Gunpei Yokoi

Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 with an electronics degree and a job maintaining the assembly line that made playing cards. Nintendo then made cards and little else. One day in 1966 the president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, walked through the factory and saw Yokoi amusing himself with an extending wooden gripper he had made. He was told to turn it into a product for Christmas. The Ultra Hand sold more than a million and Yokoi was moved into toy design.

He built a light gun, a baseball pitching machine and a small remote-controlled vacuum cleaner. Watching a bored businessman on a bullet train tapping the keys of a calculator, he had the idea of a pocket-sized game that used the cheap liquid crystal displays flooding the market. Game & Watch came out in 1980, and for it he designed the cross-shaped directional pad found on nearly every controller since.

His guiding idea was lateral thinking with withered technology: take parts that are cheap and well understood and find a new use for them. The Game Boy of 1989 was that idea in a grey box. It had a monochrome screen when rivals had colour, and outsold all of them because it was cheap and its batteries lasted.

His Virtual Boy of 1995 failed badly. He left Nintendo in 1996 to start his own firm, and was killed a year later when he got out of a car after a minor collision and was struck by another vehicle.