Hot Take: Furukawa Is FAR Superior To Iwata (in his leadership of Nintendo)

[Soundwave]

firebush03 said:

Soundwave said:

I mean Super NES after NES I'm sure was fairly successful. 

Yokoi is overrated big time. Most of what the Game Boy was isn't even attributable to him, he wanted to make some weird disposal toy type thing like Game & Watch for the Game Boy, not the interchangeable portable game machine that it became, he had to be yelled at and embarrassed to finally renege. The Virtual Boy was quirky and all, but honestly terrible, lol. 

Yamauchi's big, big mistake was opting to agree with cartridges over CDs, but I think he was pressured into that decision by designers like Miyamoto. 

You do realize that without Yokoi, there would have never been a GameBoy, no? In the initial manufacturing of GB product, there was an error which made the screens appear much too dark to see anything. Yamauchi, already skeptical on the weak specs of the system, reportedly responded by demanding that the GameBoy be scrapped. But Yokoi fought and eventually got his way. GameBoy was his brain child, as was Game & Watch and marketing NES as a FamiCom.

Incorrect.

Satoru Ikada (who gets no credit) is actually more accurate the "father of the Game Boy". Yokoi's wanted to make a successor to Game & Watch and not a portable NES/Famicom like device with interchangable cartridges and 3rd party games, what Yokoi wanted to make would've been much cheaper and more disposable. He had to be yelled at by Ikada to finally give up control over the project and from then on Ikada basically made what is the Game Boy. Yokoi's main contribution really seems be in the end to give the Game Boy a crappier quality screen (whoop de doo). At 10:54 into this video:

Most people don't understand Yokoi didn't want cartridge games at all, it was basically supposed to be a Game & Watch, but you could replace the cheap screen overlay for games. It was meant to be basically a very simple, disposable thing that could play like basic Game & Watch style titles like a Ice Hockey or Donkey Kong most likely but nothing past that complexity and was meant to be replaced after a few years. The Game Boy would have sucked if he had got his way.

Last edited by Soundwave - on 22 May 2026