Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 351: Gunpei Yokoi (Pt. 2)

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Matt Alt, and Bill Mudron conclude their discussion of the life and times of Gunpei Yokoi (and the larger history of video games) by looking back at the inventions he helped spearhead, from Nintendo's Game & Watch to Bandai's WonderSwan.

Good news. You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To check out the dozens of other great shows on the network, or to join our growing podcast family, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week on Retronauts, not on my game and watch. That's right. I just came up with that joke just now, and I'm using it because this is Retronauts episode. According to my notes, 353. And I'm Jeremy Parrish. And we are here to finish up some unfinished business. A couple of, I guess, months ago. I Skyped with Matt Out. and Bill Mudron to talk about Gunpei Yokoi. And now the four of us, Bill, Matt, and Gunpei and I are all back together here on a podcast to talk about stuff. Gentlemen, I've kind of introduced you, but I'm going to let you introduce yourselves again. So let's start alphabetically with last names.

So Matt. I'm Matt Alt. Thanks for having me again. Sorry I said Alt, not Alt. No, no, no, no. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's funny.

It's just like the key on the keyboard. right but it's fine it's and i'm the co-author of pure invention how japan's pop culture conquered the world which talks about all sorts of gadgets including some that yokoi made that changed our lives truly and it truly did and then over in uh portland i believe is that correct um still which portland there's so many yeah uh i'm bill mudger and i'm just an artist guy who does drawings of pop culture things um yeah i including the slip cover for a book on Virtual Boy, which was designed by Gunpeyokoi. You see, it's all circular.

Well, the book was designed by you. The Virtual Boy was designed by... The slip cover. Oh, the slip cover was drawn by me. Okay, I wasn't quite sure if that information would be out there by the time this episode goes live. I don't care. That was a fun project. And also, uh, doing the artwork for that slip cover meant I got to watch repeatedly every

virtual boy video that you put up. Repeatedly. Wow. Well, I did screen, like, a lot of the artwork on that slip cover was derived from, like, you know, screen caps and stuff like that. So I was going to scrubbing back and forth all over that stuff. Nice. Thank you, Jeremy, for helping so much with your own project. Yeah, right.

And I'm, I'm happy to be the definitive source of something. That's great. Oh, yeah. No. Seriously. You've definitely produced the most high-res virtual boy footage available on YouTube, at least as of Christmas 2020. But it's not red and black, which makes some people very angry. Green. But it's better than red and black. Seriously, trying, like, I was looking at some red and black

footage, like, from, like, eight years, you know, other people try to record virtual boy footage and that stuff is just, like, just even watching the, like, other people's YouTube video of that stuff, just on a TV screen or on a laptop was eye-searing. I can't imagine. I mean, I've actually used the virtual boy in real life, but it's funny that even just watching video footage of that stuff is heading to do something. Red was already really out, but you remember, like, I don't know if you remember, like, in the 70s, they had those red digital watches and they had all this kind of weird colored CRTs and stuff. And like, I thought humanity was past that by the time the virtual boy came out. But I guess now. Well, we'll talk about that

more later. But, you know, it, it was kind of a throwback to like the Milton Bradley and Mattel electronics with the LEDs, like the little simple primitive games. Yeah, yeah, like the football game and like the all of those. I had a basketball game that was in a kind of like a basically a basketball shaped and molded disc. And you could tell it was you were supposed to playing basketball because the plastic case it was in was a basketball. Otherwise, it was just red dots moving around. Right. Right. It's like those old like 10 and 1 TV games where you could play like Pong or like song or dong or wrong. I don't think I want to play DONG. Variations on the same thing. You know, hockey, but it's just like what? Like instead of the paddle being flat,

it has like a little J shape on the bottom or something like that. I don't know. And that actually kind of segues into our topic for this episode or the beginning of this episode. So last time, instead of talking about the entire legacy of Nintendo, former Nintendo designer, Gunpei Yokoi, we ended up talking about his work up through like the end of the 70s. We did not get as far as we expected. But that's okay, because now we basically have the video game relevant stuff to talk about now. And I can't remember if we talked about the arcade games that he worked on. But it's all... I don't think so. I think we just got... We talked up to like Elliconga.

And like Nintendo's, you know, like the making ramen and the love hotels and stuff like that. And we just realized we were about to step our toes into the digital era of games and stuff like that. And then, yeah, broke out. Did we talk about, I think the key pivot here is, did we talk about just like how derivative and copycat Nintendo was as a video game company in those very early years? I think we were just about to get into that. Yeah, we did we did talk a bit about that, yeah. Because it was. They were, you know, like that was.

copycat derivative. That was kind of a great tradition for everyone who wasn't creating something kind of groundbreaking was that you were just making video games that were the same as something someone else made and made money on, but, you know, with a slight difference to it. And sometimes... Or even not a slight difference to it. Like, I mean... Yeah, sometimes just the same thing.

Yeah, like SF High Splitter. Wasn't that their big clone? SF. High Splitter? Like it was Space Invaders except like you, you... would shoot them and they would split into two or something like that. I know it's like a space invaders part two. There's also a Nintendo knockoff of that. Yeah. In Space Invaders part two, there are some invaders when you shoot them, they split into two. So that was that was Taito's own idea. Nintendo made a few different space invaders clones or derivatives, including Space Firebird and Radar

Scope, which of course is the one that was an infamous failure. And the idea with Radar Scope is that it was pretty much just space invaders, maybe a little more leaning toward the Galaxian side of things with movement beyond just marching back and forth for the aliens. But it had this kind of like skewed semi-3D perspective to kind of give you the sense that you're shooting off into the distance. But yeah, it was a modest hit in Japan. And then for whatever reason, Nintendo was like, this is going to be the way we make bank in America. This is going to be huge. So, I believe they put in an order for two, don't quote me on this, but I believe two thousand of them and had them. Yeah, 2000s what I've always heard. Yeah, distributed, you know, shipped over to America,

but space invaders was never that big here. Like, it was popular, but it wasn't the phenomenon that it was in Japan. And, you know, it took like two or three months for their boats full of space invaders clones to make it from Tokyo to New York, where their distribution was. They didn't even have like, you know, they weren't based in Seattle at that point. They were based in New York. So it wasn't like they were going just across the Pacific. They had to, you know, freighted across the continent or whatever. And so by the time it arrived, American distributors were like, eh, pass. So they were left with a warehouse full of, yeah, they were left with a warehouse full of radar scope cabinets.

And everyone knows the story. That's where Donkey Kong came from. But, you know, Donkey Kong was not just Shigeramiyomyo saying, I, the golden child of Nintendo shall, you know, spring forth from Hiroshi Yamauchi's skull, you know, fully, fully formed in my adult form and save Nintendo. Like, Donkey Kong was a collaborative effort, and Gunpei Yokoi was part of the team that helped put that together. He was, you know, kind of the guy who was overseeing Nintendo's gadgets and games and gizmos, and video games were definitely that. So, yeah, and I think it's really key to say that Nintendo's general succitude at making games in-house, because none of their games were made in house. Like, they would come up with ideas, and then they would be sort of outsourced to this company called Ikegami Tsushinkie, who is still in business today and makes broadcast grade TV monitors and, like, cameras and stuff like that.

But they, as far as I'm aware, did all of the actual wiring and, like, designing of circuit boards and stuff for the arcade games. other companies did that in-house. Nintendo out-housed it, as we say in the industry. So, yeah, I don't think that's... Is that correct? Ikegami is Sushinkie. Yeah, that's correct. But I don't think that Nintendo was especially unique in that regard.

A lot of companies did outsourcing like that. And in fact, Ikegami went on to work for Sega and put together a very Donkey Kong-like game called Congo bongo and also Xaxon. You know, it was just like in the very, early days, Nintendo didn't have that kind of engineering expertise in-house. So they're... Well, they were a toy and card company. So it makes sense that they just don't have the infrastructure yet to... They're not going to have an in-house programming division. It was a specialized skill. And a lot of companies, a lot of, you know, video game makers were outsourcing at that point.

It wasn't, it wasn't, you know, this was in no way unique to Nintendo. Although, were the big ones was like, was like, was Taito doing that? Because my understanding is that, like, you know, Nishkado actually, like, designed the circuit boards and wiring for, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, you know, I think for this most part, Sega was doing their stuff in house. Taito was doing their stuff in house. Who else was big back then? Namco was doing stuff in house. Those are the companies that kind of evolved from, certainly Sega, from, like, you know, making, like, jukeboxes and stuff. So they must have had, like, electronical engineering experience in the company, I would assume, more so than a company like. But those were kind of the giants. But then you had everyone else who wanted a piece of the pie. They were scrambling to get in making their Space Invaders clones or the Pong clones. They didn't necessarily have electrical experience.

There were companies getting in from all kinds of side businesses or businesses that barely even touched on electronics and computing. So they didn't have people in house and they would outsource. And that's where, you know, around this time, you started getting companies like Tose and Micronix. and all these other sort of infamous, you know, Hal was a company. They weren't engineering, but they were programming. You had all these companies. Almost like middleware. Yeah, they were basically like the ghost writers for companies that wanted to publish and distribute.

Well, that's the kind of modernification of the game industry, isn't it? Like, because basically, you know, now like that kind of, I don't know, delegation of responsibilities for making a game instead of just being one guy or gal who comes up with like everything and has to not only imagine it, code it, you know, build it like it was in the, early years, you have this kind of situation where roles are starting to get more specialized, correct? Yeah. I mean, it's just in the beginning. I just think that the Japanese side of the industry was much more open to the idea of hiring subcontractors.

