Gunpei Yokoi built the Game Boy out of technology everyone else had written off
Lateral thinking with withered technology was not an aphorism but an engineering policy. The monochrome Game Boy of 1989 outlived its colour rivals precisely because it was made of cheap, thoroughly understood parts.
Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 to maintain machinery on the line that printed hanafuda playing cards. The company was a card factory: it needed a machine engineer, not a toy designer. He built his first toy, the extending Ultra Hand, for himself out of boredom; president Hiroshi Yamauchi saw it and ordered it into production. It sold over a million.
What withered technology means
Yokoi's phrase — kareta gijutsu no suihei shikō, lateral thinking with withered technology — is usually translated as use cheap hardware. That is a simplification, and it loses the point.
Withered technology is not merely cheap. It is mature: mass produced, with yields solved, with patents expired, fully understood by the engineer. Lateral thinking is finding a use for it that the manufacturer never intended. That is how the Game & Watch of 1980 was assembled from the segmented LCD panels then being made for calculators and clocks. The D-pad comes from the same place, invented to fit controls into a flat box.
The Game Boy as a budget manoeuvre
The Game Boy launched on 21 April 1989 with a monochrome screen of four shades of green, at a moment when rivals were already demonstrating colour. The Atari Lynx, with a backlit colour display, arrived that autumn; the Sega Game Gear followed in 1990. Both machines were technically more interesting and both lost.
The reason is not asceticism but where the saved money went. A simple screen draws little power: the Game Boy ran on four AA cells for a claimed thirty hours, while the Lynx and the Game Gear ate six cells in a few. A simple screen costs little: the Game Boy sold for around ninety dollars against a hundred and eighty for the Lynx. And in the box went Tetris, a game an adult was not embarrassed to pull out on a train. A handheld lives on the move, and on the move what matters is price, battery weight and whether there is something to play right now.
Novelty does not come from the component. It comes from the combination. The component can be anything, as long as it is boring and reliable.
Same method, opposite result
The failure is just as instructive. The Virtual Boy of 1995 follows exactly the same recipe: instead of expensive LCD panels, red LED arrays and an oscillating mirror that sweeps a line into an image. The technology was genuinely withered and genuinely cheap. But the lateral half did not work: the image is red only, there is no head tracking, and you play with your face pressed into a stand. It sold under a million units and was discontinued in less than a year.
Yokoi left Nintendo in 1996 and died in a road accident on 4 October 1997, aged fifty-six. His method is quoted today as a justification for weak hardware, though the claim inside it is stronger and less comfortable: if your novelty lives only in the component, you have no novelty. The Game Boy proved it twice, once by succeeding and once by failing.
Source: en.wikipedia.org