Tiny Cartridge - Nintendo DS, DSi, & 3DS News, Media, Videos, Imports, Homebrew, & Retro Junk

Pix'n Love translating Gunpei Yokoi book →

Hurrah! French outfit Pix’n Love Publishing is translating its book on Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Game Boy, the directional pad, the Game & Watch, and many other Nintendo innovations. It’s titled Gunpei Yokoi: Life And Philosophy Of Nintendo’s ‘God Of Toys’.

I believe this is the same book as the inventor’s Yokoi Gunpei Game House autobiography (co-authored by Takefumi Makino, who is also credited as the writer on the Pix’n Love listing), but I could be wrong on that.

The book is slated to release in the first quarter of 2012 for £24.99 ($40). Pix’n Love also has two other English translation projects on the way early next year for The History of Nintendo - Vol.2 and The History of Mario.

Buy: Nintendo Magic

See also: More Gunpei Yokoi posts

[Thanks, Olivia! Image via moossye]

tags / gunpei yokoi / pixn love / book / gaming / imports / ec

/ permalink / / 3 months ago / Comments (View)

A young Gunpei Yokoi, looking like a straight-up ladies man with his Wonderbread pocket square.

Almost every photo you’ll find of the Game Boy creator will show him dressed for work and with a bit of gray in his hair, but this photo scanned from Pix’N Love’s French biography shows Yokoi as a young and cool fellow — one who hadn’t yet suffered the scorn of Nintendo’s former president Hiroshi Yamauchi after choosing the wrong kind of LCD displays for the company’s 8-bit handheld.

This looks more like the Yokoi briefly alluded to in Osamu Inoue’s book Nintendo Magic: “Yokoi had a reputation as something of a playboy — he’d done ballroom dance in college, played music, drove around in foreign cars, and spent his summers diving.”

Buy: Nintendo Magic

See also: More Gunpei Yokoi posts

[Via Mehdi_San]

tags / gunpei yokoi / pix n love / ec

/ permalink / / 1 year ago / Comments (View)

Toshio Iwai’s Sound Fantasy, demoed at the “Gunpei Yokoi: The Man Called the ‘God of Games’” exhibit. 1UP’s Ryan Winterhalter actually checked out the exhibit, and saw a roundtable presentation by Hip Tanaka, artist Daito Manabe, Yokoi biographer Takefumi Makino, and musician/designer/inventor Toshio Iwai.

Sound Fantasy was an unreleased SNES mouse game designed by Iwai and produced by Yokoi, consisting of four musical minigames:

There’s “Pix Quartet,” where four bugs wander around the screen and create music based on a player created environment; “Beat Hopper,” which features a grasshopper on a pogo stick jumping from platform to platform in a style very similar to Xbox Live Indie Game Artoon; “Ice Sweeper,” a Breakout clone; and “Star Fly,” a freeform music creator where players lay down stars in the sky rather than notes on a chart.

See also: More Gunpei Yokoi posts

[Via 1UP]

tags / gunpei yokoi / jc / toshio iwai / sound fantasy

/ permalink / / 1 year ago / Comments (View)

“You know, I wonder where Gunpei Yokoi is buried? I wonder if we should visit his grave?

I don’t know if that would be … not even tongue-in-cheek but an actually reverent visit to see wherever he may be resting.”

Chip musician Bit Shifter in a Reformat the Planet interview excerpt about Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi.

Today marks what would have been Yokoi’s 69th birthday. Though I’m not able to direct you to his headstone, you can remember a fraction of his immeasurable contributions to video games (especially those of the portable variety) at our previous posts about the legendary figure:

Buy: Reformat the Planet DVDs, Nintendo Magic

See also: Tiny Review: Nintendo Magic

tags / gunpei yokoi / ec

/ permalink / / 1 year ago / Comments (View)

Photos of the “Gunpei Yokoi: The Man called ‘God of Games’” exhibit, taken by Inside-Games. This exhibit, featuring playable (and, I’m sure, non-playable) items designed by Gunpei Yokoi, will be open at Harajuku’s “Vacant” venue until August 29.

In addition to looking at Virtual Boys, Ele-Congas, Wonderswans, and other items from the legendary engineer’s career, attendees also have the opportunity to buy used Game Boys, books, and reproduction Love Testers.

tags / gunpei yokoi / tokyo / vacant / jc

/ permalink / / 1 year ago / Comments (View)

Virtual Boy wasn’t Gunpei Yokoi’s downfall

With the Virtual Boy’s 15th anniversary for Japan having passed last week and its U.S. birthday coming up, I thought I’d take a moment to correct a long-held misconception about the maligned red and black console.

As if the system doesn’t already receive enough hate from gamers, you’ll find many online sources claiming as fact that the Virtual Boy’s failure compelled Nintendo to force the resignation of its creator, Gunpei Yokoi — also the father of the Game & Watch, the Game Boy, the WonderSwan, and several memorable NES franchises.

According to Nintendo Magic and Yoshihiro Taki, who worked under Yokoi at Nintendo and later served as president and CEO of WonderSwan developer Koto, that wasn’t the case at all:

/ permalink / / 1 year ago / Comments (View)

Japanese commercial for Nintendo’s Love Tester, one of the first products from Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi!

In case it’s not obvious how this device works, the Love Tester is designed to measure the degree of affection between a couple. Two partners hold hands, then each grab an electrode — the connected meter registers their relationship compatibility.

