In 1979 Nintendo was carrying roughly 8 billion yen of debt when a company chauffeur called in sick, forcing toy designer Gunpei Yokoi to drive president Hiroshi Yamauchi to a meeting with the CEO of Sharp. The pitch he made from the driver's seat became the Game and Watch, and within a year of its April 1980 launch the line had wiped out that debt and built a 4 billion yen surplus. This deep dive profiles Yokoi's inventive mind and his philosophy of lateral thinking with withered technology.

We start with R&D1, which was really just Yokoi and assistant Satoru Okada, and the bored businessman on the Shinkansen mashing a calculator that inspired the idea. We explain why VFD screens drained batteries and why cheap, mass-produced calculator LCDs from the Sharp and Casio price war were the answer. Then we follow the rogue prototyping after  ...