The Nintendo switch to is finally out.

Came out last week.

The moment has arrived.

My switch to is here.

It's been eight long years.

Well, folks, it is currently one six in the morning, and I just got home from the Best By midnight launch for the Nintendo Switch Too.

And here is a close up look at those new magnetic joy cons.

It's bigger, it's more rigid, it feels more premium.

The buttons are bigger.

Speaking of bigger, the doc got a little redesigned not earlier.

Did I manage to pick up the Nintendo switch too, But I also got as many accessories as humanly possible, and.

I've got the freaking switch to.

Are you ready to dive in?

Let me know the comment saw below how freaking cool this is.

I do not have one yet, but I thought maybe now it was a good time to talk about the people who made the switch to Nintendo, because they're kind of a weird company.

So I was invited to a event in New York for media to come play the switch to early.

And I walk in and as I'm approaching, there are just two long lines of Nintendo employees like awaiting me and like the seven people who are like walking through and they all just start clapping and hooting and hollering like yeah, you get to play Switch, dude, And I'm like ah, and I walked through.

Wait, hold on, there's seven of you, and how many of the.

Employees triple that?

Like like like wives, way more than that.

Petrick Clippik and I used to work together Vice back in the day.

He now runs a podcast at Remap Radio with some other VICE friends, and he also writes a substack called cross Play about playing video games with kids.

He got to play the Switch too early and later on we'll get his thoughts about it.

Work got weird was there was sort of like a media space and I would go over there kind of collect my thoughts.

What else do I need to go do?

I was like, all right, I'm gonna go back because I didn't play this and and play that.

And I walk in again and those same people are there waiting, like who's ready to play Switch too?

And I'm like I was, I was just I was just here, Like I was just here, and then happen to be three times over the course of the like six hours.

So it's a little it was a little culty, but it was very funny.

So this episode isn't really about the as Patrick put it, the slightly culty part of Nintendo's culture, which does exist.

But Nintendo is a unique video game company for another reason.

I think what's fascint about Nintendo is that they have survived as long as they have.

You know, my Microsoft is a relative newcomer.

Sega came into the hardware business and last the hardware business.

The thing about Nintendo is that their kind of conservative nature has allowed them to survive big ups and big downs.

Like they were making games that cost less required fewer people in an industry in which games are becoming more expensive to make, requiring more people.

I think it's a corporate culture that goes back to the origins of the company at the executive level.

A lot of people compare Nintendo to Disney, and those comparisons make a lot of sense.

But when Patrick says conservative here, it doesn't just mean being family friendly or not taking risks.

It can also mean thinking seriously about what you've already got and what you can make with it.

And Patrick's right that culture does go back to the origins of the company, at least the company as we know it.

Specifically, it goes back to one guy, someone that even most hardcore video game fans have never heard of.

His name is Goompe Yokoi, and I would argue that he's the guy who made Nintendo.

Nintendo, I'm Afraid from Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts.

This is kill Switch.

I'm Dexter Thomas, I'm Char, I'm char.

Good Bye.

Nintendo as a company goes back to eighteen eighty nine.

They were best known as a producer of playing cards, specifically hanafuda, which are a kind of traditional Japanese card.

They're a little smaller than the western cards you might be familiar with, and they have these images of flowers or birds on the front.

And people still play this game today.

But Nintendo didn't become a household name until they pivoted to video games.

And there's one specific person that we should probably credit for making Nintendo what it is today.

Now.

When I say that, a lot of people might think of Shagero Miyamoto, which is fair because he's the guy who created Mario and Zelda.

But the guy that I'm talking about was there before Miyamoto even joined the company.

A young electrical engineer named Gumpe Yukoi.

He was kind of their original creative lead, if you will.

The company kind of started their R and D division for him.

To understand Yukoi's influence on Nintendo called the Jeremy Parrish.

He's been reporting on and researching game history for years now.

He's even got an entire YouTube channel dedicated to it, and Ucoy's name comes up a lot there.

He joined the company I think back in the nineteen sixties or so, when Nintendo was still trying to figure out what it was.

You know, that was the era where they were licensing peanuts from the US Charlie Brown and Snoopy and trying to create stuff around that.

They were selling Ramen like instant Ramen, basically like any trend that they could find, they would jump on it, hoping for some sort of hit.

