The Toy Company of the Future, Gunpei Yokoi

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Gunpei Yokoi was a tech on the playing card assembly line, maintaining the machines within Nintendo. Hiroshi Yamauchi plucks him off the assembly line and says, you are now the chief designer, the chief engineer for Nintendo. Gunpei would go on to design the Game Boy and the Virtual Boy. He would be the first boss and mentor of one Shigeru Miyamoto.

You may think you know the Nintendo story: a plumber named Mario, a princess named Zelda… and didn’t they buy the Seattle Mariners at some point? We thought we knew it too. And then we started researching and were blown away.

The lovable Disney-like Nintendo that we know today is a 130 year-old a playing card company (i.e. gambling), forged in the shadowy world of the Yakuza and shaped by a four-generation cycle of bitter family betrayal. And its unlikely transformation into a global multi-billion dollar media monopoly was led by an iron-fisted patriarch who — amazingly — never played a video game in his life! Get ready for one of our favorite stories Acquired has ever told — we couldn’t make this one up if we tried!

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