Range - David Epstein Page 0,79
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.”
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