They had their own lego knockoff called n Block, and the company really didn't have a direction beyond we want to make money somehow.

Good direction?

So why would they need an electrical engineer like Ukoi.

Let's back up, and I can tell you the story that's in the closest thing to an autobiography that Yukoi ever wrote, which is in an interview in a book by a reporter named Makiino Takifumi.

So the kind of cards that Nintendo made weren't just for families to gather around and pass the time.

They were also good for gambling, and part of Nintendo's early customer base was illegal gambling houses.

And if you've ever been to Vegas, you know gamblers take the quality of the cards very seriously.

If there's a defect in the manufacturing, the players will notice it a little mark on a card here, or a divid in the surface there, and a player can use that to figure out what card it is and a cheat.

And apparently Nintendo's cards weren't always perfect, and occasionally some quote scary looking yakaza would show up directly at Nintendo's office and well, they would voice their concerns about the cards.

So if the cards aren't being manufactured evenly, one solution is to use a machine to put them together.

But the machine that Nintendo had bought wasn't working well.

So when Gumpeykoi first got hired in Nintendo, the first project they put him on was fixing the glue machine for the cards.

Supposedly, legend has it that he was kind of assigned to the night shift managing the factory and the assembly lines, and it was a pretty boring task, so he would just tinker and create things.

And he created like an accordion style device that you could open up and it would contract, and then it had clamps on the end, and if you closed it, you know, close the grips again, then it would extend and close the grips on the other end.

And supposedly the company's president, Hiroshiyamauchi, who was always, you know, always out looking for good ideas, saw this thing that Yokoi had put together just to kill time, and said, this is something that has play value.

This is something we could sell to people.

So they created the Ultra Hand and that was Nintendo's first hit toy in the nineteen sixties.

So, you know, Yokoi created this hit and Nintendo basically said you're our guy, now do this kind of thing again, and he did.

So gumpe Akoi kept cranking out these hit toy products, but the toys he made were kind of weird.

One of the toys is a race car called Lefty RX.

And the reason it's called Lefty RX is because it's a remote control car.

That's the RX that can only turn left.

It cannot turn.

Right, only left, only left.

It goes in a straight line and you can turn left.

And that sounds like the worst toy imaginable.

But the thing is, when it was created in the nineteen seventies, remote control cars were very very expensive, and having that full chassis on a remote control car that can go in both directions, can reverse, and also having a remote control that has steering wheel and all the necessary buttons and everything, it made those very expensive.

And Yokoi's idea with left DRX was what if we stripped out all but the most basic functions to create an affordable remote control car that any kid can own.

So, all of a sudden, with the left RX, you didn't have to be one of the rich kids to have a cool remote control car.

You could have a slightly less cool remote control car, but it was yours and it would still race.

It's just you know, you had to put it on a race track.

And it made sense because you know, you look at enough one track, basic oval track, it's just going to be your car is going to be turning left.

Yeah.

So that's all they I mean, not all they do, you know, offence of the NASCAR fans out there.

But yeah, essentially it is a sport in which you go straight and turn left.

Yes, so Yokoi tapped into that.

It was vastly less expensive, you know, like a quarter of the cost of a remote control racing car that had the full set of features.

Koy sort of democratized this technology, but at the same time created something that was very profitable for Nintendo.

So it's not like he was, you know, some great man of the people or something.

He was a businessman.

He was making money for his employer, but doing it in a way that opened up the field for the biggest audience possible.

And you know, using limited technology, using something that seems underwhelming on the face of it, but still ultimately it's functional and fun.

And this speaks to a philosophy that gumpe Ukoy had which is still courts to Nintendo today.

His phrase was kut atajijitsu no siejeskal, which if you translate it literally is something like lateral thinking with withered technology, or another way to put it might be something like taking mature technology and thinking sideways.

The idea is that you take something that is not cutting edge tech that is not necessarily intuitive like the new hot thing.

It's been around for a while, and that kind of works to its advantage.

Find new applications for this old technology, this old gadget or gimmick or CPU or whatever, and create fun out of that, to create something that one kind of gives kids and consumers a fresh take on something that might be sort of familiar and that they take for granted.

But also because this technology is old and well established, it's usually created at scale, and so it's readily available as a component.

