Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (81 page)

Location:
South Pacific, between Hawaii and the Cook Islands

Size:
Less than two square miles

Population:
Uninhabited

Background:
Discovered by the British in 1821; claimed by the American Guano Company in 1858; abandoned in 1879; annexed by Britain in 1889; abandoned soon after. Reclaimed by the United States in 1935. The island is currently a National Wildlife Refuge; a small group of buildings are occasionally occupied by scientists and weather researchers.

Location:
North Pacific Ocean, 1,000 miles south of Hawaii

Size:
Four and a half square miles

Population:
Uninhabited

Background:
This group of 54 islets is known for its lush natural beauty and biological diversity.

The first to land on the atoll were sailors from the American ship
Palmyra,
which was blown ashore during a storm in 1852. Though the American Guano Company claimed it, guano was never mined there. In 1862 King Kamehameha IV of Hawaii took possession of the atoll, which is actually a part of the Hawaiian archipelago. The United States included it when it annexed Hawaii in 1898, but when Hawaii became a state in 1959, Palmyra was excluded.

The 1974 murder of a yachting couple on Palmyra became the subject of a 1991 novel by Vincent Bugliosi (and a subsequent TV movie) entitled
And the Sea Will Tell
. Today the atoll is privately owned by the Nature Conservancy, which is managing it as a nature preserve.

You've probably never heard of Gumpei Yokoi, but if you've ever played a Game Boy, a Color Game Boy, Donkey Kong, or just about any other Nintendo product made between 1970 and 1996, you have him to thank for it. Here's his story.

In the mid-1960s, an electronics student named Gumpei Yokoi graduated from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and got a job as a maintenance engineer with the Nintendo company, a manufacturer of playing cards.

Keeping the playing card printing machines in good working order must have been boring work, because Yokoi started passing the time building toys—with company materials, using company machines and equipment, on company time.

That didn't exactly fit into his job description, so when Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, found out what he was up to and called him into his office, Yokoi figured that he'd soon be looking for a new job.

Not quite—Nintendo was making so much money selling children's playing cards that it had decided to create an entire games division. Yamauchi transferred Yokoi to the new division, and told him to come up with a game that Nintendo could manufacture in time to sell for Christmas.

Yokoi went home and got one of the toys he'd already made: an extendable grabbing “hand” that he made out of crisscrossing pieces of wooden latticework. When you squeezed its handles together like a pair of scissors, the latticework extended and the hand closed its grip.

Yamauchi was impressed, and production on the Ultra Hand, as they named it, began right away. The company ended up selling more than 1.2 million of the hands at a price of about $6 apiece—the games division's first toy was also its first big hit.

Yokoi's team followed with a series of other toys, including the Ultra Machine (an indoor pitching machine), the Ultra Scope (a
periscope), and a “Love Tester” that supposedly measured how much love existed between a boy and a girl. All the Love Tester really did was give people an excuse to hold hands, but that was enough—it was a huge success too. So was the Beam Gun, a gun that shot beams of light at optical targets.

Nintendo spent a fortune converting old bowling alleys and shooting galleries into Beam Gun shooting galleries…and nearly went bankrupt. But it recovered after Yamauchi noticed how much money Atari, Magnavox, and other companies were making in the video game business. He licensed their technology and came out with Color TV Game 6, the company's first video game.

As video games were becoming more successful, Yamauchi started pressing Yokoi for a competing product. So the design team came up with the Game & Watch, a series of dozens and eventually hundreds of pocket-sized video games that also displayed the time at the top of the screen.

The games used simple calculator technology—LCD screens and tiny buttons that served as game controllers—and they weren't much bigger than credit cards. Kids could play them anywhere: in cars, at school during recess, or in their rooms before bedtime. Nintendo ended up selling more than 40 million of the devices all over the world between 1980 and 1989.

As we told you on page 415, Nintendo introduced the Famicom (short for Family Computer)—its first cartridge-based videogame system—in 1983 and then released it in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985. The system established the company as the dominant world player in the video game business. By 1988, however, the NES was getting a little old and Nintendo's rival Sega was preparing to launch a new system called the Mega Drive. Nintendo's new Super NES system was still in the works, so the company needed a product that would generate revenue and keep fans of the company's products occupied until Super NES was ready.

Lucky for Nintendo, Yokoi had one. Called the Game Boy, it sought to combine the best that the Game & Watch series and
the NES had to offer. The Game Boy was portable, about the size of a transistor radio, and it was a cartridge-based system like the NES. With the Game & Watch series, anytime you wanted to play a new game, you had to buy a whole new Game & Watch. With a Game Boy, all you had to do was buy a new cartridge. Better yet, Game Boys could be linked together so that two players could compete against each other.

The Game Boy wasn't exactly state of the art. It didn't have a color screen or a backlight, because those drained the batteries too quickly and added too much to the cost. You couldn't play it in the dark. The screen was so crude, in fact, that when Atari's engineers saw it for the first time, they laughed. Over at Sony, the response was different. “This Game Boy should have been a Sony product,” one executive complained.