And so there were, I mean, that's, if you've ever visited the website Game Developers Research Institute, they're basically devoted to figuring out which subcontractor put together this game, you know, and they pick apart source code. and they listen for distinct sound effects and, you know, like pause chimes and things like that and say, well, you know, based on this pause chime and, you know, the weird, like, lag on the way this one thing moves, we can determine that this was put together by this development house. And then they'll, like, find someone they know who worked at that developer or worked at a publisher that contracted that developer and say, like, do you remember working with these guys? And they'll be like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's fine. It's technological forensics, archaeological forensics,

is really what that is. And, well, I, I think the big, the two big things here you have to remember, too, no one really knew this was an industry yet. Right. And so it made sense that no one's really going to start investing in, like, and hiring tons of in-house programmers and stuff, because as far as everyone knew, like,

Space Invaders was just a fad, and like two years from now, everyone's going to be doing some kind of other kind of electronic gizmo, but no one's thinking, like, oh, in five years from now, this is going to be like an industry that could like rival like the movie industry and I think that

and the second thing too Nintendo at this point it's a company filled with Rand Peltzers inventors gizmo makers while Nintendo was in a space where they could

they could probably build arcade cabinets by themselves but they don't have anyone to make the programs that are going to be put onto those cabinets and so yeah there's no Steve Jobses

or anything like that and so yeah of course they're going to have to go to a third party company to say hey we have some we have here's the hardware we have some ideas for some games to put on the hardware but we don't know we don't know how to make those games ourselves and so of course they that that would that was perfect that they had ikigami right there just the well yamauchi yamauchi was like a real fad chaser

you know like that's what you had to be in order to survive i mean that's it's not a dis it's but he definitely like and he he and this will come into play again a little bit later in this conversation, I think, but it was his personal belief that fads, any fad, lasted only three years. That was it. And then he had to come up with the next thing. And so I'm sure that was on his mind when, you know, video games were coming into play. Oh, this is the thing for the next three years, which is exactly what you're talking about. Like, nobody knew this was going to be the next genre. But that's a quick turnaround going from, what, Space Invaders was like 79. Donkey Kong was 81? And two years after that, they're building the Famicom. So that is.

is a pretty quick, and they're building that thing in-house, too. That's Masayuki or Mara. So that's a fascinating, just like two or three years in Nintendo history there, where it goes from, like, we're not quite sure if this is going to be an industry to, like, we're going all in on this thing. Well, yeah, but not just arguing with a home, you know, he knew a cash cow when he saw it. Yeah, so. Right?

And, I mean, that was a really smart idea because they got on the ground floor of home. I mean, not that Nintendo, not that the Famicom was the first, you know, home video game system ever made or anything like that, but they just happened to hit right at the right time. and, of course, they had Shigura Miyamoto making the right games for that. Not to say again, Miyamoto was the only guy making games for that, too. It was its spec, according to Ue Mura, and other things I've read,

was it had to run a very certain video game well. That was its like. Exactly. It was built as, yeah. What game was that, Jeremy? It was Donkey Kong. And we're kind of getting off the main topic here, which is Gunpei, you know. Well, he's still tangentially in there, but yeah, we're not talking about it. But, you know, you kind of have these two big milestones.

You have Donkey Kong, and you have the family computer, Famicom, 1983. And in between there, you have Yokoy making a much smaller, much more modest, but in many ways more important contribution to video game history. Maybe not more important than Famicom. But, you know, more original, definitely, more inventive. And that is the game and watch. And so, you know, while he was sort of the producer and kind of overseeing the division for Donkey Kong and, you know, really didn't even have that much involvement with the Famicom and the NES. until the disc system came along in 1986, game and watch was definitely his baby.

And it's, it really, you know, we talked last time about his philosophy of lateral thinking with season technology and, you know, taking extant technology, cheap, plentiful, readily available, gizmos, gadgets, technology concepts, and twisting them a little bit, you know, like turning in them

and looking at them sideways and seeing how, can I make play out of this? Or how can I take a concept and simplify it, you know, strip it down so that play can be affordable and accessible to everyone. So things like the ultra hand and the lefty RX, you know, the low control card that only turns left. Those were his babies. And Game and Watch was very much like that. It was a video game, but not really. Like, technically speaking, Game and Watch is not a video game because it does not have a video system. It is, it uses an LCD display that is pre-printed with characters.

It's just a digital watch or a calculator. But instead of having numbers imprinted on the LCD, it has instead characters and game elements. And he, you know, his idea was basically to take that technology, turn the numbers into something different and make video games out of it. And it was very simplistic and basic. But at the same time, it was a video game, video game that you could slip into your pocket and play anywhere, which was pretty revolutionary. It wasn't the first portable video game system, but Micronics or Microvision.

Oh, yeah. Mattel, Mattel, MicroVit. No, Milton Bradley. Milton Bradley. It was not really good or usable. Like, it was brilliant, but it was expensive. It was clumsy. It was battery hungry. and, you know, it had extremely low resolution and, you know, every game had to have its own control system built in, which was, you know, versatile, but also, you know, just added to the expense and added to the clumsiness. Whereas game and watch was very inexpensive and it was so tiny. You could, it was, you know, the size of basically like a thick credit card or maybe a little bigger. Yeah.

And you could just slip it into a pocket, bring it out anytime you want and play, slip it back into your pocket when you're done. I don't want to say it was practically disposable, but... No, God, don't say that. We were so worried about damaging that. They weren't easy to damage, but they cost quite a bit in the States anyway. I'm old enough to remember... I was born in 1973, so I'm old enough to remember kind of, like, playing before and after the Game and Watches came out,

and, like, there was a fad for playing with calculators even before the Game of Watch came out. There were actual, like, books of, like, tricks you could play on the calculator, and, like, you know, you type in, like, numbers and flip it around and show your friends. Yes, exactly. And so when the game and watch came out, it really felt like this natural, like, wow, somebody's finally done it. They actually turned a calculator into a game system, you know, like it felt like a kind of vindication of every time we showed our friends, you know, boobies typed into the calculator in a certain way, you know what I mean? And that was the really, you know, Yokoai just had that genius for making the right thing at the right, like, it just felt so right. you know what I mean? Yeah. The Game and Watch.

Yeah. And I never actually owned a Game and Watch until very recently. In fact, since the last time we talked about Yoko, I've kind of gone on a little bit of a shopping spree for a video project I'm working on. And it kind of feels like, oh, I'm finally, I'm finally getting this childhood realization here. Like these things that I would stare at in the catalogs, the Sears catalog. I would look, just like stare at the Donkey Kong Game and watch and be like, I can imagine what playing this is like. It's so cool. I wish I had this, but I never did.

And now I do. And it is, in fact, pretty damn cool. And now you can look at them through Mandarake's window in Broadway in Tokyo, where they're all like $300 each. Yeah, they're not cheap. It's like they scaled the money up from what it was when you were. Just added an extra zero on to them. Exactly. They're just as difficult to buy now as adults as they were when you were 14.

I don't know. It was it 30,000 yen now or whatever. Yeah. Well, I mean, some of those are really, really expensive now. I'm not like super up on which are rare or which aren't, but they're definitely, there's an entire store devoted to retro, it's several actually devoted to retro gaming in Tokyo and they're expensive there. I was just reading something today. I didn't realize they came out with like 60 different game watches. Yeah, there were tons and there were lots of different form factors. There was like maybe a dozen, but yeah. Good luck collecting all those. Yeah. There were tons of different form factors. And I wanted to do a video that included like every possible. style like every format of game and watch but the crystal the game and watch crystals are so expensive there were like three games including super mario brothers in the crystal format which is just a transparent LCD like the entire body is clear so you're like you can you play and you know you've got the

LCD which is piezoelectric or whatever and so like the the graphics show up in dark but then everything else is clear it's really cool but those sell just as a system bear without a box or anything for anywhere from $800 to $1,000 each. It's just not worth it. It's really rad, but no, thank you. No, thank you. Yeah, that's officially, like, rolling up at, like, $1,000 bill and just burning it just to smoke it for fun money. That's like, yeah, that's not practical at all.

No, I mean, I'd make a YouTube video with it, and that would bring in at least $20. So, you know, almost justifies that. God. Welcome to my world. It's like a collector of vintage to, like, Japanese, like, robot toys and stuff. everything's $1,000 these days, it feels like. Did we even talk about the one that was supposedly the legendary genesis of the Game and Watch was Yoquoy on the bullet train or whatever watching the other businessmen?

He wrote that in his autobiography, and it's been reenacted on Japanese TV. It's kind of an origin story. I don't know, like, you know, how can you... It feels like we should obligate it just to mention it just because that's like part of the legend. Yeah, go for it. Well, isn't that it? He just saw people playing businessmen with the calculators, and he was like, what if we made them like it could be like a toy they could be playing with and it could be games instead of spelling boobies.

I don't think that works on a Japanese calculator, but the Japanese use numbers. They definitely actually in Japan, it's probably even, this is really off track, so I'll keep it short, but like numbers, numbers in Japan are phonetic too. So this is how Japanese schoolgirls invented texting in the 1990s by using pagers and putting in numerical messages that if you read them phonetically would sound like a sentence. huh so there is that but you know yeah i think the key thing about yokoi and what's really interesting about that origin story is he's trying to make a toy for adults like for sound like that of course that has an echoes and the genesis of the game boy later and stuff like that supposedly but yeah so yeah and then the the follow-up to that story is he tried convincing people in the company nobody to listen to him and then umma uchi's driver fell sick one day and they forced yokoi to drive yama uci around

to his appointments which he at first was really upset about but then realized that he had a captive audience in the backseat and basically spent the entire ride, you know, haranguing a really disinterested Yamauchi and this idea of we can, you know, turn a calculator into a game. And he thought it went nowhere. And then a couple weeks later, he showed up at the office. And it turned out that the appointment that Yolkoy was driving Yamauchi to was at a dinner where Yamauchi sat next to the president of Sharp, the calculator company. Kismet. Yes. And a couple weeks later when Yolkoy was called into the office, which he was on some irregular basis, it sounds like, for doing all sorts of wacky things

at the company. He was told, this is the guy from Sharp, you know, tell him your idea. Let's see if we can make this happen. And that's how it happened. Well, wasn't Sharp in a, like, calculator war with, like, Cassio or kind of wasn't, or something like that to us. So I think it was also a thing, like, Sharp was really like, well, also Sharp had an end with Nintendo because Masayuki or Amora. Yes. And Mora came from there. He first came to the company because he. Yolkoy recruited him. Yochoy recruited him. He was like he came to Yeroy saying,

hey, we've invented these lights instead of dios that maybe you guys could use in your toys and that was the genesis of the laser clay ranges and the little toy dolls

with the rubber bands that's to support the figures that when you shoot them they fall down and stuff like that. And they, Yamora became part of the company and they wanted to becoming Nintendo's chief hardware designer.

Yeah, there's another interesting connection between Nintendo and Sharp, which is that, you know, Nintendo ended up calling their first console, the family computer, which it turns out was already the name of a microwave oven, I believe, that was made by Sharp. And so they had to like, they had to kind of work out a deal with Sharp to use that name. And that's why the twin Famicom from Sharp exists, the all in one

unit that is a console and a Famicom disc system. They made the twin Famicom or the Famicom twin or whatever it's called. And it is, it is, I believe, a part of, like, you know, kind of the, the deal that they had to forge in order to use the name family computer. But I do want to go back to something Bill said earlier, which is that Gunpe Yokoi speaks like Zepad Bibelbrox's psychiatrist, gag half-front. Well, Zafat's just this guy, you know? Where did that come from, Bill? Is this canon? Did I say that? You didn't say it, but you were like, you were speaking in Yokoi's voice. I'll take credit for that. It was very like Austrian psychiatrist.

