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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.
Yokoi was the first to admit it. “I don’t have any particular specialist skills,” he once said. “I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.” He argued, “Everyone takes the approach of learning detailed, complex skills. If no one did this then there wouldn’t be people who shine as engineers. . . . Looking at me, from the engineer’s perspective, it’s like, ‘Look at this idiot,’ but once you’ve got a couple hit products under your belt, this word ‘idiot’ seems to slip away somewhere.”
He spread his philosophy as his team grew, and asked everyone to consider alternate uses for old technology. He realized that he had been fortunate to come to a playing card company rather than an established electronic toymaker with entrenched solutions, so his ideas were not thwarted because of his technical limitations. As the company grew, he worried that young engineers would be too concerned about looking stupid to share ideas for novel uses of old technology, so he began intentionally blurting out crazy ideas at meetings to set the tone. “Once a young person starts saying things like, ‘Well, it’s not really my place to say . . .’ then it’s all over,” he said.
Tragically, Yokoi died in a traffic accident in 1997. But his philosophy survived. In 2006, Nintendo’s president said that the Nintendo Wii was a direct outgrowth of Yokoi’s doctrine. “If I can speak without fear of being misunderstood,” the president explained, “I would like to say that Nintendo is not producing next-generation game consoles.” The Wii used extremely simple games and technology from a previous console, but motion-based controls were a literal game changer. Given its basic hardware, the Wii was criticized as not innovative. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen argued that it was actually the most important kind of innovation, an “empowering innovation”—one that creates both new customers and new jobs, like the rise of personal computers before it—because it brought video games to an entirely new (often older) audience. Nintendo “simply innovated in a different way,” Christensen and a colleague wrote. “It understood that the barrier to new consumers using video game systems was the complexity of game play, not the quality of existing graphics.” Queen Elizabeth II of England made headlines when she saw her grandson Prince William playing Wii Bowling and decided to get in on the action herself.
Yokoi’s greatest failure came when he departed from his own design tenets. One of his last Nintendo projects was the Virtual Boy, a gaming headset that employed experimental technology. It relied on a processor that produced high radio emissions, and before cell phones, no one knew if that was safe so close to a user’s head. A metal plate had to be constructed around the processor, which in turn made the unit too heavy to work as goggles. It was transformed into a device that sat on a table and required the user to assume an unnatural posture to see the screen. It was ahead of its time, but nobody bought it.
Yokoi’s greatest triumphs occurred when he thought laterally. He needed specialists, but his concern was that as companies grew and technology progressed, vertical-thinking hyperspecialists would continue to be valued but lateral-thinking generalists would not. “The shortcut [for a lack of ideas] is competition in the realm of computing power,” Yokoi explained. “When it comes to that . . . the screen manufacturers and expert graphics designers come out on top. Then Nintendo’s reason for existence disappears.” He felt that the lateral and vertical thinkers were best together, even in highly technical fields.
Eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson styled it this way: we need both focused frogs and visionary birds. “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon,” Dyson wrote in 2009. “They delight in concepts that unify our