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Gumpei Yokoi/Gameboy story on ICONS on G4TTV NOW!! WATCH!

GDGF

Soothsayer
Watch it. It kicks ass.

Commercial break. You missed 5 to 10 minutes. Watch the rest of it now! It's good. Informative. Has Steven Kent, Peer from IGN and others telling the story.

Edit: The show is over, now. This post contains a flux capacitor.
 

GDGF

Soothsayer
I wish everyone who posts in the millions of PSP vd NDS threads that we get around here could watch this. Perfect timing for them to air it.
 

Mashing

Member
Yup... if the PSP's battery life is indeed terrible... it's DOA. It won't take developer long to realize that either. Don't get me wrong though, I really do hope that the PSP does have good batter life with it's most processing demanding games... none of this variable battery life malarkey
 
Hah, this is my third time watching it is by far the only show besides the FF Icons that I have enjoyed from G4.

The best part is when the discuss the Lynx and how the developers laughed when they saw the GB demo. Good times.
 

GDGF

Soothsayer
I learned a little something too. Apparently (according to Jez San from Argonaut, who at the time was privy to such information) Nintendo had a much better (portable?) system than the Virtual Boy, but that system was scrapped to give Yokoi's vision the go ahead.

Speaking about Yokoi, sad story about that window seat and all. Left to his failure, and no one allowed to talk to him.

Anyway, great show! Wish I had recorded it or something.
 

AniHawk

Member
They were kinda off on some numbers. The NES sold 70 million, not 50 million. The GB line has also sold closer to 190 million, not 160 million.
 

Mashing

Member
I'd like to see a similar show to this on Sony's rise to power... I'm sure it goes back much further than the PSX and I'd like to see how it all got started... I love reading/seeing stuff about the origins of video games and video game companies.
 

AniHawk

Member
Mashing said:
I'd like to see a similar show to this on Sony's rise to power... I'm sure it goes back much further than the PSX and I'd like to see how it all got started... I love reading/seeing stuff about the origins of video games and video game companies.

It goes back to about 1989.
 
I know a guy who captures every episode of Icons and posts them to Usenet. Hopefully he grabbed this one, cause I really want to see it!

If I find it, I'll let you guys know where to grab it from.
 

Sagitario

Member
bobbyconover said:
I know a guy who captures every episode of Icons and posts them to Usenet. Hopefully he grabbed this one, cause I really want to see it!

If I find it, I'll let you guys know where to grab it from.

Yay! :D
 

GDJustin

stuck my tongue deep inside Atlus' cookies
Icons is a fantastic show, and the only thing on G4 I completely and truly enjoy.
 
bobbyconover said:
I know a guy who captures every episode of Icons and posts them to Usenet. Hopefully he grabbed this one, cause I really want to see it!

If I find it, I'll let you guys know where to grab it from.


Do that please.....
 

SD-Ness

Member
bobbyconover said:
I know a guy who captures every episode of Icons and posts them to Usenet. Hopefully he grabbed this one, cause I really want to see it!

If I find it, I'll let you guys know where to grab it from.
Usenet is an IRC channel, correct?
 

KarishBHR

Member
Damn, I dont wanna watch it after Ive missed 10 minutes. I guesse Ill wait for the next airing. Dont miss road to G-Phoria tonight at 8!
 

----

Banned
I watched it last night. I was pretty disappointed that they left out some of Yokoi's achievements like creating the light gun, working on Donkey Kong, inventing the d-pad and his involvement in other notable projects. They also painted the Virtual Boy as a totally stupid concept, when I feel it is going to be seen in retrospect as a revolutionary idea over the next decade. And no I never owned a Virtual Boy, but I do respect the genius of what Yokoi was striving for. Everything I'm seeing in the far corners of E3 each year convinces me that the Virtual Boy was our first glimpse into the next big step forward.

Overall this Icons was really good though. They even had stuff about the Nintendo DS and PSP, so it didn't feel like dated information at all. Any Icons where they talk about Yamauchi is a good one. I'm really glad I'm getting G4 now, thank god for this TechTV merger. :D

I love G4TV.com and Judgment Day too. Those are the 3 best shows on the new network.


