Gunpei Yokoi

Gunpei Yokoi (横井 軍平 Yokoi Gunpei) was a designer and producer at Nintendo. Originally hired in 1965, long before Nintendo entered the game industry, Yokoi initially worked maintenance on the production line of the company's hanafuda cards. He later came to the attention of Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who tasked him with designing marketable toys. After Nintendo entered the video game market, Yokoi found success as the creator of the Game & Watch handheld series, followed by the Game Boy.

In addition to his hardware development, Yokoi also served in a producer role on numerous Nintendo titles developed throughout the 1980s and into the mid-1990s. Among these titles were the original Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, and Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War.

Due to the commercial failure of the Virtual Boy, Yokoi resigned from Nintendo in August of 1996, several months after the release of Genealogy of the Holy War. He subsequently founded Koto Laboratory, where he partnered with Bandai on the development of the WonderSwan gaming handheld. However, on October 4, 1997, Yokoi was killed by passing traffic on an expressway after exiting his car to survey the damage to a truck he had rear-ended.