"In video games," Game Boy designer Gunpei Yokoi once said, "there is always an easy way out if you don't have any good ideas."
The recent 25th anniversary of the original Game Boy's release has provided a perfect moment to celebrate the contribution of the sadly long-departed Yokoi to the world of video games, and it's also provided a perfect excuse to delve further into some of Yokoi's many brilliant ideas . Some of them are better known than others: there's the Ultra Hand, the toy tongs invented in the designer's downtime during his first job at Nintendo tending to the company's card manufacture machines, and a device whose success would lead president Hiroshi Yamauchi to give Yokoi his own R&D department. There's the Love Tester, an endearingly trashy toy created, Yokoi once said no doubt with an impudent sparkle in his eyes, to see if he could get more girls to hold his hand, and of course there's the Game & Watch, whose d-pad was at the vanguard of Nintendo's move into households across the world with the Famicom and NES.
But it's another slightly more obscure creation that I think sees Yokoi at his best. Developed at a time when remote-controlled cars were a high-budget object of real desire for the discerning child, the Lefty RX is, on looks alone, beautiful. The sleek body blends together the elongated, elegant lines of 70s Japanese automotive icons like the Nissan Fairlady Z and Toyota 2000GT, its squat plastic shell and rubber tires making it a joyously robust play-thing. Its master-stroke, though, is hinted at in the name: in order to keep costs low, and in order to make what was typically prohibitively expensive available to the masses, the parts were stripped back and simplified to the extent that the car could only ever turn left.
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