So you know, you can basically put together off the shelf parts and very inexpensively come up with something that can be created in mass manufacturing and distributed and be very profitable.

So it's one part kind of pure mad cap and vence and one part business practicality.

And eventually, once Nintendo kind of went all in on video games, they brought him in and said, please apply that creativity to video games.

And so you saw things like game and Watch, and you saw things like game.

Boy, and this concept is still being referenced by Nintendo.

When one of the developers for the switch to was asked about how the new JOYCN could be used as mice.

This is what he had to say, implementing mouse control that's widely used nowadays in the Joycon controllers, isn't that costly?

And I think that's exactly what Lateral thinking of whither technology is all about.

Nintendo is still citing this philosophy decades after Goompey entered the company, but we still haven't talked about the games.

How did goompe Eucoi's philosophy lead to Nintendo's biggest early video game hits?

That's after the break felt the nineteen seventies, Goompey, a coy came up with tons of toys for Nintendo, and they were all pretty quirky.

There was a puzzle game, There was an extendable periscope.

He made this thing called the Love Tester, which supposedly measure your compatibility with a romantic partner, but really just boys would buy it so they could get girls to hold their hands.

Goope had even started making games for arcades.

But the thing that really brought Nintendo into some serious cash was this right here.

Game, what game?

What game?

What game?

If you play Smash Brothers, you might have recognized the name there game and watch the game and Watch came out in Night and this was Nintendo and goompe Ucoy's first real video game hit, so right.

From the gate when those debuted in nineteen eighty with Ball, a very simple juggling game where you have a guy with you know, arms, and you just have to like keep balls in the air.

That's sold I want to say half a million a million units.

It became a worldwide hit.

Ball is as simple as it sounds, and it was the game that first came out with Game and Watch.

And again, if you play Smash Brothers, that's the character you play as.

And you could buy different Game and Watch games and they were all equally simple.

There was Ball, there was a game where you dodge falling objects.

There was a really simple version of Whack a Mole.

But Game and Watch wasn't just a gaming console.

It was also a literal watch.

When it was in sort of a neutral mode, it would switch over to like a display clock.

You could set an alarm on it.

The time piece element was sort of built in from the start because the idea behind Game and Watch was taking the fundamental technology the powered the brand new LCD wristwatches that were kind of making their rounds from Cassio and other companies and taking that screen technology and approaching it a different way to create entertainment out of it.

So how did Ukoy come up with this thing?

This is where we start getting into the era where Ukoy was starting to become something of a legend.

So there are a few stories about this.

The most popular one is that he got the idea from seeing businessmen on the train absent mindedly playing with their calculators, and he decided to make a product out of this.

Maybe there is some truth to that, and it is a nice story, but.

I think that's probably somewhat apocryphal.

Most likely what happened was before Game and Watch came out.

Milton Bradley created a game system portable game system called Microvision that was in nineteen seventy nine, and Nintendo's designers and developers have referenced Microvision when talking about the Game Boy, and that you know, game Boy was ten years after Microvision came out.

But that system was big and unwieldy and kind of a weird piece of tech.

It had like a bowling game that barely resembles bowling.

It had a casino game that barely resembles a slot machine, So that definitely caught a Nintendo's eye, and I think what happened was, you know, they said, we've got to do something like this, and they looked at, you know, the technology that they saw in LCD wristwatches and said, oh, okay, like we could do something along those lines.

We could take that technology and approach the idea of video game displays differently than the standard pixel grit.

What they did was they just silk screened onto an old screen and created little characters, very detailed characters and images that are pre built into the screen light up.

It was built around I believe sharp LCD technology and they were mass manufacturing millions and millions of these screens.

So they took something that was a prevailing trend at the time but used in one way, and said what if we use this a different way?

And it was a huge hit, made them tons of money.

These were hits in Japan, but also in the US, but also in Europe and also in the Middle East and you know, parts of East Asia and Africa, like anywhere, you know, anywhere people bought consumer products and enjoyed entertainment.

They could buy a game.

And watch It makes sense because these were such simple games that they didn't need translation or even a manual.

Just pick it up and you immediately know how to play.

Just recently, the Video Game History Foundation found what is probably Nintendo's first EVA commercial in the USA in nineteen eighty.