I mean, maybe he's the spirit just inhabited me for a moment. He was actually on the podcast. We're talking about right now. Well, before I forget, too, the Masayuki Amora connection, too. Another important thing about Gunpy Yokoy, aside from all the technology

stuff, he's kind of the nucleus through which all, like, not all the people, Nintendo, but like he's the reason why Masayuki Yamora gets involved with the company. Genio Takeda was like an assistant electrical engineer who was like repairing the laser clay ranges

when they broke down and of course he ends up becoming the guy who directed a punch out and designs all the memory mapper chips for Famicom and like he kind of just the talent Nintendo's just just starts Yolkoy's like the little sun and everyone's

like these little... He's the nucleus around which everything crystallizes. Exactly exactly so just even from like a personnel perspective that's really kind of fascinating and it's also you know there's this kind of persistent, or there was a persistent rumor going around that like R&D1 and R&D2, which are the famous, the two research and development teams inside Nintendo that worked on various projects, and I'm sure we'll get into this, were like at each other's throats, rivals. But the fact of

the matter is Yokoi ran one and Uemura ran another. And when I interviewed him in Kyoto a couple years back, Uymer was like, there wasn't any rivalry. That guy is like my sempai. He hired me. I just, there might have been a rivalry in the sense of, oh, look what, you know, Gumpai did. But I don't think there was any, like, we're going to get that guy. We're going to destroy the other department. We're going to blow up our own company. It's like National Lampoons, you know, yeah, it's just what the animal house. I know that there were, there was some kind of like, you know, as projects scaled up or down, they would cannibalize each other.

That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, they would just, they would, it was fluid, you know, the teams would drift back and forth as needed. Again, it was still a small enough company. Everything's still kind of amorphous. Even though there's separate divisions and stuff. like that. But if something gets shut down and figures like these people from over here would melt over here, especially if these guys over here need help

and stuff. Right, right. So I do want to talk a little bit more about Game and Watch just because I've recently discovered how cool they are and beyond the abstract. But there were multiple... So which Game and Watch did you get? I picked up a few. You know, I had...

Oh, you got a few. Oh, wow, okay. Well, I had the reissued Ball from a few years back, and Ball was, you know, the first game and watch. It was a very small unit, and basically you are a little dude who moves left and right. And actually you don't. You stand in one place and you move your hands left and right.

You move your arms left and right. You move your arms left and right to juggle balls. And it's kind of the quintessential game and watch experience. It's very simple. There are like two or three balls that are bouncing back and forth between your hands. And they're moving at different rates. And, you know, the tricky part is when they both end up kind of coming over to the same side at the same time. Then you have to really move your hand on that side to catch both of them without letting one of them drop.

And also there's kind of like an ebb and flow to the pace of the game where it gets faster, faster, faster, and then it slows down a little bit. And then it gets faster, faster, faster, it slows down a little bit. So it kind of gives you like a little bit of a reprieve. And it's, you know, very well designed, considering it is such a basic primitive game. But that's one of them. And that's kind of the basic unit. It just has like left and right buttons and no fire button or anything. It's just left and right because that's all you're doing is moving left and right. That's before the D-pad, right? Right. The D-Pad came in with the dual-screen systems, which was Donkey Kong, and that was basically, like, twice the side. It was basically, like, two Game and Watch ball units put together with a hinged joint in between, so you could close it. And what really surprised me about Donkey Kong when I got my hands on it is that it's really solid. Like, it feels dense. It's not, you know, it's not like heavy.

It's not like, oh, wow, what a pain in the ass. What a burden. And it just feels like amazingly well constructed. I think there's some metal in it and some plastic, like really good, rugged plastics. And it has a good action when you close it. It just feels, you know, after 40 years, nearly 40 years later, it still, like, it still works, one. But also, it just feels good. It feels solid.

The hinges aren't all loose, you know, like Nintendo DS would, so there are some models of that that would get floppy after like six months. but the game and watch was just incredibly well constructed. Over designed in a good way. Yes. I mean, those things were carried around in backpacks and schoolyards and stuff. And Nintendo,

I guess by that point, realized maybe they had to make them a little stronger than just the... Because now it seems kind of crazy you'd have an exposed LCD screen like that and anything to give to a kid. But, yeah, what is your memory of how did Donkey Kong play? Like, my memory of it was a little... It was cool.

Like, we were really happy, but it was a little janky. Yeah, so I actually discovered, you know, played Donkey Kong Game and Watch for the first time a couple of years ago doing a video on the game and watch gallery, the game and watch collection for Game Boy Color. And it definitely, like if you're expecting a pure arcade experience, it kind of throws you for a loop because basically the way it is, the way it's designed is that there's like moving sky hooks and you have to kind of jump up and grab onto those to hang over above. barrels that are rolling beneath you, and there's like a moving platform at the top that you have to jump on. It's kind of tricky, but it's kind of the basics of Donkey Kong that you remember from the arcade, but with a little more, there's a little more going on in the stage, like more dynamic moving elements, which, you know, it's, it's not a pure interpretation of the arcade game, but rather kind of a reinterpretation that sort of reworks it to fit

the game and watch format. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I'm watching a video of it on YouTube right now, and I'm kind of, yeah, I'm genuinely surprised at how they kind of messed with the format a little bit, which I guess they had to. Yeah, otherwise it just would have been the same thing, right? Yeah. So was this the first, was this the first one with the plus-shaped D-pad? Yes. Yes. Which is really key because they actually, you know, I heard from Ue Mura that they actually used these or another game and watch with a D-pad as the prototype controllers for their prototype Fomicon.

They actually wired it into the Fomikom like that they had that was on the, you know, operating table. I mean, that makes sense. I mean, if you got already got that hardware laying around, why not to let that be the, you know. I wonder if that was like their first attempt. Like, you know, I wonder if it was just. very lucky that the first thing that they, the first bit of hardware they had lying around that they could kind of use as a

gen-d-up controller just turned out to be the most classic controller design in video game history. There were other attempts to kind of come up with a game and watch interface. I want to say that there were, I'd have to look into this, but I'm pretty sure there were some game and watches that came before Donkey Kong

that had four-button direction controls that used like individual little buttons. I've definitely seen those. Just four-round buttons. You have a left button and a right button. So, you know, kind of getting into that PlayStation style where you have separate buttons. And the genius of Donkey Kong was that the crosspad just combined all those buttons into sort of a rocker switch in four directions. Yeah.

He has talked about that. He had written about how he won that specific sensation of being able to cradle your thumb in the rocker and just rock back and forth without having to worry about hitting individual buttons. Yeah. Yeah, it makes a big difference. and it survived for 40 years. Like it's still kind of the standard for analog or for digital controls. Well, as you remember very well, like, you know, one of the biggest issues with those old pre-FOMICOM game consoles that were sold in the States of the 2,600 or the Kaliko Vision or the Intellivision was how sucky the joystick slash directional control was.

Was it the Kaliko Vision who had that like golden disc thing? No, that was Intellivision, yeah. Colico Vision was like a little flat mushroom. It was also bad. Yeah, and they're just terrible, terrible stuff. stuff. And so one of the big things I remember when the Nintendo, the NES, came out in the stage, was just like how complete it felt. Like, oh, this is just right. As opposed to, you know, like the simplicity, like, the Atari 2600's joystick is awesome as like a kind of

piece of designed, you know, consumer electronics equipment. But like, it's only really usable for a couple types. There's no finesse to it. You know what I mean? Um, the, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, you can't, you almost can't imagine it being designed any other way. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And, you know, people have tried, like, the Master System had a D-pad that was a square, and it was really bad because, like, I like the hardware, but I find the game's really difficult to use on Master System hardware, because my fingers always stray to the diagonals. And likewise, you know, PlayStation said, well, we can't just use the cross-pads, so let's separate the buttons so that you get a blister on your finger, especially if you're playing, like, a fighting game. Yeah, that sounds great. Well, Nintendo patented that D-pad design, right?

They did, but I, you know, I think people kind of figured out ways to sort of fudge it. But wait a second. I thought, I thought Mr. Yamauchi said that he didn't want to patent things. He wanted to help the industry as a whole. Didn't he say that? That sounds just like him. He was so altruistic. Exactly, yeah.

The guy who was like, I don't donate to charities because I pay my taxes and that's enough. Yeah. The living embodiment of Scrooge McDuck. An undconstructed, like, robber baron capitalist. I just want to go back and redraw Duck Tales comics just with starring Hiroshi Yamuuchi. Also, okay, I did have a game and watch that someone gave me a few years back, which is the more, like, the biggest outlier of this series, which is the Mario Cement Factory tabletop game and watch, which is more like those vacuum fluorescent display systems that Clico was making around the time, the same time, like, Pac-Man Donkey Kong, you know, that we're like bright and glowing. Oh, yeah, I'm looking at this right now. Someone's like online game and watch collection. I had no idea that was a thing. Yeah. It's weird because the one that I have, I don't know if this.

is true of all of them. It takes C-cell batteries, two C-cell batteries and they last for like 15 minutes because it's it seems to have some sort of illumination going on. I don't know. Maybe I'm using it wrong, but yeah, that thing just

sucks down batteries. It's ridiculous. It's cool, but it's kind of big and it sort of defeats the purpose of Game and Watch. And no way to plug it in either, right? As far as I know, yeah, it's battery power only. There was also the multiplayer, a couple of multiplayer game and watches.

I got one of those, Donkey Kong Hockey, which, so this is, it's a really cool system. That's a good phrase. I've never heard of this. Donkey Kong Hockey. Yeah, so it's a two-player hockey game. And the way it works as a two-player game is that the system is kind of pill-shaped. It's like oblong and kind of rounded. And then the top of it actually slides up, almost like a drawer.

And inside, there are two small, round puck-shaped controllers that are wired into the system. And you take them out, and each player can hold one of these control pucks. And so then you kind of place the game and watch in between the two of you. And so one person is on one side, you know, defending one goal. And the other players on the other side defending the other goal, it's like, talk about overengineering. Like this is, it's, it's ridiculous, but it really feels like

the precursor to the switch and the joycons. Like, this is where it's from. You know, obviously these aren't wireless and they don't have HD rumble, but you know, the idea of like taking your, your game system, your portable game system, setting it down,

giving each player one half of the controller and then playing together. Like that is, that is straight up what they did with Switch. Yeah, this is a podcast. So you can't see the face I just made, but I totally did a Drew Scanlan white guy blinking gif at that, like, oh yeah, that totally sounds like Switch, yeah. It's crazy

to think. I mean, even aside from the game design stuff with like the 3-2-1 switch stuff where Nintendo's whole thesis of games as toys thing has still managed to survive long after Gunpei Yolke left the company and left this world, but it's fascinating to see how, like,

that has become a core ethos to that company's whole shtick. And they were derided for it. for a while, like, you know, around when they were kind of dragging their heels to get, like, the CD-ROM into their system in the early 90s. Oh, yeah, they had that, like, when the Wii didn't do that well, like, there was a lot of joking about it. But, you know, like, I think there's a really kind of Apple-esque ethos to that where, like, consumer electronics, their, their Rizondetra isn't to be cool in and of themselves.

