Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology
DURING TWO CENTURIES of closed-borders isolation, Japan banned hanafuda—“flower cards,” so called because the twelve different suits are represented by flowers. The playing cards were associated with gambling and unwanted Western cultural influence. By the late nineteenth century, Japan was reintroducing itself to the world, and the ban was finally lifted. So it was in the fall of 1889 that a young man opened a tiny wooden shop in Kyoto and hung a sign in the window: “Nintendo.”
The precise meaning of the Japanese characters is lost to history. They may have meant “leave luck to heaven,” but were more likely a poetic way to say “the company that is allowed to sell hanafuda.” By 1950, there were a hundred workers, and the founder’s twenty-two-year-old great-grandson took over. But trouble was coming. As the 1964 Tokyo Olympics approached, Japanese adults were turning to pachinko for gambling, and a bowling craze swallowed entertainment dollars. In a desperate attempt to diversify a company that had survived on hanafuda for three-quarters of a century, the young president began scattershot investing. Food would never go out of fashion, so he shifted the company to instant rice and meals branded with cartoon characters. (Popeye noodle soup, anyone?) Then there was the failed taxi fleet venture, and the failed rent-by-the-hour “love hotels,” which landed the president in the gossip pages. Nintendo sunk into debt. The president resolved to hire top young university graduates to help him innovate.
That was a nonstarter. Nintendo was a small operation in Kyoto; coveted Japanese students wanted big Tokyo companies. On the bright side, there was still the playing card business, which had become more cost-effective with machine-made cards. In 1965, the president settled for hiring a young local electronics graduate named Gunpei Yokoi, who had struggled through his degree and applied to major electronics manufacturers but gotten no offers. “What will you do at Nintendo?” Yokoi’s classmates asked him. He wasn’t worried. “I didn’t want to leave Kyoto anyway,” he said later. “I never had a specific dream for my work, and it was just fine.”* His job was to service the card-making machines. There were only a few, so Yokoi was the entire maintenance department.
He had long been an enthusiastic hobbyist: piano, ballroom dancing, choir, skin diving, model trains, working on cars, and most of all monozukuri—literally, “thing making.” He was a tinkerer. Before car stereos, he connected a tape recorder to his car radio so he could replay content later on. In his first few months at Nintendo, there was so little to do that he spent his time playing with company equipment. One day, he cut crisscrossing pieces of wood and fashioned a simple extendable arm, like the jack-in-the-box kind he had seen in cartoons when a robot’s belly opens up and a boxing glove fires out. He stuck a gripping tool on the outer end that closed when he squeezed handles to extend the arm. Now he could lazily retrieve distant objects.
The company president saw the new hire goofing around with his contraption and called him into his office. “I thought I would be scolded,” Yokoi recalled. Instead, the desperate executive told Yokoi to turn his device into a game. Yokoi added a group of colored balls that could be grabbed, and the “Ultra Hand” went to market immediately. It was Nintendo’s first toy, and it sold 1.2 million units. The company paid off a chunk of its debt. That was the end of Yokoi’s maintenance career. The president assigned him to start Nintendo’s first research and development department. The facility that briefly made instant rice was converted into a toy factory.
More toy success followed, but it was an abject failure that first year that profoundly influenced Yokoi. He helped create Drive Game, a tabletop unit where a player used a steering wheel to guide a plastic car along a racetrack, which scrolled beneath the car via electric motor. It was the first Nintendo toy that required electricity, and a complete flop. The internal mechanism was advanced for the time and ended up so complex and fragile that it was expensive and hard to produce, and units were riddled with defects. But the debacle was the seed of a creative philosophy Yokoi would hone for the next thirty years.
Yokoi was well aware of his engineering limitations. As one aficionado of game history put it, “He studied electronics at a time where the technology was evolving faster than the snow melts in sunlight.” Yokoi had no desire (or capability) to compete with electronics companies that were racing one another to invent some entirely new sliver of dazzling technology. Nor could Nintendo compete with Japan’s titans of traditional toys—Bandai, Epoch, and Takara—on their familiar turf. With that, and Drive Game, in mind, Yokoi embarked on an approach he called “lateral thinking with withered technology.” Lateral thinking is a term coined in the 1960s for the reimagining of information in new contexts, including the drawing together of seemingly disparate concepts or domains that can give old ideas new uses. By “withered technology,” Yokoi meant tech that was old enough to be extremely well understood and easily available, so it didn’t require a specialist’s knowledge. The heart of his philosophy was putting cheap, simple technology to use in ways no one else considered. If he could not think more deeply about new technologies, he decided, he would think more broadly about old ones. He intentionally retreated from the cutting edge, and set to monozukuri.
He connected a transistor to a cheap, store-bought galvanometer, and noticed he could measure the current flowing through his coworkers. Yokoi imagined a toy that would make it fun for boys and girls to hold hands, risqué at the time in Japan.* The Love Tester was nothing more than two conductive handles and a gauge. Players grasped a handle and joined hands, thereby completing the circuit. The gauge reported electrical current as if it were a measure of the love between participants. The sweatier their palms, the better a couple’s conductance. It was a hit among teenagers, and a party prop for adults. Yokoi was encouraged. He committed to using technology that had already become cheap, even obsolete, in new ways.
By the early 1970s, radio-controlled toy cars were popular, but good RC technology could cost a month’s salary, so it was a hobby reserved for adults. As he often did, Yokoi pondered a way to democratize RC toys. So he took the tech backward. Expense came from the need for multiple radio control channels. Cars started with two channels, one to control the engine output and one the steering wheel. The more functions a toy had, the more channels it required. Yokoi stripped the technology down to the absolute bare minimum, a single-channel RC car that could only turn left. Product name: Lefty RX. It was less than a tenth the cost of typical RC toys, and just fine for counterclockwise races. Even when it did have to navigate obstacles, kids easily learned how to left-turn their way out of trouble.
One day in 1977, while riding the bullet train back from a business trip in Tokyo, Yokoi awoke from a nap to see a salaryman playing with a calculator to relieve the boredom of his commute. The trend at the time was to make toys as impressively big as possible. What if, Yokoi wondered, there was a game small enough that an adult could play it discreetly while commuting? He sat on the idea for a while, until one day when he was drafted to be the company president’s chauffeur. The normal driver had the flu, and thanks to Yokoi’s interest in foreign vehicles, he was the only one of Nintendo’s hundred employees who had driven a car with the steering wheel on the left, like the president’s Cadillac. He floated his miniature game idea from the front seat. “He was nodding along,” Yokoi recalled, “but he didn’t seem all that interested.”