A week later, Yokoi received a surprise visit from executives at Sharp, a calculator manufacturer. At the meeting Yokoi had driven him to, the Nintendo president sat next to the head of Sharp, and relayed his chauffeur’s idea. For several years, Sharp had been engaged in calculator wars with Casio. In the early 1970s a calculator cost a few hundred dollars, but as components got cheaper and companies raced for market share, cost plummeted and the market saturated. Sharp was eager to find a new use for its LCD screens.
When Sharp executives heard Yokoi’s idea for a video game the size of a business card holder, and that could be held in the lap and played with thumbs, they were intrigued, and skeptical. Was it worth mobilizing a new partnership just to reuse technology that had become dirt cheap? They weren’t convinced it was even possible to make a display smooth enough for the game Yokoi proposed, which involved a juggler whose arms move left and right, trying not to drop balls as they speed up. Nonetheless, the Sharp engineers made Yokoi an LCD screen in the appropriate size. Then he hit a severe problem. The electronics in the tiny game were packed in such a thin space that the liquid crystal display element touched a plate in the screen, which created a visual distortion of light and dark bands, known as Newton’s rings. Yokoi needed a sliver of space between the LCD and the plate. He took an idea from the credit card industry. With a slight tweak of the old hanafuda printing machines, he delicately embossed the screen with hundreds of dots to keep the plate and the display element narrowly separated. As a final flourish, with just a few hours of work, a colleague helped him program a clock into the display. LCD screens were already in wristwatches, and they figured it would give adults an excuse to buy their “Game & Watch.”
In 1980, Nintendo released its first three Game & Watch models, with high hopes for one hundred thousand sales. Six hundred thousand copies sold in the first year. Nintendo could not keep up with international demand. The Donkey Kong Game & Watch was released in 1982 and alone sold eight million units. Game & Watch remained in production for eleven years and sold 43.4 million units. It also happened to include another Yokoi invention that would be used laterally: the directional pad, or “D-pad,” which allowed a player to move their character in any direction using just a thumb. After the success of the Game & Watch, Nintendo put the D-pad in controllers on its new Nintendo Entertainment System. That home console brought arcade games into millions of homes around the world, and launched a new era of gaming. The combination of successes—the Game & Watch and the NES—also led to Yokoi’s lateral-thinking magnum opus, a handheld console that played any game a developer could put on a cartridge: the Game Boy.
From a technological standpoint, even in 1989, the Game Boy was laughable. Yokoi’s team cut every corner. The Game Boy’s processor had been cutting edge—in the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, home consoles were in fierce competition over graphics quality. The Game Boy was an eyesore. It featured a total of four grayscale shades, displayed on a tiny screen that was tinted a greenish hue somewhere between mucus and old alfalfa. Graphics in fast lateral motion smeared across the screen. To top it off, the Game Boy had to compete with handheld consoles from Sega and Atari that were technologically superior in every way. And it destroyed them.
What its withered technology lacked, the Game Boy made up in user experience. It was cheap. It could fit in a large pocket. It was all but indestructible. If a drop cracked the screen—and it had to be a horrific drop—it kept on ticking. If it were left in a backpack that went in the washing machine, once it dried out it was ready to roll a few days later. Unlike its power-guzzling color competitors, it played for days (or weeks) on AA batteries. Old hardware was extremely familiar to developers inside and outside Nintendo, and with their creativity and speed unencumbered by learning new technology, they pumped out games as if they were early ancestors of iPhone app designers—Tetris, Super Mario Land, The Final Fantasy Legend, and a slew of sports games released in the first year were all smash hits. With simple technology, Yokoi’s team sidestepped the hardware arms race and drew the game programming community onto its team.
The Game Boy became the Sony Walkman of video gaming, forgoing top-of-the-line tech for portability and affordability. It sold 118.7 million units, far and away the bestselling console of the twentieth century. Not bad for the little company that was allowed to sell hanafuda.
* * *
• • •
Even though he was revered by then, Yokoi had to push and shove internally for his “lateral thinking with withered technology” concept to be approved for the Game Boy. “It was difficult to get Nintendo to understand,” he said later. Yokoi was convinced, though, that if users were drawn into the games, technological power would be an afterthought. “If you draw two circles on a blackboard, and say, ‘That’s a snowman,’ everyone who sees it will sense the white color of the snow,” he argued.
When the Game Boy was released, Yokoi’s colleague came to him “with a grim expression on his face,” Yokoi recalled, and reported that a competitor handheld had hit the market. Yokoi asked him if it had a color screen. The man said that it did. “Then we’re fine,” Yokoi replied.
Yokoi’s strategy of finding novel uses for technology, after others had moved on, smacks of exactly what a well-known psychological creativity exercise asks for. In the Unusual (or Alternative) Uses Task, test takers have to come up with original uses for an object. Given the prompt “brick,” a test taker will generate familiar uses first (part of a wall, a doorstop, a weapon). To score higher, they have to generate uses that are conceptually distant and rarely given by other test takers, but still feasible. For the brick: a paperweight; a nutcracker; a theatrical coffin at a doll’s funeral; a water displacement device dropped in a toilet tank to use less per flush. (In 2015, Ad Age awarded “Pro Bono Campaign of the Year” to the cheeky lateral thinkers of the “Drop-A-Brick” project, which manufactured rubber bricks for use in California toilets during a drought.)
There is, to be sure, no comprehensive theory of creativity. But there is a well-documented tendency people have to consider only familiar uses for objects, an instinct known as functional fixedness. The most famous example is the “candle problem,” in which participants are given a candle, a box of tacks, and a book of matches and told to attach the candle to the wall such that wax doesn’t drip on the table below. Solvers try to melt the candle to the wall or tack it up somehow, neither of which work. When the problem is presented with the tacks outside of their box, solvers are more likely to view the empty box as a potential candle holder, and to solve the problem by tacking it to the wall and placing the candle inside. For Yokoi, the tacks were always outside the box.
Unquestionably, Yokoi needed narrow specialists. The first true electrical engineer Nintendo hired was Satoru Okada, who said bluntly, “Electronics was not Yokoi’s strong point.” Okada was Yokoi’s codesigner on the Game & Watch and Game Boy. “I handled more of the internal systems of the machine,” he recalled, “with Yokoi handling more of the design and interface aspects.” Okada was the Steve Wozniak to Yokoi’s Steve Jobs.