It's to worm their way into your kind of lifestyle, you know what I mean? To make them part of your life in a way that is broadly appealing, not just. to tech geeks. They know play is eternal. So that's the one thing you can rely on Nintendo eventually circling back round to is like, is this fun? Can anyone just kind of pick that up? Not to say that everything Nintendo makes sticks to that, but even when they lose their

way, they eventually end up looping back around to like what's the most fun toy-like thing we could make with this technology. Right. No, it's true. Yeah. That's, and that's... Well, so much of those, of those, especially during the console wars, like, you know, the way the Genesis looks is, to me, looks like something like a 13-19.

year old boy would brag about are the lynx you know they're black they're chrome they're like you know they have these like aggressive like carnivore names like links you know what i mean or whatever whereas like game boy or like almost anything nintendo made was cool but it wasn't gendered and it wasn't like really trying to be cool it just was cool because it was so right i have used this this description so many times it's getting boring now but the first time you picked up that game boy it just like you couldn't imagine a world without it like i can imagine a world without the links i don't want to, but you can. But the Game Boy to me is like that Yo Koi, he just had this genius for hitting a sweet spot that was like kind of cross genre, cross demographic that is really

tough, I think, for any company or designer to hit. Yep. I absolutely agree. There is something very, I think, intuitive about his design sense. And, you know, Game and Watch was great because you got to see him and his team iterating on great ideas and continuing to develop them. Another system format that I didn't discuss is the color models. And there's one of those called Spitball Sparky, which is basically like a... I was just going to say. It's basically, you know, breakout with a little bit of a kind of game twist to it. But it has color, kind of the way Space Invaders does with like tiers of color on the screen.

Cellophane? Sort of. Something along those lines. Yeah, it's kind of like that. Like the screen is, is colored in stripes, basically. Spitball Sparky. By the way, I just, I'm going to insist that you guys call me Spitball Sparky for the remainder of this podcast. It's the greatest, it's the greatest name ever.

That sounds like something Noir Spider-Man would say right before he knocks out a Nazi. It's like, slow your roll there, Spitball Sparky. You know, it's like, I love Japanese who can break the English language in such beautiful ways. that's half the appeal of Hideo Kojima games. Well, Donkey Kong right there is just such a... I still think... I mean, Donkey Kong is a great name, but half a Donkey Kong is that name.

And I'm sure that's half the reason why anyone played it back in the day when it first came out there like, the hell's a donkey Kong. I don't think so. Like, I don't know, maybe because I discovered it as a very young child, but it just seemed right to me.

It was just like, oh, yeah, it makes sense. It's a big monkey called Donkey Kong. Of course. That's what his name is. And it's euphonic. It just rolls off the tongue. It's also really genius because King Kong's kind of scary, right? King Kong, he's like his kaiju.

He's like a giant monster, right? And then donkey, you put donkey in front of it, and suddenly it's kind of cute. So this is another really key Nintendo and Yokoy thing is that they could make the cute cool. Yeah. Because don't, like, basically there's very little difference in, if you're looking at just as a pure design kind of perspective between, there's very little difference between Hello Kitty and like what Mario looked like in those very early iterations. giant bobblehead, little body, little boing, boing sound effect when you're walking. Yet you felt cool when you were controlling Mario. You didn't feel like you were like being babyish or infantile or anything.

And that kind of cool factor and cute at the same time, I think, is it's partly Yoquoy, and it's partly, of course, Miyamoto, who designed those characters. Yokoi didn't design the actual characters in the game. But that's a very Japanese, that's in Japan's wheelhouse. Do you know what I mean? And one of the big reasons I think its products took off so much. in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and now. Yeah, embracing that playfulness.

Yeah. You know, that cute doesn't necessarily mean, like, uncool or unmasculine or anything like that. It's almost like a filter that you can put over any experience. Well, and that goes back to the treating everything like a toy. Like, play as a notion exceeds any kind of boundaries or any kind of gender or class stuff. Ever, no matter who you are, you like to play with things.

Yep. But although, I always wonder how much. Gumpi Yokoi is credited as a producer on all these games after the game in the watch. And I always kind of wonder how much of a design input he had beyond just saying, hey, make this fun. Because it feels like Donkey Kong is mostly Miyamoto. And I know like Gunpei Yoko is credited as like, no, not the director, but like everyone thinks that like Super Mario Land and all those early Game Boy games or Gunpei Yokoy games. And they were not. But in Yoko's autobiography.

he says that there's actually a big chunk on Donkey Kong in there and it's he said... Yeah, I would love to read that sometime, yeah. Well, he came, his take on it is that it's Miyamoto's game, but that Yokoai came up with the idea of

he was the one who was inspired by a Popeye cartoon called A Dream Walking, which is from the 1930s. See, I just assumed that was... Okay, yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, no, he just says that. And it's whether, you know, this isn't his autobiography,

so I'm just quoting him now. And it's a 1930s cartoon, and Popeye was huge in Japan. Like before Astro Boy came out in 63, like Popeye was the huge fad. It was broadcast on, you know, nationwide TV in the late 50s and early 60s and then reruns just like we saw it in America. Yeah, and around this time there was a, there was a boys magazine called Popeye that was like be the stylish city boy.

And there was also like a Bluto magazine, I think, and an olive oil magazine. Like they, Brutus. Brutus. That's it. Sorry. Yes, I forgot. He was Brutus at that time in Japan and in some parts of the U.S. But yeah, Brutus magazine and then olive oil. I think was also one.

And they weren't about the characters. That was just the names. But it was kind of like saying like basically this is a magazine for like if you want to be kind of a hip, trendy city boy, then you read Popeye. If you want to be kind of like a Yankee, you read Brutus. And if you want to be a style savvy young lady, then you read olive oil. This is, we should have David Marks on his book, Amatora, how Japan saved American style goes like really deep into that about those magazines.

it's actually Ivy style is what it's called and that was like a really big thing back then but the point of this is is if you look up a dream walking on YouTube and watch it it looks like like it's Popeye and and and and Pluto like punching each other up and down off of off of girders there's all sorts of obstacles and stuff olive oil is sleepwalking and like they're trying oh yeah I've seen this one this is like yeah it's thank God it's Fleischer brothers or otherwise yeah no it's awesome so like it's raising my fist at yoke yokey took it and so so it was supposed to be a licensed Pompey property at first,

Donkey Kong. And then that fell through, but they kept the general gameplay. So the question is, like, you know, who made Donkey Kong? Like, you know, Yokoi came up with the idea of characters on girders like, you know,

competing to get to the top. You know, Miyamoto is the one who came up with the characters that made it an awesome experience. And there's no question about that. And that's kind of what I was saying with. I could see Yokoi being mostly

more like a guiding hand than like boots on the ground. Yeah. Yeah, and that's pretty much the role that Shira Miyamoto plays in games now. He's not out there, like, saying, you know, this level's going to be where you pick up a penguin and fly with it. He's just like, you know, nudging everyone and saying, well, okay, this is okay, but there's probably a way to make this more fun. What would that be? And, you know, kind of pushing people being their, like their Yoda, basically.

Yeah. And, you know. Most famously, Pokemon. you know, to the point that Tijiri actually named Gary Oak Shigeru in the Japanese version of Pokemon to kind of symbolize his rivalry with his rivalry and friendship with Miyamoto Shigeru, who was like a really kind of driving force in guiding Tijiri. Like I don't think, like just like Jeremy's saying, I don't think he went in and said make this level in Pokemon or anything like that

or add these Pokemon's pocket monsters. But he was like kind of really... You should make it so that if you like stand in this truck, then you can get Mew 2. Yes. They should have put like a Donkey Kong style pocket monster in there. I don't know. Actually, famously the very first, like the design docs for like when it was called capsule monster were made public a couple years back.

And the kind of prototype screens that Satoshi Tadiri drew of pocket monsters fighting were Godzilla and King Kong. So that just goes to show you how much King Kong is kind of part of the DNA of Japanese. pop culture that he keeps coming up again and again and all of these kind of hit Japanese games. Ugh, I'm thirsty, but water just won't cut it right now. Hey, catch. Whoa, is this a can of cola? It is, because here at Podford University, our cafeteria has soda. Available on iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere you get podcasts.

With a purposeful grimace and a terrible smile, join Nikki and Wyatt as we stomp our way through the history of Toho's DiKan You films in Discuss All Monsters. Are you telling me we're going to discuss all monsters? We won't stop until there isn't a monster left to discuss. Smash that play button like Godzilla and King Kong smash an 18th century Japanese fagoda. Only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Hi, we're Ellen. Stephen and Mark.

Hosts of Nice Games Club, the show where Nice Game Deves talk gaming and game development. Topics include programming, design, tools, and more. We also do interviews and one of our game games. Listen to Nice Games Club, wherever you get to your podcast, you get there, or at nicegames.com. Video Deathloop is a podcast where we watch a short video clip on Loop until we just can't take it anymore. Along the way, we'll try our best to make each other laugh and to hold out longer than the other guy. You can jump in on any episode, no need to worry about continuity. Check out Video Deathloop on the Greenlit Podcast Network with new episodes every Friday.

Yeah, you know, the work on the work that you know, the work that Yochoy's division did for the NES and Famicom is that they didn't really make games for Famicom. They pretty much made their games for the disc system add-on. All the games that you associate with R&D1 were Metroid, Kidacurus, Famicom Wars, the Famicom Tante Club, Fire Emblem. All of these were headed up or developed in collaboration between R&D1 and intelligent systems, and all of them were disc games. I really don't know why that is. You know, Yukoi did not have any involvement that I'm aware of with the actual design

of the hardware. It was done at R&D2 under Uyamura. But, you know, for whatever reason, that seemed to be kind of where they specialized. And you didn't really see Miyamoto's R&D4 doing that many disk system games. It was mostly, you know, they did Zelda

and Zelda 2 and Mario 2, but otherwise they kind of focused more on cartridges. Even after Nintendo had kind of given up on cartridges, you know, Super Mario Bros. 3. That was probably their biggest NES game, and that was a cartridge-based game. So there was definitely kind of this division happening. It was very interesting. Kind of a weird leapfrogging with like Miyamoto being kind of in charge of some of the earlier games. And then, isn't it, isn't it just like an age thing?

Like, Miyamoto was younger. And like, you know, they knew that you wanted a young person in that role because you're appealing to young adults and young kids. So, like, Yo-Koi is already, like, a middle-aged dude. He's, like, in his 40s by this point. And is not, you know, he probably himself was realizing that he was kind of aging out of it to a certain degree. You know what I mean? I also wonder, was Yukoi still just kind of focused on Game & Watch stuff while kind of mopping up that stuff while the Famicom was kind of making it?