They weren't big enough to distribute their products internationally by themselves yet, so some other company did it and called it time Out.

But other than that label, this is definitely the game and watch.

Jah Ying gave you falling notches, take time out.

Tennis gave you tennis elbow, take time out.

Then you electronic spot this timeout games called toss Up.

It plays an easy game and a hard game.

It recauds your highest score and even tells time plus.

Yeah again like using low power, inexpensive, easily accessible technology, and a really clever way to create great play value and fun.

And this is where the directional pad came from.

Also right, yes, the Donkey Kong game and Watch.

When they sat down to adapt Donkey Kong into game and watch forum, they created the crosspad.

The crosspad, also known as the direction or the d pad, basically think of the part of the controller that you use to make Mario walk left or right crosspads are so ubiquitous now that it might seem like they've been around forever, But back in the seventies and even into the eighties, arcade games or home console games would use joysticks or left or right buttons, or switches or even circular dials to move.

Pretty often, playing a new game also meant having to learn a brand new interface just to make your character move left or right.

It was Nintendo's Game and Watch that first introduced the crosspad.

That was this moment that changed everything for video games.

The crosspad came from Game and Watch and became an integral part of not only their system, but so many other systems we have.

Basically every single system after that is used some version from I mean Super Nintendo, you know, PlayStation, all the segasystems, all the Microsoft systems to Xbox, everything has used some version of that an original directional crosspad.

Video games were starting to make serious money for Nintendo.

Donkey Kong hit arcades in nineteen eighty one and that was a massive hit, And in nineteen eighty three they put out their first home console.

In Japan, it was called the Famicom.

Here in the States it was the Nintendo Entertainment System, and we got it in late eighty five early nineteen eighty six.

But this whole time they were still making and selling game and watch units.

Other companies were starting to copy their designs, which Yukoi himself didn't really mind, but of course, the president of Nintendo needed another hit product.

By this point, Yukoi was the head of his own R and D department with a team of engineers working under him, and in nineteen eighty nine, this department created a new handheld gaming device, the game Boy, and this is probably the most famous expression of goompey Ocoy's philosophy of sideways thinking using old technology for a new purpose.

At the heart of the game Boy, you have a Z eighty processor, and those have been around since the seventies.

A lot of the early computers used those early game consoles, like the Calico Vision SAG SG one thousand.

But by the time Game Boy came out, you know, the SG one thousand line Master system was on its way out like that, that technology was being deprecated, and Nintendo went with that because there were hundreds of millions of Z eighty's in the world, like they were cheapest chips.

And it was functional.

It was capable, not super powerful, not cutting edge in any way, but it did the job.

It was a proven piece of technology for video games, so it was very easy to make games for game Boy.

But you know, the thing that people always go back to with game Boy is that the screen was garbage.

Yes, it really seems like they went out of their way to find the worst screens possible, but they were cheap, they were very inexpensive, and so game Boy worked out for them very popular.

Just to back up here, at the time, game Boy on paper probably sounded like an incredibly bad idea.

I mean, it's easy to look back now in hindsight and say, well, hey man, that was back in nineteen eighty nine.

Cut them some slack.

It was gonna be a little bit primitive.

But no, this thing was garbage even by nineteen eighty nine standards.

And when it was first being released, there were reviewers who reviewed it very harshly, saying that the hardware was primitive and the screen looked bad, and they were correct.

But then the thing actually hits the market and it turns out hardware specs don't actually matter.

It's all about the games and how you put it together.

The obvious early highlight would be Tetris.

This game was pushing three million units sold within months, and it was also one of the first things to help solidify video games is not just for little kids, but something that adults could also pick up and play.

I could list other hits or high lights like Kirby or the game Boy Camera or Pokemon definitely, But maybe the most impressive thing here is that the game Boy came out again in nineteen eighty nine, and Nintendo put out their final game Boy game in nineteen ninety nine.

But that's only if you only count the game Boy itself.

If you're also willing to count the game Boy Color, which is mostly compatible with the original.

The US got its final game in late two thousand and two.

That's thirteen years of complete market domination in an era when game systems usually got replaced after just a few years.

Game Boy was the best selling game system of the twentieth century.

Like it outsold any acid outsold PlayStation, and nothing came close to the numbers that game Boy did.

