The amazing and then tragic story of Nintendo's ex General Manager

Nintendo is quite possibly the most famous name in gaming history. Sure there were other companies that got there first and if Atari had just dropped the arrogance and evolved with the times there is a good chance that they would have maintained a strangle-hold on the industry and still be a player today. However, when Nintendo released the NES there was no comparison between the two companies: Nintendo was awesome and Atari was lame. Atari continued to release garbage console after garbage console while Nintendo rode the wave of a fantastic system that didn't even need a newer counterpart of many years.

The Playstation is selling better and in more households than the Swtich, by a long shot, but Sony hasn't been in the game as long as Nintendo.

I'm not saying Nintendo is better, I'm saying they are more famous as far as the legacy of gaming is concerned and one person who ended up being the head honcho at Nintendo, has a very interesting story.

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His name is Gunpei Yokoi and like most high-ranking executives and big wig company heads he had a privileged upbringing as he went to fancy schools, knew important people, and had many doors opened for him because of his connections. I'm just kidding. He didn't have any of those things.

His initial job at Nintendo was that he was hired to clean toilets. That is, he was a janitor. He later would pick up some shifts on the assembly lines at Nintendo and in his spare time he would tinker with innovations to what the company was doing at the time (Nintendo is a 100 year old company, they didn't always make gaming consoles) and the people who were in charge took notice of his abilities.

He kept producing wonderful invention after wonderful invention some of the most noteworthy ones being Donkey Kong (which arguably is the game that got Nintendo fully interested in being exclusively a video game company) and also is the mind behind Metroid, which I think is one of the greatest home console innovations every made. However, the pinnacle of his accomplishments is one of the best selling video game products of all time and I would be willing to bet that most of you who are over 30 have owned one of them in your lifetime.

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That's right, a janitor with very little in the way of education is the brain behind what became the best selling video game console by FAR and try as their competitors may, no one has been able to come even close to the portable game system success that Game Boy has experienced. Sony PSP kinda came close when selling 80 million units but when you consider that the Game Boy "family" has sold 355 million units, it really isn't a close race at all.

Not everything he did struck oil of course, as he was also responsible for one of the greatest and only failures that Nintendo has ever released.

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The Virtual Boy was a disaster for Nintendo in its 1995 release and discontinuation just 1 year later and even though Yokoi denied that this was the reason behind his resignation from Nintendo, the timing is rather suspicious, dontcha think? He began working on other projects and abruptly leaves Nintendo after 30 years of working there. Even though the Virtual Boy was just a bad idea, I think we can successfully argue that almost everything else this janitor turned GM did was simply epic.

Unfortunately this story has a tragic end. Yokoi was involved in a minor car accident in 1997 and when he got out of his car to inspect the damage he was struck by another motorist and died from his injuries in a hospital later that day.

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As a video game nutjob in the 90's I was aware of this because I subscribed to basically all of the gaming magazines but it wasn't until after his death and doing some digging that I discovered his humble beginnings. I think that Nintendo kind of kept that under wraps either because of Yokoi's own desires to not be exposed as a janitor, or Nintendo's. It doesn't matter I guess. But this is just another one of those stories about how education doesn't necessarily make someone smart. Some people just have what it takes via interest, perseverance, and natural intelligence.

Add Gunpei Yokoi's name to the list, because he definitely deserves to be there.