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, sometimes transliterated Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese video game designer. He was a long-time Nintendo employee, best known as creator of the Game Boy and Game & Watch handheld systems, inventor of the modern-day D-pad or 'cross' pad (a design that nearly all video game controllers use today), and producer of a few long-running and critically acclaimed video game franchises. ==Career== Yokoi graduated from Doshisha University with a degree in electronics. He was first hired by Nintendo in 1965 to maintain the assembly-line machines used to manufacture its Hanafuda cards. In 1966, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo at the time, came to a hanafuda factory Yokoi was working at and took notice of a toy, an extending arm, that Yokoi made for his own amusement during spare time as the company's machine maintenance man. Yamauchi ordered Yokoi to develop it as a proper product for the Christmas rush. The Ultra Hand was a huge success, and Yokoi was asked to work on other Nintendo toys including the Ten Billion Barrel puzzle, a miniature remote-controlled vacuum cleaner called the Chiritory, a baseball throwing machine called the Ultra Machine, and a "Love Tester." He worked on toys until the company decided to make video games in 1974, when he became one of its first game designers, only preceded by Genyo Takeda. While traveling on the Shinkansen, Yokoi saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. Yokoi then got the idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature video gaming pastime, and went on to create Game & Watch, a line of handheld electronic games. In , Yamauchi appointed Yokoi to supervise ''Donkey Kong'', an arcade game created by Shigeru Miyamoto.〔Kent 158.〕 Yokoi explained many of the intricacies of game design to Miyamoto at the beginning of his career, and the project only came to be approved after Yokoi brought Miyamoto's game ideas to the president's attention. After the worldwide success of ''Donkey Kong'', Yokoi continued to work with Miyamoto on the next ''Mario'' game, ''Mario Bros.''〔 He proposed the multiplayer concept and convinced his co-worker to give Mario some superhuman abilities, such as the ability to jump unharmed from great heights.〔 After ''Mario Bros.'', Yokoi produced several R&D1 games, such as ''Kid Icarus'' and ''Metroid''. He designed R.O.B. and the Game Boy, the latter of which became a worldwide success. Another of his creations, the Virtual Boy, was a commercial failure, but was not the reason for his subsequent departure from Nintendo. According to his colleague Yoshihiro Taki, "Yokoi had originally decided to retire at 50 to do as he pleased. His retirement had simply been a bit later than planned." According to David Sheff's book ''Game Over'', Yokoi never actually intended for the console to be released in its present form. However, Nintendo pushed the Virtual Boy to market so that it could focus development resources on the Nintendo 64.〔''Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children'' by David Sheff, 1993, Random House.〕 Amid the failure of the Virtual Boy, Yokoi left Nintendo on August 15, 1996 after thirty-one years at the company. However, he did not leave before completing the more successful Game Boy Pocket as a going-away present in July of that year. Leaving with several of his subordinates to form a new company called Koto, Yokoi led the development of the Bandai WonderSwan handheld gaming machine.〔''Geemu no Chichi, Yokoi Gunpei Den: Nintendo no DNA wo Souzou Shita Otoko'' by Takefumi Makino, 2010, Kadokawa Shoten.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gunpei Yokoi」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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