Game Boy was a solid platform that had technology that was just fairly good enough.

But again, you know, it drew very little power.

The Atari Links, the Sega game Gear, Turbo Express.

We're all kind of competing at the same time, and all of those had much greater power, full color screens, backlighting, and those things would chew through four to six double A batteries and like an hour and a half two hours.

Game Boy could run on four double a's for about twenty hours.

Yeah, and it's got your favorite guys like Mario and Link and so on and so forth.

Goombay Okoy left Nintendo in nineteen ninety six to start his own company.

From now on, he'd be a competitor, which probably made Nintendo a little nervous.

It definitely made investors nervous because when word got out that goombay Okoy was leaving, Nintendo's stock fell so hard, so fast that the Tokyo Stock Exchange had to stop trading for a while.

But that situation didn't last long.

The very next year, Yukoi was riding as a passenger in a car with a front The car we're ended someone and u Koi got out to look at the damage.

Just then another car hit both of them.

The friend was injured, but your Koi was killed.

A lot of the higher ups in Nintendo now worked personally with Ukoi in the past.

Shigero Miyamoto, who again is the guy who created Zelda and Mario, sometimes talks about him in interviews, but even if it's not being mentioned directly, Yukoi's philosophy is something that Nintendo always comes back to, especially when things don't go well.

Yeah.

I mean, they have had their moments where it has felt like they have chased the powerhouse systems.

You know, I'd argue that maybe we you felt a little bit like that, although we was doing some interesting things as well, but you know, GameCube maybe a little bit like that.

It seemed like they kind of felt like, all right, this Xbox things on the market, we got to look like the Xbox, right.

Yeah.

I feel like when Nintendo has chased power and tried to be at the cutting edge of the industry, they've they've found diminishing returns on that.

The Super as was very powerful, and it sold nowhere near as well as the NES.

The N sixty four was cutting edge.

They made a big deal about you know, real time toy story and Jurassic Park graphics, and that sold even more poorly, especially in Japan.

GameCube really kind of bottomed out and that was that was them trying to play in the same arena as Xbox and PlayStation two, and that was you know, kind of their I think, come to Jesus moment.

If it hadn't been for the game Boy line, they would have been lost with the GameCube.

So I think that, you know, that was the moment where they stopped and said, we need to recalibrate and stop chasing power because we can't keep up with the competition.

We can't stay at the cutting edge.

It's just not going to work for us.

And so, you know, then you get the DS and you get the Wii, which took existing technologies and applied them in really novel, interesting and intuitive ways, and those were their best selling systems ever.

And they kind of touch it with that again with WEU trying to create something that was you know, kind of on par with PS three, and it was a bad idea, so they kind of reversed course and went back with Switch, and you know, unsurprisingly, it's been hugely successful because it really played to Nintendo's poor competency, which is working with slightly less powerful technology but doing interesting and appealing things with it.

So it's kind of like every time they chase power, you know, they kind of veer off course and really doesn't work well for them.

When they come back and apply the kind of stuff that gumpe Yukoi was going for, they started to get back on track in terms of sales exactly.

So how how exactly did goompe Accoy's influence feed directly into the Switch and now the Switch too.

That's after the break.

So we mentioned this before, but before the first Switch came out in twenty seventeen, Nintendo had a big flop with the WIU.

This was their successor to the we It did not do well at all, but they took some lessons from that to the Switch.

The WUT conceptually was a bad idea.

What also happened Nintendo was, despite being technologically generation behind, their teams could not support building parallel games, which is like they were making games for the their handheld platforms and for their console platforms.

That's because at the time they had their handheld successor to the Game Boy, the three DS, and the WIU on the market at the same time.

Again, my former colleague Patrick Klippick.

Part of what happens with the Switch is what if everything we do we don't have a handheld track and a console track.

It's just one and that allows us to consolidate our expertise, our engineering, our design.

But it also means like there's not something to save you, right, like if the weu underperforms, if the game Uwan performs, well, don't worry.

The handheld business is picking up the slack.

If the switch didn't work out, there was nothing to pick up the slack.

And there's every reason to wonder what would Nintendo be if the switch hadn't taken off for whatever reason.