So, if I might, I have a little anecdote there. When I asked UeMura whether there was a... a game industry crash in Japan of anything, even a bubble, you know, a bobble, so to speak. Some kind of it. Yeah, like related to the way, because, and he was, of course, aware of the great American video game crash of 1983, precipitated by, famously by E.T. And he said, no, but there was a game and watch crash. And when game and watch crashed, everybody, like, people just stopped buying game and watches

and that was actually a big blow for Nintendo. They were really freaking out about what to do. So it's interesting that at least among the people at making the games, I don't know if this is really widely as celebrated on the ground as like the American game industry crashes. The Game and Watch cratered. It stopped selling. Like the fad was over roughly three years.

Was there any particular reason given for that? Did they flood the market? Well, yeah, well, there was a lot of product on the market. But as Uemura told me, he's like, well, like Yamauchi said, and he was generally right about this, fads lasted. three years. Oh, okay. And Japan, Japan is very fad-driven, too.

You can speak to this better than I can, but, like, things become really popular there, and everyone is like, I got to do this. Everyone's doing this. I got to do it. I got to get part of this. Like, I want to take part in this. I want to participate. And then they're like, yeah, I'm done.

Okay, I did it. That's great. I'm out. Well, it speaks to how quickly Nintendo exited the arcade industry, too. They weren't pretty much straight from arcade just to doing Famicom stuff. More money. And, yeah. I never thought about the ebb and flow of, like, who was working on what then.

Because I could see Nintendo just keep on writing the Game & Watch thing for as long as possible, and just keeping Yokoy on that wall. Miyamoto's working on early Famicom stuff. And as soon as the, I would assume as soon as the Gameon Watch industry dried up, that's when they're like, okay, Yokoy, or we're thinking about doing a disc drive system. How about you start thinking about that kind of stuff? And then, yeah, so it's Gunpei and Miyamoto, I guess, kind of leaprogging each other. Or was the disc system another way to keep the NES from going obsolete?

Because, like, again, to bring up Uri Morrow, when I asked him, like, well, so why are you targeting the American market? Is it because it's so big? And then he said, no, because we were coming up on three years of the NES and everybody thought it was going to just crater and the fad would be gone. So Yamauchi ordered us to approach America, not out of any sense of like, you know, we're going to take this gaming to the world. But because, oh, we're going to lose all our profits in Japan.

We better find a new place to make a small. everything over to, yeah. Huh, that's interesting. So was, I don't, I'm not exactly up on what the timing was of the disc system coming out. What year was that? That was February, 1986. We're coming up on 35 years. Oh, wow. So it's way later. It's actually way later. So that definitely was not part, I didn't have anything to do with the, or though maybe he was developing it from much longer than that. I don't know. Well, you know, that was, that was three years after the Famicom launched. And then Game Boy was three years after that. Yeah, I was about to say that. But a big, A big factor in the Famicom disk systems existence, from what I understand, is that, you know,

Nintendo didn't have a licensing program in place for the Famicom right away. And so everyone was just jumping in and creating games. And there was, like, I've seen, you know, like, translated columns and text from magazines of the era saying, like, you know, there's a video game crash coming. It's just like this bust of quality. There's just not, there's not good stuff coming out. And the disk system was a way to kind of circumvent that. It was, you know, gave Nintendo more control over the output for the system. It had that very clever hardware lock out system where you had to have the word

Nintendo engraved on your disk in order to function inside the system. And it, you know, boosted the capabilities of the system, at least for like a year or two, until the cartridges leapfrogged it with the memory mappers. But it was basically just a way to refresh the console with that. actually creating a new platform altogether. And to give Nintendo more control over the direction of the Famicom market in Japan, whereas, you know, they built the 10NES security system and licensing into the American and European versions of the NES.

So they didn't have to worry about that so much. Yeah, and wasn't, was digital distribution? I mean, in the form of, like, they had those kiosks, right? The disc system kiosks. Yeah, they had the disc writers. That you'd go to in a game store and basically stick your, stick your disc in, and get it overwritten by whatever game you wanted, right? Yeah, it was like five bucks, 500 yen

as opposed to 3,000 yen for... So basically digital, digital distribution, digital delivery, a kind of prototype of that. I guess you had to physically walk to the website. It's basically sneaker net. Although at least then you actually got some kind of a discount for engaging it, just like they were

promising with digital distribution at the beginning of, you know, this current iteration of that, but no, just the publishers just hoard whatever extra profits that the consumer never gets a break on that, but... Right. the Game Boy now? Yeah, I think so because

Yokoy, R&D1 worked on Famicom Disc System for like two three years, produced some pretty memorable and groundbreaking games and then in April 1989 the Game Boy came out and that was headed up. He was the

project lead, Yokoai was, on Game Boy, the portable system from Nintendo that was complete crap and successful because it was complete crap. He was not the only designer. He was not the like the guy who figured out all the circuitry and stuff like that, that was Satoro Okato. Yeah, he is not good things to say about Yacoy, it seems, about in terms of like who's responsible

for the Game Boy and stuff. Ooh, interesting. Dish. Dish. So, Sator Okada, I guess you wound up being responsible for the designing all of Nintendo's portable hardware from pretty much the original Game Boy up to everything right up until, but not including the 3DS. And there's, I think it's, is it an interview? that was translated by some schmopulations. He talks about... Just Google Satoru Okada

microvision. Because what he says is that once the Game & Watch fad died, you know, of course, Yukoi was like, well, we've got to follow this up with something. Maybe we'll come out with a system with like intertangible cartridges and stuff. According to Okada,

Yukoi's idea was to come out with like a really, almost kind of like a game and watch but with just interchangeable cartridges to the point that he was saying we should do something like the Milton Bradley Microvision, but just cheaper and with crappier technology and it'd be almost like, I don't always say disposable,

but Okada says that Yohoi was talking about the system essentially you'd throw it away after two years because it was just not very cheaply well made and it was kind of more of a disposable toy than anything else. According to Okada, he's like, I was the one who said no, whatever our portable handheld with cartridges is going to be. It should be a portable Famicom.

And according to him, he's the one, like, essentially he and Yokoai had a throwdown. For Yoko is like, no, we need to make this cheaper, more tour-like. Okato was like, no, we made them need to make this, like, sturdy and give actual play value to the customers and stuff like that. And it has to be something, yeah, it has to have some meat on its bones. Not to say that has to be super expensive and anything like that. and supposedly Yokoy was like well if you're willing to take responsibility for this I'll let you build this thing and so according

to Okada he went off and designed the game boy single-handedly but then Yokoy I guess took all the well this is like the great man theory of history right like people love to kind of you know wrap up a very complicated design where they want to put a face

on a very complex what is actually a kind of a very complicated process I don't want to misconstrue to make it sound like Okada says that Yoquoy it's stolen the credit. But I think he does seem to be, in the one or two interviews where he talks about this, he does seem to be a little bit salty that Yucoy,

through no fault of Yucoy's own efforts, kind of became the face of the Game Boy, even though it sounds like it was totally Okada's idea in his in his, I mean, even people will admit the fact that he was a guy who actually designed the Game Boy. But like, yeah, Akata's

whole thing is like whose idea was and who was really pushing for it to begin with. Yolkoi's autobiography, he's basically focusing on screen. And, like, all of his stress is about how bad the screen is. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, well, he actually, he says, like, he stopped eating. And he's, he developed such like a bad case of ulcers that he was actually considering,

I think he means it's metaphorically considering suicide. Like, is it because it's blurry or? Well, just basically, I think that the, the big issue that they were running into was the viewing angle. And, like, if you just tilted it even slightly, and he kept showing prototypes of it to Yamauchi. And Yamauchi's like, get the fuck out of here. This is, no, this is, You can't sell this. And he was so worried that they wouldn't be able to come up with a screen that pleased Yamuchi and, like, the other higher-ups and it would be canceled or something that he just, he got, like, incredibly stressed out. And so it's interesting because in the biography, he doesn't really claim credit.

He doesn't, he kind of skirts around the issue of who designed the Game Boy. He's basically just focusing on delivering the Game Boy, which I can very more easily see. Well, he's the producer, though. Like, even if he's not designing, he's still in charge of the project. Yes. Yeah, if anyone has to answer to Yamuichi, it's going to be him. Yeah, definitely. I'm just looking online here. Okada, Okada is, was interviewed by retro gamer magazine, I guess. And this site, Japanese nintendo.com says, you know, quote, when I was young, and this is Okada, I was rather stubborn and often became angry at my superiors when I was defending my ideas. The best example of this was the game boy. The game boy, you know today, actually had nothing to do with the one Yokoi had in mind. He saw the game boy as a direct follow on from the game and watch. which meant a rather cheap toy, with no business model and no long-term ambition.

So that's basically, you know, what you were saying, right? That it was kind of, you know, game and watch plus. Almost exactly, yeah. Yeah. I remember that that's the unfortunate thing of a bunch of white guys who have all this information from secondhand sources. We can never tell no for sure because of, you know, just the nature of the industry and everything like that is like,

like the only two real sources we have for most of this stuff is like game over and Awada asks and the occasional golden nugget like this interview with Akata so we have to like kind of piece together a puzzle retroactively and but that makes him

a little more of an interesting picture of exactly how the game point was developed there wasn't just you're coy being like I have an idea I'm gonna invent a machine that one day everyone

will play Pokemon on it wasn't like that yeah so it's never as simple as that yeah I mean it's like the Rochomone effect you know what I mean it's like you ask everybody and everybody has an equally compelling completely different, you know, story

of how it came to be. They should make a movie about that. They should. Jeremy, is this your podcast? You've disappeared. I'm here. I don't have to dominate the kind of. conversation. You know, I think everything we're talking about right now is there's a high degree

of speculation, and that's not really what I want to deal in too much. But, you know, the important thing is that Yo-Koi did have an important hand in getting the Game Boy project through. There were obviously some disagreements on the final form it would take. I know some people with Nintendo have also been said to have wanted the system to be much higher spec, to, you know, have a color screen and things like that. So, you know, every, every kind of project like this is a compromise. And what it actually ended up as is, you know, that's what we got. And it did the trick.

It was very successful, one of the best, actually the best selling game system of the 20th century. Yes. So kind of hard to argue that they didn't succeed with it. I think an example of just good enough. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And, you know, Yokoi was involved in Game Boy throughout its life. R&D1, the R&D1 division was kind of the main internal team that worked on Game Boy

Software. Like if it was a first-party game, it was probably headed up by R&D1, maybe co-developed by Minigawa engineering or Minakuchi engineering or Paxsofnika or some other co-developer, but, you know, ultimately spearheaded by someone who worked under Yoko in his division. And so you had games like Balloon Kid. Yeah, that's the first go-to, right? Everyone goes to balloon kit first. No, it was, you know, balloon fight, but with kind of like a single player quest mode that really built on the balloon trip concept and was really, really good.