Lost Weekend said:
I learned a little something too. Apparently (according to Jez San from Argonaut, who at the time was privy to such information) Nintendo had a much better (portable?) system than the Virtual Boy, but that system was scrapped to give Yokoi's vision the go ahead.
Yeah but you have to remember to factor in the fact that Jez San from Argonaut is a complete moron, so I wouldn't put much stock in what he has to say.
 
Will there be another showing of this?

And is there a good book about Gumpei Yokoi that I could pickup and read? i know a bit about him but I'm sure he's accomplished many more incredible things that I'm completely unaware of...From what I hear, he was a very charismatic individual.
 
For those of you familiar with newsgroups and downloading binaries, Icons s03e07 - Gameboy - has just been posted to alt.binaries.emulators.misc. Grab it while it's hot!

And no, Usenet isn't an IRC channel. :D
 

Vibri

Banned
---- said:
I watched it last night. I was pretty disappointed that they left out some of Yokoi's achievements like creating the light gun, working on Donkey Kong, inventing the d-pad and his involvement in other notable projects.



According to their website, it was an Icons show (probably tying in with the 15 year history of Gameboy) about the history of Gameboy though, not a history of Gunpei Yokoi's other achievements.

I'm actually happily surprised they gave so much air time to Yokoi himself and not Pokemon etc. The footage they had of Yokoi's Japanese son and widow at the end was pretty moving.
 

----

Banned
Vibri said:
According to their website, it was an Icons show (probably tying in with the 15 year history of Gameboy) about the history of Gameboy though, not a history of Gunpei Yokoi's other achievements.

I'm actually happily surprised they gave so much air time to Yokoi himself and not Pokemon etc. The footage they had of Yokoi's Japanese son and widow at the end was pretty moving.
I understand that, but they did go into some of his contributions that had nothing to do with Gameboy, like Metroid. I don't know how they could talk about Game & Watch and Gameboy and fail to mention that the guy invented the D-pad. That seems like a pretty big oversight to me. I doubt Yokoi is going to get his own Icons, so it's kind of sad for me that they left out some of his greatest achievements. They also had dopey Steven Kent on comparing the guy to the Shakespeare of the game industry, when what Yokoi should have been compared to is Albert Einstein. The entire technological side of the game industry is at a complete loss without Gunpei Yokoi. Everything we have seen since Yokoi's death has been simply evolutionary, slowly building on existing technologies. When Yokoi was alive we got revolutionary gaming advancements in very short periods of time. Yokoi was time after time able to produce incredibly creative hardware ideas that were based upon nothing anyone had ever seen before. And he was a damn good game creator too, Kid Icarus and Metroid being the prime examples. Those games were also the first games to use a save feature through passwords.

Even the Virtual Boy as much as they railed it on this Icons featured the first controller to have dual controls. It had 2 d-pads, now every controller since Virtual Boy has come to adopt 2 analog sticks as it's control method. And the visual principles of Virtual Boy, there is no doubt in my mind that that is the future of video games. Spatial 3D graphics is the next big revolution after 3D. I've seen bits and pieces of it at E3 each year and it's not like the cheesy stuff we know from the past. In the next 10 to 20 years it's going to take over.
 

Vibri

Banned
---- said:
I understand that, but they did go into some of his contributions that had nothing to do with Gameboy, like Metroid. I don't know how they could talk about Game & Watch and Gameboy and fail to mention that the guy invented the D-pad. That seems like a pretty big oversight to me. I doubt Yokoi is going to get his own Icons, so it's kind of sad for me that they left out some of his greatest achievements. They also had dopey Steven Kent on comparing the guy to the Shakespeare of the game industry, when what Yokoi should have been compared to is Albert Einstein. The entire technological side of the game industry is at a complete loss without Gunpei Yokoi. Everything we have seen since Yokoi's death has been simply evolutionary, slowly building on existing technologies. When Yokoi was alive we got revolutionary gaming advancements in very short periods of time. Yokoi was time after time able to produce incredibly creative hardware ideas that were based upon nothing anyone had ever seen before. And he was a damn good game creator too, Kid Icarus and Metroid being the prime examples. Those games were also the first games to use a save feature through passwords.

