The Silence Inside a Game Boy

The Silence Inside a Game Boy

The Game Boy Pocket went on sale in Japan in July 1996. On 15 August that year, Gunpei Yokoi, the man behind the Game Boy, left Nintendo after more than thirty years at the company.

Open a Game Boy and there is nothing inside that spins: no fan, no drive, only the board, the buttons and a small speaker. Yokoi's way of working had a name, "lateral thinking with withered technology": take technology that is already mature and cheap, and find a new use for it.

A newspaper at the time said he had quit to take responsibility for the failure of the Virtual Boy. He denied it in his own words: "I did not resign to 'take responsibility for the Virtual Boy's failure.'" His reason was older than that: "Since before that, I was thinking that when I turned 55, I wanted to become independent." He started his own company, Koto, and began work on a new handheld for Bandai, the WonderSwan.

He did not see it reach the shops. On 4 October 1997, Yokoi died in a traffic accident. He was 56. The WonderSwan came out in 1999.

I don't repair these machines myself. A friend of mine, a certified engineer, does that work. The man who made the Game Boy has been gone for almost thirty years, and the machines his team made are still passing from one owner to the next, some of them through our shop.