Gunpei Yokoi was a Japanese inventor, video game designer and producer who worked for Nintendo for over 30 years. Yokoi was hired by Nintendo in 1965 prior to Nintendo’s involvement in video games. His initial responsibilities were to maintain the assembly line machines used to manufacture Hanafuda cards.

During a site visit of the hanafuda factory where Gunpei Yokoi worked the president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi noticed a device that Yokoi created for his own amusement during his spare time. The toy like device acted as an extending arm which amused Yamauchi, who saw promise in the invention. Yamauchi instructed Yokoi to spend time to refine and develop his invention into a proper product for the upcoming Holiday season.

When Yokoi was finished refining the product it was marketed as the “Ultra Hand” which became a huge success. Upon the success of the Ultra Hand, Yokoi was asked to join Nintendo’s toy division where he focused on the creation of products such as puzzle games, remote controlled devices, baseball throwing machine and a lover tester. He worked on toys within Nintendo’s toy division until the company decided to expand into the video game market in 1974, becoming one of Nintendo’s first game designers along with Genyo Takeda.

Yokoi would spend several years working on electro-mechanical arcade games, many of which were early light gun games. During his daily commute Yokoi noticed a bored businessman on the train playing with an LCD calculator to pass time. From observing the man, Yokoi conceived the idea of a device that would act as both a watch and a miniature video game which could be used to pass time. Gunpei Yokoi’s concept would come to fruition with the creation of the Game & Watch, a line of handheld electronic games. The Game & Watch series of devices were a massive success for Nintendo going on to sell a combined total of 43.4 million units worldwide over its lifecycle.

In 1981, Yokoi was appointed as the producer of the arcade game Shigeru Miyamoto was working on, Donkey Kong. Yokoi shared many of the intricacies of game design to Miyamoto at the beginning of his career and acted as a mentor for Miyamoto for years. Donkey Kong became a worldwide phenomenon and afterwards Yokoi continued to work with Miyamoto on his next game series, Mario Bros.

After the release of the Mario Bros. arcade game, Yokoi produced several Nintendo R&D1 games before designing R.O.B. for the NES and the Game Boy. On October 4, 1997, Yokoi was involved in a fatal car accident on the Hokuriku Expressway. Gunpei Yokoi remains a well known figure and important founder in video games, best known as the creator of the Game & Watch, inventor of the D-pad, original designer of the Game Boy and producer of Metroid.