Discover the legacy that the Game Boy creator, Gunpei Yokoi left with his final two games! As well as a brief look at the company he founded after leaving Nintendo, Koto Laboratory!
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Gunpei Yokoi was one of Nintendo’s most important people, but rumour has it that he left Nintendo on bad terms after the failure of the Virtual Boy, but a translated interview from 1997 reveals that’s not the case:
“Actually, I didn’t leave for the reason of ‘taking responsibility for the failure of the Virtual Boy. Since before, I’ve thought about becoming independent after turning 55. That’s why I don’t have any hate or ill will towards Nintendo.”
“Well, if Nintendo can have people like Miyamoto making big, grand games, then I think there’s room for someone like me who makes games you can enjoy in your spare time.”
The reason he actually left Nintendo is very interesting, and seems to fit perfectly to his own ambitions, from the same interview:
“I wanted to continue to tweak the ‘niche toy’ ideas that were part of the founding spirit of Nintendo – this was the only reason for my departure.”
And from there, in September of 1996, Koto Laboratory was created.
Here he could build a team and spend some time experimenting with new toys and smaller niche ideas. Using the mantra of “Lateral thinking with mature technology, which he’d coined back in the early Nintendo days, they set about creating some simple LCD games, cheap to produce, but with fun new gameplay ideas, and a fun ultra portable size.
Unfortunately, just one year later in October 1997, he was involved in a car crash and sadly passed away. Before that though, two of his projects from Koto did see the light of day, and I have them both here with me!
The first game is Kunekunetchyo, which at first glance looks like a snake style game, but it’s actually quite unique in its approach. Rather than having static food that appears in the maze, in this game, the food to collect appears along the side and moves around until it enters the play field. Once it enters the field, it begins to move across the board, you need to try and steer your snake into it before it reaches the other side of the board. If it touches the wall on the other side, it’s game over! It’s a fresh take on the formula, and genuinely fun to play!
The second game is called Professor Henoheno, in this one, you move lines up and down the screen to connect all the way across before they disappear, it’s a fresh idea for the puzzle genre, and apart from the very small buttons making it a little awkward to play, it’s still really fun even in this jeering LCD format! Of course this game would later become a launch title for the WonderSwan a few years later, renamed to Gunpey as a tribute.
Just like the game and watch games that came before them, these also have two game modes, A and B, the B mode on both of these is an endless trial mode which gets more challenging as time goes on.
Im so glad that Gunpei Yokoi had a chance to revisit his ideas for fun standalone games before he passed away. It really seems like these two titles were exactly the path he wanted to take with his career, and according to an interview in 1997, just before he passed, he seemed very happy about their performance and glad that people still enjoyed simple games, as well as the main console releases which at the time were all becoming more and more realistic and moving into the 3rd dimension. I could go on for hours about how much Yokoi did for video games, and Japanese entertainment, but I’ll save that for a future video!
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