Super Mario Land, Super Mario Land 2 and 3, Tetris, Solar Striker, you know, all the kind of early sports games like tennis and golf and baseball, those were all R&D 1 intelligent systems working together. Metroid 2. there was a great Kid Acre sequel quite a few other games by R&D1. I don't think Nintendo R&D4 and Miyamoto got involved

until Zalda and that was like 1993. So the system was, you know, had been around for several years by the time R&D4 was like,

oh yeah, we should do something for this other system we have, who knows. Famously, the Super Mario clone, I mean, it's not clone,

it's by Nintendo. I don't know what you called it Super Mario clone. That's so damning. That's worse Oh, Godd a story. I remember it was mind-blowing when I first played it, you know, as a kid. But, like, it's a weird, it's a weird Mario game.

It is. And, you know, I've talked about this in some of my videos and projects before, but there was the timeline split, kind of like the Zelda timeline, but it was the Mario timeline. And there was, like, the hero of mushrooms. And he went on to, you know, do Super Mario Brothers and all of its sequels. And then there was the blue-collar hero who made wrecking crew and showed up in some weird random games from R&D1. But the people who made Smirieland, including Hip Tanaka, the composer, and Yokoi, had worked on Donkey Kong. They had worked on Mario Brothers.

So they had this kind of connection to Mario, and they had a claim to the Mario legacy. they just hadn't worked on the Super Mario Brothers like that specific corner that specific branch of the Mario series so when they were given, when they were told, you know, make a Mario Super Mario Bros. style game they were like, okay, sure. But, you know, instead of following strictly

what EAD or R&D4 had done, they were just like, let's kind of stick with what we know. So you get, you know, fighter flies from the original Mario brothers in there. You get all kinds of weird stuff. you don't get the fireballs, you get super balls that bounce around the screen. It was just kind of them saying, you know, we've got our own take on Mario. And it's totally legitimate and fine. It's just, you know, not necessarily what you expect if you were a kid watching the wizard

and solvating over Super Mario Brothers 3. Yeah. And well, it's the ultimate expression of the idea that, like, there was no specific formula for any of this. Like, just like everyone talks about how, you know, there's early NES games, the sequels are always weirdly different because there was no formula for any of those specific. series that the developers fault obligated to follow and of course yeah with this without Miyamoto's involvement

there was no one to say hey this this is what makes a Super Mario game and this this is not and I've always said that like if Yokoai was ever in in charge of any actual game it feels like Super Mario Land might be the one where you can most

feel his fingerprints in because it is such a weird toy-like little game just the idea of like oh well we can't instead of fireballs? What if it's just a bouncy ball? It just bounces and collects coins. It's just goofier and funnier. And what if every other stage was just like a little shooty

stage and go shoot, shoot, shoot. It's so much more toilet. Yeah. Submarine? Wasn't there a submarine stage too? Yeah. And it but at the same time it's so less refined. Which you could chalk up a lot of that just being, you know, one of the first games that the development team was making for that system. You know, Mario feels

kind of weirdly sticky and stiff. But like, yeah, there's something very fun and play-like in that game that I get the feeling that that was more of a Yukoi joint than any other video game you could probably point to in terms of like him coming up like maybe

maybe he wasn't designing the whole game he was definitely not the director it was just quote unquote just the producer but like if you ever wanted to point at something that kind of shows you the difference in game design philosophies between Gunn P. Yokoi and Shigerra and Miyamoto Super Mario Land is it well it certainly hit a sweet spot

when it came out I mean it's like I think judging it now with the benefit of what 30 years of hindsight is a little uncharitable because you know it was meant it was designed for its era and in the era we certainly didn't you know feel like oh man this is like a fake mario man like i felt like wow Mario handheld like actual Mario handheld you know despite how tiny that spright was like he is tiny in that game yeah i don't i don't think this was a yokoi game i mean like he he produced it but it was directed by saturu okata uh he was he was the the designer, like the planner on the game.

Like, Okada had a hand in a bunch of kind of early Game Boy games. You know, he was the guy who designed the hardware. So, you know, most of the best games that take the best advantage of the system and kind of make the most effective use of it were designed by Okada. Interesting. Anyway, Game Boy was great, even though the Mario game was kind of weird. As you said, Matt, it was, you know, just good enough. Not very impressive on, you know, in comparison to the links or to the game gear, but the batteries lasted forever.

It had a great library of games because Nintendo, you know, everyone wanted a slice of the Nintendo business. It had, you know, it was a very durable piece of hardware. It was portable, yeah. Like, you could actually literally bomb it and it would still work. So, literally. It got better pretty quickly, too. I mean, that original DMG. 101 brick was around for a while,

but, like, Nintendo did start knocking out better versions of that hardware pretty soon. Yeah, the Game Boy... Well, the Game Boy pocket... The Pocket. Game Boy was seven years old by the time that came out. I thought that was just a couple years later. I'm sorry. I was thinking that was... Okay, so that is a while. Oh, geez.

The Game Boy Pocket was 96. It actually came out around the same time in Japan as Pokemon. Like, that was kind of a shot in the arm for the Game Boy. That was Yo Koi saying, you know, things didn't go so well with virtual boy but I really want to retire and he he'd already been planning to retire before virtual boy he did not leave the company in disgrace because of virtual boy but you know he wasn't satisfied with how that turned out that project so he he spearheaded game boy pocket and said you know I'm going to make a game boy that really it just it's it's more

satisfying it lasts longer on on you know a set of fewer batteries it has a better screen it's smaller and more compact. It's just like the Game Boy perfected. And it is a great statement. Like, um, when you, when you use a Game Boy Pocket, if you go back to the original DMG-O-1 brick, it's like, whoa, I'm playing it loud, but I don't know if I want to. You know, it's the, it's the, the fact that Pokemon came out on a game system that was like seven, eight years old, pretty long in the tooth for a game system back then was sort of a testament to how little anybody cared about it at Nintendo or like they didn't really have high expectations but the flip side of that is because the Game Boy had such a huge installed user base you know there was

really no hurdle to acquiring the game especially if you were a little kid and you know I think Pokemon's success in huge part is due to that like enormous enormous like installed base and how many Game Boy's already been sold by 1997 you 96 when it was you know it was tens and tens of millions yes well I didn't realize yeah Jeremy you just said before that it was the best-selling piece of game hardware of the 20th century. And I'm sure it had sold like a lion's share of the number of consoles or a number of handhelds that would sell before Pokemon came out. Well, no, I think probably it had sold about, I don't know exactly, but about half of its total numbers by that point. But that's what I was saying.

Like, yeah. But definitely not the lion's share. Like Pokemon, Pokemon and Game Boy Pocket and then Game Boy Color, they kind of lump those all together. Like, those had a huge impact on the system. Like, you know, the original Game Boy hardware was viable for a decade. That's really kind of amazing. It's unprecedented, really. So what is the bridge, what I am really not familiar, and this is where I kind of hope Jeremy can fill me in on this, like the kind of genesis of the virtual boy and all of that,

because that's, if you want to talk about swan songs of, of, of yokey at Nintendo, um, what, what's the, what's the story there? Well, no, his actual swan song was the wonder swan, and that was, that was a, that was a different company. Yes. Um, so there's a, there's a pretty long story behind virtual boy, but to make it short, it was it was basically the the yokoi version of virtual reality like how can we take some existing technology that's inexpensive and accessible to the you know to the mainstream consumer audience and use that to simulate something that's a just good enough version of 3D i think the project kind of slipped along the way and i think it was yokoi who compared it to a frog slowly being boiled uh you know the temperature just goes up one degree at a time, and you don't really notice it, but in the end, you know, the frog boils.

And it was, it was pretty much the same thing with Virtual Boy, where they kept cutting features and changing elements and eventually what ended up shipping was so far removed from what the original plan was, they were like, whoa, how did this happen? This was, this is not what I was supposed to be. But, but Yo Koi, you know, Yamauchi, Hiroshi Yamuichi, the company president, really wanted some sort of 3D functionality. Nintendo had been dabbling in 3D for quite a while. There was a 3D system for Famicom. The shutter goggles for the Famicom. Yeah.

The LED shutters. Those are really cool looking. I've never used them. Have you? I have some, but I haven't actually sat down and used them yet. They're on the list of things to do. The master system had similar goggles, too. Those came out in the U.S.

The Famicom goggles did not come out in the U.S. But anyway, like, the idea of 3D was very appealing to Nintendo. They really wanted to do it. So basically, Yokoy connected with a Massachusetts-based firm called Reflection Technologies who had this device that basically was a headset that would allow you to use, like, you know, head-mounted virtual reality on a consumer level. And that's fine. but it just...

Or it was it? Well, it turned out not to be viable as a consumer video game product. For one thing, they couldn't do the head mounting because the device was so heavy. The original concept for Virtual Boy was to make it head mounted

so you would wear it. But... Yeah, I don't know if they meant to have like head tracking stuff. Well... That's kind of the defining thing of virtual reality. And without that, you're already lost half the game right there. A consumer level chip, like processor, was not fast enough to do head tracking. That's one problem. Yeah. They basically used the same chip that was in the PCFX, kind of a failed console

slash computer hybrid from NEC. It was, you know, a 32-bit chip. So compared to Game Boy, it was really impressive, but for head tracking didn't quite do that. But also another problem was there's a piece by Binge Edwards, a retro notts regular on Fast Company where he talked to some people who worked on Virtual Boy in different capacities

but apparently there were concerns from like the FCC about the fact that you had this radiation emitting device that you were wearing on your head and so they had to shield components with metal

and all of a sudden it was so heavy and all of a sudden it was way too heavy to be a headset so it was no longer had mounted. It no longer had head tracking. You know, they wanted full-color LED or LCDs, but anything besides red was way too expensive. You know, the alternate colors, like, you know, RGB LEDs became affordable like a year later, a year after Game Boy or Virtual Boy came out.

So they just kind of missed the boat on that. But it ended up being like basically monochrome black and white, but drenched in bright searing red. So it was just... Yeah, it was kind of like the bloody wedding or something like that. It was really not pleasant to look at. It was just kind of a mess. But the virtual boy did have a lot of interesting ideas to it. Wasn't one of the issues Nintendo had that they were worried kids would, like, fall down

stairs if they had it strapped to their head, too? That's one of the other things I read was even all the other tech stuff aside, Nintendo's lawyers, once they saw what the whole idea of this thing was supposed to be, they were like, there's no way in a hell we're letting you guys sell something that can like essentially make kids blind and deaf because even if

even aside from the first accident that might happen that you could actually maybe blame on the virtual boy, the moment as some kid falls down the stairs and blames it on the virtual boy we're dead. So we this cannot obscure people's visions or like mess with their hearing like this has to be something they just

stick their face into. They can't just like walk around with this on there. How times changed when Pokemon Go came out, and, like, people started walking into, like, nuclear waste dumps and stuff looking for... God, who knows? Yeah. And that's even aside from the death of a thousand cuts with the technology thing, where everything just kind of kept on, like, just fall... Not falling apart, but, like, they end up having to cut away so much of the, you know, stuff that was actually going to make it actually fun to play. And just, yeah, everything...

