Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 as a maintenance worker fixing the machines that printed hanafuda playing cards. When president Hiroshi Yamauchi caught him tinkering with a scissor-mechanism grabber toy built from spare parts, he ordered it turned into a product. The Ultra Hand sold over a million units and turned a mechanic into Nintendo's first toy designer. This deep dive follows Yokoi from that factory floor to the Game and Watch, the Game Boy, and a design philosophy that still guides the company.

The hosts explain how watching a bored businessman tap a calculator on a bullet train inspired the Game and Watch, how Yokoi mentored a young Shigeru Miyamoto on Donkey Kong and convinced him to give Mario rubber-ball physics, and the meaning of lateral thinking with withered technology: using cheap, mature, reliable parts in unexpected  ...