designer
Gunpei Yokoi
横井軍平
About
Gunpei Yokoi (1941–1997) was a game designer and hardware engineer at Nintendo's Research & Development 1 division. He created the Game & Watch handheld series (1980), designed the original Game Boy (1989) and the Virtual Boy (1995), and co-created the Metroid series. His guiding philosophy — "lateral thinking with withered technology" — held that mature, affordable technology applied creatively produces more enduring products than raw performance. He left Nintendo in 1996 and founded Koto Laboratory. He died in 1997 in a traffic accident.