The Game Boy went on to become hugely successful, thanks in large part to the fact that the game appealed to adults in a way that the NES didn't. The original Game Boy was packaged with Tetris, an adult-friendly, maddeningly addictive game in which the player has to maneuver and interlock blocks that fall from the top of the screen. Game Boys became a fixture on subways, on airplanes, in company lunchrooms, any place adults had a few free moments. When President George H. W. Bush went into the hospital in May 1991, the leader of the free world was photographed playing a Game Boy. Kids liked to play Game Boys too…whenever they could pry them away from their parents.

Yokoi led the effort to keep the Game Boy product line fresh and profitable over the years. In 1994 his design team came up with an accessory that allowed Game Boy cartridges to be played on the Super NES system. That was followed by the Game Boy Pocket and the first Pokémon (short for Pocket Monsters) cartridge in 1996.

Pokémon was the first game that allowed players to exchange items from one linked Game Boy to another, and though Nintendo's expectations for the game weren't particularly high, the game became an enormous industry unto itself, spawning other toys, trading cards, clothing, an animated TV series, a movie, and even
food. It's estimated that Pokémon merchandise has racked up more than $20 billion worth of sales for Nintendo since 1996,
not including
the video games. As for the Game Boy product line (which saw the addition of the Game Boy Color in 1998), by 2001 it had sold more than 115 million units and 450 million cartridges, making it the most popular game system of all time.

Needless to say, Yokoi made Nintendo a lot of money over the years. What did he have to show for it? Not much—in 1995 his Virtual Boy, an addition to the Game Boy line that was kind of like a 3D View-Master—bombed. The red LED display gave so many players headaches and dizziness that when the product was released in the United States it came with a warning label. One reviewer called it a “Virtual Dog.”

Nintendo lost a lot of money on the Virtual Boy, and Yamauchi apparently decided to humiliate Yokoi publicly by making him demonstrate the game system at the company's annual Shoshinkai trade show, even though it was all but dead. “This was his punishment, the Japanese corporate version of Dante's Inferno,” Steven Kent writes in
The Ultimate History of Video Games.
“When employees make high-profile mistakes in Japan, it is not unusual for their superiors to make an example out of them for a period of time, then return them to their former stature.”

Yokoi must have decided not to wait around for his restoration. He left the company in August 1996 after more than 27 years on the job, and founded his own handheld game company called Koto (Japanese for “small town”). It produced a game system similar to the Game Boy, only with a bigger screen and better speakers. We'll never know what kind of gains he might have made against the Game Boy, because on October 4, 1997, he was killed in a car accident. He was 56.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

—Yogi Berra

 

EXTENDED
SITTING
SECTION

A Special Section of Longer Pieces

Over the years, we've had
numerous requests from BRI members
to include a batch of long articles—
for those leg-numbing experiences.
Well, the BRI aims to please…
So here's another great way
to pass the uh…time.

Mark Twain is one of Uncle John's heroes—a humorist whose writing is still funny a hundred years after his death. We found this in
Mark Twain's Library of Humor
from 1888. It's a chapter from his novel
A Tramp Abroad.

We were in bed by ten, for we wanted to be up and away on our tramp homeward with the dawn. I hung fire, but Harris went to sleep at once. I hate a man who goes to sleep at once; there is a sort of indefinable something about it which is not exactly an insult, and yet is an insolence; and one which is hard to bear, too. I lay there fretting over this injury, and trying to go to sleep; but the harder I tried, the wider awake I grew. I got to feeling very lonely in the dark, with no company but an undigested dinner. My mind got a start, by and by, and began to consider the beginning of every subject which has ever been thought of; but it never went further than the beginning; it was touch and go; it fled from topic to topic with a frantic speed. At the end of an hour my head was in a perfect whirl and I was dead tired, fagged out.

The fatigue was so great that it presently began to make some head against the nervous excitement; while imagining myself wide awake, I would really doze into momentary unconsciousnesses, and come suddenly out of them with a physical jerk which nearly wrenched my joints apart—the delusion of the instant being that I was tumbling backwards over a precipice. After I had fallen over eight or nine precipices, and thus found out that one half of my brain had been asleep eight or nine times without the wide-awake, hard-working other half suspecting it, the periodical unconsciousnesses began to extend their spell gradually over more of my brain-territory, and at last I sank into a drowse which grew deeper and deeper, and was doubtless on the very point of becoming a solid, blessed, dreaming stupor, when—what was that?

My dulled faculties dragged themselves partly back to life and took a receptive attitude. Now out of an immense, limitless distance, came something which grew and grew, and approached, and
presently was recognizable as a sound—it had rather seemed to be a feeling, before. This sound was a mile away, now—perhaps it was the murmur of a storm; and now it was nearer—not a quarter of a mile away; was it the muffled rasping and grinding of distant machinery? No, it came still nearer; was it the measured tramp of a marching troop? But it came nearer still, and still nearer—and at last it was right in the room: it was merely a mouse gnawing the woodwork. So I had held my breath all that time for such a trifle!