Episode Details

In 1979 Nintendo was carrying roughly 8 billion yen of debt when a company chauffeur called in sick, forcing toy designer Gunpei Yokoi to drive president Hiroshi Yamauchi to a meeting with the CEO of Sharp. The pitch he made from the driver's seat became the Game and Watch, and within a year of its April 1980 launch the line had wiped out that debt and built a 4 billion yen surplus. This deep dive profiles Yokoi's inventive mind and his philosophy of lateral thinking with withered technology.

We start with R&D1, which was really just Yokoi and assistant Satoru Okada, and the bored businessman on the Shinkansen mashing a calculator that inspired the idea. We explain why VFD screens drained batteries and why cheap, mass-produced calculator LCDs from the Sharp and Casio price war were the answer. Then we follow the rogue prototyping after R&D2 declared the device impossible: paper cutout shadow puppets, hand-coded machine code on a TK80 kit, a breadboard nest of wires, and the moment Sharp's skeptical engineers were simply told to play with it.

• Why the built-in clock and alarm gave adults a psychological alibi for carrying a game in public
• Ball, its brief life in North America as Toss-Up, and the titles that followed
• The 1982 clamshell multi-screen design that later inspired the Nintendo DS
• How porting Donkey Kong to a folding case with no room for a joystick forced the invention of the D-pad, later honored with a Technology and Engineering Emmy in 2008
• Over 43 million units sold, the road to the Famicom and Game Boy, and Mr. Game and Watch living on in Super Smash Bros