Even the Virtual Boy as much as they railed it on this Icons featured the first controller to have dual controls. It had 2 d-pads, now every controller since Virtual Boy has come to adopt 2 analog sticks as it's control method. And the visual principles of Virtual Boy, there is no doubt in my mind that that is the future of video games. Spatial 3D graphics is the next big revolution after 3D. I've seen bits and pieces of it at E3 each year and it's not like the cheesy stuff we know from the past. In the next 10 to 20 years it's going to take over.


I agree with this, good points. However on the Virtua Boy point, watching the show it seemed that they didn't rail on the VB so much as they just pointed out its failure more as a story device to explain why Yokoi eventually left Nintendo to start his own company.
 

----

Banned
Vibri said:
I agree with this, good points. However on the Virtua Boy point, watching the show it seemed that they didn't rail on the VB so much as they just pointed out its failure more as a story device to explain why Yokoi eventually left Nintendo to start his own company.
They had several interviews from people in the industry where each one was making fun of how ridiculous the Virtual Boy was. Several people on Icons made fun of the device quite extensively. Obviously the exectution of the concept behind VB was absurd, but the concept itself was not nearly as silly as they made it out to be. The idea that we're going to seek to move interactive entertainment beyond the flat plane that it exists on now is an exceedingly profound and bold concept. Most gamers today still think it was just a dumb gimmicky idea that we got over, most gamers are wrong.
 
I watched it last night. I was pretty disappointed that they left out some of Yokoi's achievements like creating the light gun, working on Donkey Kong, inventing the d-pad and his involvement in other notable projects.

Well, the topic of the show is the GameBoy, not Gumpei Yokoi himself. Anything else he did other than GameBoy is really irrelevant. I think the topic starter just put his name in to draw traffic and get the Nintendo drones creaming.
 

----

Banned
Alex Anderson said:
Well, the topic of the show is the GameBoy, not Gumpei Yokoi himself. Anything else he did other than GameBoy is really irrelevant. I think the topic starter just put his name in to draw traffic and get the Nintendo drones creaming.
The show was mainly about Gunpei Yokoi's career at Nintendo, which is impossible to not talk about if you are talking about the history of Gameboy.
 

GigaDrive

Banned
hmmm.... maybe if Nintendo didn't give Gumpei a "window seat" when Virtua Boy bombed, he wouldn't have left Nintendo, and therefore, he wouldn't be..... :(


Nintendo was not very good to poor Gumpei. he made one mistake.



omg Nintendo is horrible!
 

AniHawk

Member
---- said:
They had several interviews from people in the industry where each one was making fun of how ridiculous the Virtual Boy was. Several people on Icons made fun of the device quite extensively. Obviously the exectution of the concept behind VB was absurd, but the concept itself was not nearly as silly as they made it out to be. The idea that we're going to seek to move interactive entertainment beyond the flat plane that it exists on now is an exceedingly profound and bold concept. Most gamers today still think it was just a dumb gimmicky idea that we got over, most gamers are wrong.

If Nintendo waited for about 5-10 years, maybe there'd be actual color and such for a nice price. At the time, Gunpei could have included color, but the device would have cost hundreds of dollars ($500 I think was the number).
 

AniHawk

Member
RiZ III said:
Could someone explain what happened after the VB and what nintendo did?

Since it was a failure, Nintendo made Gunpei basically stick with the failed system as punishment. At E3, he manned the VB section of the booth by himself. That led him to go start a new company, which would form with Bandai to create the Wonderswan. He also was not allowed to work on the N64 like Shigeru (his "apprentice") or any other bigshots.
 

RiZ III

Member
wow. rough. He was hit by a truck or something wasn't he? Poor guy. After all he contributed to Nintendo they were so harsh to him just because of one failure. :(
 

AniHawk

Member
RiZ III said:
wow. rough. He was hit by a truck or something wasn't he? Poor guy. After all he contributed to Nintendo they were so harsh to him just because of one failure. :(

Yeah, well... Yamauchi was a brutal person. I really don't understand why people miss him. He was a genius during the 80s, but around 1996, he had completely lost it.
 
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