But obviously the sort of capture lightning in a bottle that goes hand in hand with Breath of the Wild not just being like a good or a great game, but like a once in a lifetime, like once in a generation style game that like really hits the masses.

And the switch is an another great example of your COIs philosophy and influence.

The switch is just fascinating because the original switch is based on an Nvidia mobile phone chip from ten plus years ago, Like it's remarkable what Nintendo was able to get out of it.

And then a couple of years in COVID happens and the explosion and interest in video games.

The Switch ended up being a smash hit and it really took off in twenty twenty during lockdown.

People finding stuff to do at home, the sort of serendipitous launch of animal Crossing, which they couldn't have predicted, that just sort of happened alongside, you know, lockdowns and people looking for stuff to do.

And it's like they had a a platform that could be played like on TV or around the house, and then launched a social game at a time people were desperate for any sort of social activity and then the Switch like just explodes like during that period.

It just makes for a very unique set of circumstances for the company.

You've played the switch to?

What's it like?

What do you think?

Have you played a switch?

I have played the Switch?

So you have played a switch to?

Okay, which I think?

You know, Wait, does that mean you're not impressed?

I don't think they're trying to impress anybody.

I think I think the switch too is Nintendo.

Do people really like the Switch?

Do they really want us to reinvent the Wheel?

And I think what they have said is like their bet is that people would just like a nicer switch, and that's what the Switch to is it is a nicer switch, better graphics, more capable, nicer joy cons a better kind of fit and finish.

And then I think from a Nintendo's perspective, like, why did they do the Wii well, the GameCube felt like they ran into a wall and had to do something different.

Why did they do the switch well, the we you ran into a wall and they had to do something different.

There's really no indications from the runaway success of the switch that they should do something fundamentally different.

So I think from their perspective, a switch like a more powerful switch, like we see this with phones with tablets.

Is the switch now just a ubiquitous device in a lot of people's lives where hey, like every five ten years or whenever it breaks or I hand, I hand one off to my kid, I go get the new one, And is the switch going to be like that device like that for people?

The switch to is kind of the real test of where does it fit in people's lives?

Do you see personally any connection between say, the switch to and goompe Ocoid's philosophy or legacy.

I mean in the sense that switch to is the successor to switch and really doesn't change much about the way the switch is built, where you've got the kind of self contained device that is a screen and a processor and RAM and a cartlot and then you have the controllers that can be removed and swapped around, and it plugs into a port to a DOC to connect to a TV.

I think Yokoya would look at the switch and say, you know, this is this is it?

Like this is great stuff right here.

I do think it is very true to Gunpay yokoy Is design concepts and the thinking that he brought to Nintendo's products, not just their games, but many of their products.

It does make me happy to see his kind of spirit live on and continue through this.

I want to give a big shout out to our first guest, Patrick Klippik.

He's got a right up on crossplay dot substack dot com where he's laying out all the games he's looking forward to on the switch too.

So if you're thinking about getting one, and you know, if the player two or player three in your life just so happens to be a kid, that might be something you want to check out.

And also big shout out to Jeremy Perish if you're interested at all in video game and history seriously, his YouTube channel is mandatory watching.

And also, speaking of videos, right as we were putting this together, the YouTube channel did you know Gaming dropped almost an hour long episode on Goompayakoy.

What can I say?

Great minds think alike.

So if you're interested in knowing more specifically just about goompay Acoy's life story, because honestly, there isn't a whole lot of info about him in English, that's a great video to check out.

Also, and once again, all those links are in the show notes.

Lastly, also a big shout out to you the listener for indulging me as I basically just go full fanboy about Nintendo, so I appreciate that also.

But anyway, let me know what you think.

You can hit us up at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC with any thoughts.

You could also hit me directly at dex digi that's d e x d I g I, either on Instagram or Blue Sky if that's more your thing.

And if you like this episode, leave us a review because it really helps people find the show and that in turn helps us keep doing our thing.

Kill Switch is hosted by me Dexter Thomas.

It's produced by Shena Ozaki, darl Of Potts and Kate Osborne.

The theme song is written by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixes a show from Kaleidoscope.

Our executive producers are Ozwa Washin, Mangesh Hotigadur and Kate Osborne.

From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki E.

Tour.

If you've got any game recommendations, send it to me, but until then we'll catch you on the next one.