Whereas, like, Gunpei Yoku was so lucky with the Game & Watch and the Game Boy and how... stripping it down to its basic components, just if anything, just turn those other devices into just its purest versions of themselves. The same thing happening to the virtual boy just tore the thing apart. So by the end, there wasn't really nothing left except for a brain-frying red screen that just sat on it. No, no, no. That is not true. That is not, there is a lot. There is a lot to admire about Virtual Boy. For one thing, it is, it is a system, a consumer-level system. that provided 3D visualization, 3D graphics in 1995. There wasn't anything comparable to that.

It was not the right solution, but it still achieved something admirable. It also, like you could see Nintendo's designers, Yochoi's team, kind of approaching the realities of 3D gaming in a sort of naive way, that that sort of was a precursor to what we would see in the mainstream gaming space. The controller, it didn't have analog controls, but it had two D pads, one for the left and one for the right, which is really, that is, you know, like a sort of primitive version of the way modern controllers are designed, where you have the left stick and the right stick. And they kind of intuitive that you would need two different control pads to be able to control movement and visualization in a 3D space. And, you know, the hardware wasn't really up to it. And the design chops weren't there.

People weren't really sure how to design games yet for true 3D. So the console and the controller weren't really, you know, they weren't taken full advantage of. They weren't used to their maximum potential. But they were getting there. Like this is, the virtual boy is an important step that I think people tend to overlook. There were, there were some good, innovative ideas to it. It just, it wasn't around long enough. and it wasn't the right product.

It wasn't, you know, a successful consumer product. So it did. Do you think it would have done better if it hadn't been called virtual? I don't know about that. I think it needed not to be a device that you shove your face into and get a headache after 15 minutes. I've been saying this ever since I hooked up the virtual tap to a virtual boy and recorded video through RGB on a television system. Like, when you strip it down to black and white. it becomes a Game Boy, and if they had skipped the Game Boy, like the 3D element, and just made it like a handheld Game Boy successor with the same visual resolution, but just one screen, black and white, just like Hyper Game Boy or something, I think it would have done amazingly well.

Like, if you could have played that Wario Land game on just a normal portable system, lose the 3D gimmickery, which isn't even really that important. in that game, like, that would have been not necessarily mind-blowing, but it would have been so much better than any other portable system at the time. And, you know, a big part of Virtual Boy's battery drain, the short battery life, was because there were spinning mirrors and, like, light systems inside of it. And it was supporting two backlit mirror spinning screens at the same time. Like, that's, that's super battery hungry. You take away those mechanical components, and you have a system that probably would have had

pretty good battery life, a pretty powerful 32-bit processor, a nice widescreen video system. And that would have been an amazing handheld system. That could have been their next generation Game Boy. That could have been what they did instead of Game Boy Pocket. They could have made, like, Game Boy Cargo Pans or something. You know, you need more than one pocket for this thing. You need a lot of pockets. But this is it.

Game Boy head rest, yeah. This is the new thing, man. Like, that, that, I think that could have done really well. And it's a shame that, you know, they got so hung up on the virtual reality aspect of it, the 3D aspect of it. Because it just, like, as we've seen time and again, 3D is a gimmick. No one really, really wants it that much. Nobody wanted it on TVs either. No.

Ever since the 1950s, it's been failing in the moment. market. So do you think, okay, do you think the virtual boy also helped kill the VR fad in America because I certainly, if you were, you know, it was, yeah, I mean, it was such a hyped buzz word back then and we all knew it wasn't really working. There were like a couple of kind of commercial like arcade level attempts to make it work, but like I think everybody knew like home our VR was completely overhyped. And then when the virtual boy came out, it just felt like to me anyway. I was like, wow, this is just like, that's it. Virtual reality, done, done.

Yucoy himself has had repeatedly said that he blamed the virtual boy. I don't know if he ever said anything specific about the name, but he definitely did say the marketing that positioned the system as a virtual reality machine was he blamed part

of the failure of the system on that just because it was selling people something that system was never really meant to be. And he, yeah, there's a quote with him saying something if he had a billion in the end to invest in marketing that he could have decided how that marketing would have gone. He thinks he could have

actually salvaged the system. Who knows how popular would have been, but at least it wouldn't have cratered the way it had. I mean, it just, it felt so retrograde. It felt like using one of those like coin operated peep show booths. You know what? With the leaning into the thing? No, as

an avowed fan of those things, I grew up playing those things at Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That's, I never, never occurred to me, but that is exactly And also it's all got all the drawbacks of even modern virtual reality where it's asocial. No one else can see what you're doing. You're kind of closing yourself off to everyone else around you. Very isolating.

It's impossible to show off to strangers. Yeah, there was really no way to share it. Famously, like, Sony had a really hard time marketing the Walkman in the late 70s because nobody knew what it was. And so Sony, they actually hired people to walk around the Ginza and like offer people a hit on their earphones. so they could see what it was like to listen to a, you know, music outside of your house. And that worked. That is how they sparked, you know, the Walkman had become a big fad in Japan. But there's no way to do that with a virtual boy.

I want to point out, too, before we move on through little details about this stuff. Going through Jeremy's virtual boy works video project on YouTube really made me appreciate, like, Jeremy just touched upon upon this briefly. But, yeah, the graphic work they were doing for that system, the games in that system, there are some great-looking, games and some of the best Nintendo Sprite work I've ever seen has been in like Mario Clash in that Warrior Land game and even that just alone just kind of kills me. I know Nintendo did

more advanced, you know, pixel stuff with like, you know, Game Boy Advance games and stuff afterwards but like, yeah, Jeremy's absolutely right. Virtual Boy, if it had just been served up in a different format could have, could have been a thing. I don't know how big of a thing, but it definitely wouldn't have died on the operating table.

It could have been a contender. Yeah, I would chalk that up more to Yamuuchi trying to of a bad idea through the system than anything Yoko Aukoi did. Yucoy did as much as he could give in the bad idea that was served to him. That poor frog. That's a roasted frog. There's nothing left

of that frog. That frog is... Boiled. Oh my God. Like, there was a lot of rumors that Yokoi left to the company because, in disgrace, because of the Givertural boy, but he wrote an impassioned kind of editorial for a famous Japanese literary magazine

called Xunzhu Bungay Shunju and in it he specifically said no I didn't leave because of that whether that's true or not I don't know but he said there was no bad blood between him and Nintendo.

Did you guys hear anything to the contrary? I mean I don't think Virtual Boy went well for him but again he did follow that up with Game Boy Pocket so it's not like they were just like get the hell out of here. They let him head up another project

and it was a huge successful him and for Nintendo. So it's hard to imagine Nintendo was just like, oh, well, you did all this great stuff for us for all these years, but this project, this one project you were given, didn't turn out well, so you suck.

That just doesn't seem to be their culture. No. No, no. Japanese companies didn't fire people. You just didn't fire people back then. Yeah, he got the corner office. Yes. The window, the window, not the corner office.

Well, that's the thing I've always heard, didn't fire him, they just humiliated him until he left by forcing him to show off the virtual boy at the one or two trade shows well, probably the only one, because it was only on shells for less than a year. Probably Space World, right?

That's where Yo-Coy was actually showing off the floor display model. Well, that, I mean, again, I have no idea how true that is, but that's always been how I've always heard of him was that he was essentially shamed out of the company because the Japanese just don't fire people. And I do wonder.

wonder, especially because, like, I don't know what the hell he was up to in the couple years leading up to the virtual boy in Game Boy Pocket, because what was he doing this during the Super Nintendo years? In his, in his biography, in his autobiography, he said he was in the wilderness, so to speak, because, yeah, kind of wondering, because... He was really depressed, is what he said, because, like, Miyamoto and everybody were getting all of the spotlight, and he thought... That would better...

Yeah, I could see that. That makes me think maybe, okay, maybe he was, like, he came. back just to do the virtual boy in the Game Boy Pocket, and then he was, I could see, in that situation, I can see who his eye was already on the door, because he was a, what, he's like 50 or so when that happened to? Mid-50s, yeah. Yeah, I could see him thinking about, like, Nintendo's growing and changing, the industry's changing, Nintendo's going up against Sony, everything's becoming 3D, the Nintendo's on games are

becoming much more complicated and stuff. I could totally see him thinking, I don't want to necessarily retire, but I want to go back to square one. Yeah, and that's exactly what he did with his company that's exactly what he did with his company that he started after Nintendo Koto. who, you know, where he basically put together little gadgets and projects, little LCD games, using more contemporary technology, but also collaborated with Bondi to create basically the ultimate realization of the classic Game Boy, which was the Wonder Swan, which was basically a virtual boy powered, you know, like equivalent processor on a, you know, a tiny portable system that had, it just did so much. It was like basically the same, roughly the same resolution as the virtual boy screen. So you could have big sprites. You could have more levels of gray.

I think it could do 16 shades of gray scale or eight as opposed to four. It had a rotatable orientation. It had basically three sets of buttons. There was one set of buttons that was just a D pad, one set of buttons that was just like an A and a B. And then another set of buttons in between that could be either A, B buttons or a D pad. So you could rotate the screen and the whole system and play in vertical mode or horizontal mode. And you could just kind of seamlessly do that, which, you know, it's really interesting, but it makes the idea of emulating Wonderswan on some sort of dedicated system really hard to imagine how to do because that rotation is so important.

But it ran on a single double A battery for like 30 hours. It's ridiculous how energy efficient that thing was. And it sold, I think, you know, the base price for it when it launched was like 60 bucks. It was really cheap. And, you know, it had a pretty blurry screen at first, but then they released the Wonder Swan Color, which, you know, was still very energy efficient. I think it could do like 15 hours on a double A battery. And then the Swan Crystal, which had even better quality. But, you know, it was a very, very inexpensive competitor to Game Boy that, you know, I don't know why they didn't release it outside of Japan, but I feel like it could have done.

un-okay for itself. It did reasonably well in Japan. Like, it's not hard to find WonderSwan's and WonderSwan games, you know, compared to NeoGeo Pocket color. It's much more readily purchasable. I was in Japan a lot around that time. I hadn't moved here yet, but I was traveling for work and stuff a lot. And I just remember seeing the Wonder Swan coming out and just feeling like it was the answer to a question that had already been settled. Like, putting aside the fact that it was a really great, like, system that the, that the specs were cool. it just felt like, well, I already have a game boy. You know what I mean?

