Gather 'round, my friends, and hear the tale of engineering dynamo Gumpei Yokoi. One of Nintendo's brilliant innovators, Yokoi's creations did for the company's hardware what producer Shigeru Miyamoto did for its software, but one brutal misstep cost him his career. The man who brought us the Game & Watch, the modern control pad, and the Game Boy juggernaut was done in by what was poised to be his greatest creation. Crashing down in the marketplace in late 1995, Yokoi's Virtual Boy dealt Nintendo its only true game console failure to date. Jeremy Parish at GameSpite recalls the sad tale.
By all rights, Yokoi should have finished out his career at Nintendo, steadily climbing through the ranks and guiding new generations of game and hardware designers. Unfortunately, Yokoi's sterling record ended with a terrible blemish that ended his career at Nintendo: Virtual Boy. The name, the red-and-black color shell, and the literally in-your-face design all cry out "1990s" as loudly as the Sega Scream ever did. It remains the single biggest failure of Nintendo's videogame years, and it stands as Yokoi's only notable creative misstep. Worse, it was a mistake made at just the wrong time, during a period of transition and instability for Nintendo and the industry as a whole.
The company needed a savior, and one assumes it was at this point that Yokoi stepped forward with what he hoped would be a solution: a portable system capable of true 3D graphics. Not just perspective-corrected polygons projected against a flat screen, but genuine three-dimensional visuals involving mirrors and stereo optics and an actual sense of spatial depth. True 3D in a compact, portable, inexpensive format. It was revolutionary. It was brilliant. It was, to be frank, absolutely amazing.
It was also a flop: a system that no one wanted.
After the red-and-black system failed to light the world on fire, Yokoi was subjected to the traditional corporate shaming. Assigned to personally demonstrate his failed creation at trade shows and treated as an outcast at the company that once adored him, he resigned from Nintendo one year after the system's launch and went on to found his own company, Koto Laboratory, and later created a competitor to the Game Boy product line, the WonderSwan. Unfortunately, Yokoi did not live to see what would become his final creation reach stores. Sideswiped by a passing car, Yokoi passed away in October 1997 at the age of fifty-six. As Parish says in his article, it shouldn't have happened like this.