Yokoi’s explanation for why he played with electric currents and created the Love Tester is quite charming:

“I majored in electrical engineering. If I didn’t do something electronic, I’d look bad, but then anything too complicated was out of the question. I was just playing around with resistance measurements on a multimeter when I noticed there was some electrical current running through the human body.

The Love Tester came from me wondering if I could somehow use this to get girls to hold my hand. … I wound up holding hands with quite a few girls thanks to it. Of course, somewhere along the line I started to feel like I wanted to do more than just hold hands. [laughs]”

Yeah, Yokoi employed “lateral thinking of withered technology” even when he was trying to score with girls.

Buy: Nintendo Magic (where I found this excerpt)

[Via GoNintendo]

tags / love tester / imports / gunpei yokoi / nintendo magic / gunpei yokois game house / yokoi gunpei game kan / ec

/ permalink / / 1 year ago / Comments (View)

“No matter how amazing the image you display on a TV screen, nobody’s going to be surprised. But with sterescopic vision, you can show them something with depth, and they’ll discover something new nearly every day.”

Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi dropped this knowledge in the debut issue of Japanese magazine Jugemu in 1995. Obviously, he’s referring to the flawed Virtual Boy here, but this quote seemed appropriate to share on the eve of the Nintendo 3DS’s reveal.

Buy: Nintendo Magic (where I found this excerpt)

See also: Tiny Review: Nintendo Magic

tags / gunpei yokoi / virtual boy / jugemu / nintendo 3ds / nintendo magic / ec

/ permalink / / 1 year ago / Comments (View)

Game & Watch designs and notes. These pages appeared in a new roundtable sessionNintendo’s CEO and president Satoru Iwata held with some of the talent that worked on the Game & Watch releases (minus the handheld line’s inventor Gunpei Yokoi, R.I.P.).

Speaking of the Game Boy’s father, you should follow @gunpeiyokoifan on Twitter. The ~~guy~~ gal who runs it is a total Yokoi nut but in an adorable way. When she’s not talking about the Famicom dreams she seems to have every night, she’s defending the Virtual Boy and Yokoi’s honor from internet people portraying them in a negative light.

Buy (so you can play Game & Watch DSiWare games!): Nintendo DSi XL (Burgundy and Bronze), Standard Nintendo DSi (White, Pink, Black and Blue)

See also: Game & Watch eraser

tags / game and watch / iwata asks / gunpei yokoi / ec

/ permalink / / 1 year ago / Comments (View)

“If you can make pixel art, you can make a game.”

Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi speaking to Metroid series director Yoshio Sakamoto many years ago.

Sakamoto, of course, went on to help create WarioWare D.I.Y., one of the most fun and easiest game making tools available to kids and novice developers.

Game designer Anna “Auntie Pixelante” Anthropy, who talked about the DS title’s “heroic” effort in making game creation as unintimidating as possible, recently uploaded this video of microgames produced with WarioWare D.I.Y. I wish more indie developers would try out the tool suite and show off what they’ve made with it. I know Daisuke Amaya and 2D Boy’s Ron Carmel also posted their microgames, but I haven’t seen many others.

Anyway, Wired’s interview with Sakamoto has some other fun stories, like him using Yokoi as inspiration for the character design of Gumshoe’s jumping hero.

Buy: WarioWare: D.I.Y. ($33.99)

tags / warioware diy / yoshio sakamoto / gunpei yokoi

/ permalink / / 1 year ago / Comments (View)

Grill-Off With Ultrahand promo. It’s unusual that Nintendo would spend its advertising money on not only a WiiWare game, but one that is being marketed exclusively through Club Nintendo (guaranteeing that only lifelong Nintendo nerds will even be able to access it, while simultaneously guaranteeing that Nintendo will make literally zero dollars from its sales).

Gunpei Yokoi never dreamed that a toy he designed would become the basis for a motion-controlled game about cooking meat, which would then become the basis for three minutes of vaguely uncomfortable manufactured wackiness. How would he have?

See also: Gunpei Yokoi’s birthday

tags / club nintendo / grill-off with ultrahand / jc / gunpei yokoi

/ permalink / / 1 year ago / Comments (View)

The other holiday we missed this week

The other notable date we neglected to honor this week was late developer Gunpei Yokoi’s birthday, one of the most influential and talented names in the business, the best of the best, the D-pad don, the O.G. to this rap shit — all that. He would have turned 68 yesterday.

Without him, we would not have the Game Boy, nor a Tiny Cartridge. Rather than list his numerous accomplishments, I’ll share this video collecting Mr. Yokoi’s work:

The clip also provides a brief glimpse of the mysterious Groove Raider, who, despite not being a games industry powerhouse himself, has somehow managed to exchange handshakes with nearly every notable Nintendo figure. He’s like the company’s Cigarette Smoking Man — some even whisper that he was the architect behind Mr. Yokoi’s assassination in 1997*.

Anyway, pour out a little liquor for Gunpei Yokoi this weekend.

See also: Gunpeipercraft

*This is absolutely untrue.

tags / gunpei yokoi / groove raider / ec

/ permalink / / 2 years ago / Comments (View)

Tiny Cartridge Home / Archives / RSS Feed / Lizard / Contact

Congratulations! You have reached
the bottom of the page. The darkness
is finally over…

But there are still more pages to
explore. Please continue reading continue reading.
A new day is about to begin!

The End?