Like, why do I need this? And I think the real thing that killed it was the software. I mean, as well done as some of the games that were on there, like, you just didn't feel like it had. It was Bondi. You know, the ecosystem just wasn't there, you know, like a more dedicated. Because I never really associated Bondi with gaming. Of course, they made games. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, but they were always, they were always variants of their toy licenses. Just shit tons of Evangelian games and things. like that. Just licensed anime product after licensed anime product. And it's just, you know, whereas Nintendo thrived on game properties, properties that were games first and foremost, Bondi was very much about like, hey, kids, you love, you know, Kinikuman. Here you go. Here's Kinikuman. Hey, you love, uh, whatever the hell. And those games do ganglusters. They, they do really, I mean, you know, all Japan, our localization company, a big chunk of our career was spent localizing gundam games um you know the gun damn dynasty warriors there's never there's never

a shortage oh yeah i mean and so like i get it i get why companies do that but that was i think a big reason why you know even to somebody who kind of had more of an understanding of how the game industry worked i was kind of like what is this competing with like what how are they going to compete with like the game boy right and it really limited what's their niche yeah it limited the appeal of the system to just Japan because most of those properties, you know, that was the late 90s, they just, they didn't have

traction in the U.S. yet. Like, maybe now a system that kind of leaned on Gundam and Dragon Ball would do okay for itself, but in 1999, no, it just, it wasn't there. No. Yeah, the only games I've ever heard about it for, for, didn't they pour over a couple of Final Fantasy games?

They did. That was because Squarespace and Nintendo were having a pissing match over the PlayStation and the abandonment of you know, Squarespace off abandoning Nintendo to be on PlayStation so they couldn't

make Game Boy games instead they made Wonder Swan games and when Wonder Swan went away they finally sucked up their pride and said okay you win Nintendo, we'll you know eat crow

lay ourselves on the altar altar of commerce for you. Eat Chocobo? Is that what the equivalent of eating crow is? We will make We will make Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for you. It really makes you wonder if Yolkoy, if the tragedy hadn't happened, if Yolkoy hadn't died in that traffic accident so young and so soon after like this brainchild of his launched, like maybe he would have been able to turn it around or maybe, you know, he was too entrenched in old, you know, toy based ways of thinking to turn it around again, you know, I don't know. I would imagine cell phone.

would have thrown a big kink into that. I mean, I think the Wonders 1 would have lasted longer, but the oncoming... You would know more about that than I would, because I'm not quite sure up on, like, what, early 21st century Japanese cell phone culture was like, but a dedicated handheld

that just plays games that would... sounds like you kind of could play most of them on your phone in just a couple years. Because what, this came out, and the Wonderswan was, what, 1999?

Yep, 99. It sounds like like Wonderswan would have had a pretty short shelf life even if it had been successful at the start. But then you never know. Like the company could have just turned into a cell phone game company or something like that. Or who knows, but. But Japan had already kind of wholeheartedly pivoted into kind of what the prototype of

social media was back then. Like we didn't have like Facebook or Twitter or anything in America at that point. But Japan was like, 1999 is also when Ney Channel came out, two channel, which as we know kind of revolutionized how people interact online. and like things like emoji precursor to 4chan yeah i mean the chan stuff right yes yeah yeah knee channel knee channel had it was all text based but they had an image board called futaba channel and that code is what uh moot who founded 4chan used to launch 4chan and um you know emoji and like all sorts of like you know they had the flip phone culture going on and like really

and the girls were like using these print club machines and exchanging like selfies of each other so like that that kind of like socialization of tech for young people had already kind of really accelerated in Japan at that point and it makes you wonder what would have happened if they had developed Japanese companies developed a smartphone that worked before the iPhone came in and basically just completely monoculturized the the smartphone ecosystem that's what I'm saying and there would have been time for um yukoi's company developed some kind of niche for itself before yeah apple came in swept everything away but um but even then again i mean this i i just wanted him to survive long enough to do a lot of asks that's if i go back in time and change anything like i you know that that that's because if anyone knows where the bodies would be buried and have good stories to tell in those things that well also he wasn't working for nintendo anymore that's the key thing so like you know when i was researching my book

i always heard the greatest stories from retired sony people or retired nintendo people it was never like you can't get a straight answer of anybody working out of a company not because they're deceptive, but because, you know, that's their meal ticket. And, like, they have oil to do their company and all of that kind of thing. So they're not going to tell you anything that's beyond the company line. And if, yeah, Muuichi had still been in charge of the company, I would, I don't think anyone would come back to tell stories about the company too much. But with the Awada in charge of Nintendo, I could totally see him saying, hey, I know you,

I love you, I respect you enough. Like, once you come back, we could talk. Well, who knows? He could have brought back you to quite actually work with it. Who knows? But, like, the untapped. potential there, even though Yucoy was a little bit older than

who knows what could have happened. One of those big what ifs. Yeah. Maybe the, yeah, within the gaming industry, if not the biggest one, definitely one of them. Yeah. Ooh, and do. Yeah, well, that's kind of a bummer to end on,

but boys, we've been doing this for two solid hours. Look at us. I know, and that's on top of the previous hour and a half we did before. So, I think that is enough talking about kind of Gumpi Yokoi and also, a lot of things around Gumpay Yokoi.

But, you know, I think it's good to focus on individual creators from time to time. And I can't think of anyone more appropriate to start with than Yokoi. I mean, he's not as big a household name as Miyamoto or Kojima or someone.

But in a lot of ways, I feel like he is, his work was much closer to the heart of what video gaming is really about and what makes gaming good. And you look back at things like Game and Watch, you look back at Game Boy, and even the things we talked about last episode, his pre-video game stuff, there's just so much inventiveness to it and so much of an ability to say, what are the needs of players? What is it that players want? And how can I

deliver that to them in the most efficient way possible that's going to be affordable for as many people as possible? And that's a, you know, that's a really rare ability. And he had a great instinct for that. And it's hard to imagine what video gaming would be if he hadn't had influence, you know, if he hadn't been part of it. Yeah, he's a, it's kind of singular presence, isn't he? And as somebody who kind of got interested in Japan because of toys, because I'm old enough to, you know, have been a kid when before video games are really a big thing, certainly home gaming, like that kind of fusion of physical toys and that kind of intersection, the Venn diagram is just, it's something only really he did. And like, you know,

all of these arguments over, you know, who programmed what or who made what. I totally agree that he probably wasn't the singular driving force on a lot of this stuff. But that idea that he was a toy man before he was a game man is, I think, a really unique thing in the game industry. And yeah, he was a toy maker. And like I said before, it was his thing that he served more than anything else was play. And that is at the heart of gaming more than anything else. That is the great unifier. And the fact that, like, yeah, he managed.

to kind of shape Nintendo's ethos, and that's Nintendo's driving force, too. And so, yeah, his shadow looms large over the industry and his impact will always be felt in the best ways possible. He seems like a pretty cool dude. I'm glad he was around. Yeah, always going to be one of my regrets that I was never able to interview him, but yeah. Oh, for sure. Nevertheless, we have many of his works and the works that he helped create and contributed to, uh, to enjoy. And, you know, I can continue to encounter new ones or, you know, new old ones. And, you know, having just recently kind of dabbled in Game and Watch for the first time properly has been really satisfying

and really makes me appreciate just, you know, the kind of creativeness and the kind of thoughtfulness that went into his work. Anyway, that is an overview of the work of Gunpei Yokoy. Thanks, Bill, and thank you, Matt, both for contributing to this, uh, this dynamic and exciting three and a half hour adventure. Thank you for having us. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Yeah.

And so, yes, thanks everyone for listening once again to our discussion of Gunpeyokoi and Nintendo's history. You've been very patient and hopefully you have enjoyed the fruits of your patience. Anyway, this has been a Retronauts episode. I have been Jeremy Parrish. I will continue to be Jeremy Parrish. and you will be able to continue to find Retronauts in all the usual places, including Retronauts.com on the Greenlit Podcast Network, on podcatchers and so on and so forth.

And, of course, on Patreon, where you can subscribe to us, get early access to every episode, get bonus material, things like that. Depending on the tier you subscribe to, you know, if you subscribe at a high enough level and there are any slots available, you can even request an episode topic except you cannot request Gunpei Yokoi because we have covered that topic in its entirety. So, Matt, where can we find you on the Internet? You can find me on Twitter.

I'm Matt underscore Alt. You can find me on Instagram, Alt, Matt, Alt. And you can find me in your favorite local bookstore. You can find my book, Pure Invention, How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World. Please check it out. An amazing book. I highly recommend it.

And Bill, how about you? I'm just mudron, my last name, M-U-D-R-O-N on Twitter.com. You can find art prints that I sell on at muddron at big cartel.com and I have my own podcast called Tarty to the Party in which me and my co-host, we talk about things that's we always meant to watch or listen to or read before and then we finally get around to doing that stuff, although our podcast is half mutated into us talking about Disney stuff these days. But yeah, but we also talk about video game things and stuff like that. So yeah, check out Tarty to the Party.com. In fairness, everything, like, almost everything is a Disney thing these days. That's the unfortunate. They do own all of the world at this point, don't they?

Yeah, we're slowly going through the chronological Disney through the decades collection. So within the last six months, we've actually managed to work our way from up from the very first Disney cartoons all the way up to Cinderella. Are you doing only cartoons? You're not doing like Herbie? Yeah, how does, how does Davy Crockett hold up? Treasure Island is going to be our next thing. So we have to decide if we're going to do all the live-back. You got to tell me about Dutterby O'Gill and the little people.

The computer who wore tennis shoes. If it's on Disney Plus, technically we're going to have to cover it sometimes. Don't forget the black hole. I just rewatch that recently. It's great. It's terrible, but it's great. Is that on Disney? Yeah.

The designs are iconic, the ship, the robots. Oh, yeah, that gothic crazy cathedral ship. Yeah, it's just amazing. Okay, next podcast, the black hole. I wish there were games on black hole. No, I don't think they're wrong. There should be, because I would love to talk about that movie. Just have people pitch their ideas for a black hole game.

You are, Ernest Borg9. I imagine something like Halo, except you're like a hovering, like, robot that looks like Oscar the Grouch. Or you could do like Fruit Ninja, except you're Maximilian with the spinning death hands. Totally, God. It had the most like weird ending. We're way off topic here. We are. We have to stop podcast all of a sudden, yeah.

I am totally down to. talk about black hole sometime though great great terrible anytime all right gentlemen thank you yes it was a pleasure and i hope to have you both on again sometime together or separately it doesn't matter it'll just be great all right thanks everyone for listening You know, and I'm going to be it.