Nintendo

Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo in Kyoto in 1889 to make hanafuda playing cards, and the company was still printing cards when Gunpei Yokoi joined in 1965 to maintain the machines on the assembly line. A year later the president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, noticed an extending arm Yokoi had built for fun. It went on sale as the Ultra Hand, and Yokoi never went back to repairs. His Game & Watch followed in 1980, and his habit of putting cheap, mature parts to new uses later got a name, lateral thinking with withered technology. The Game Boy is the clearest proof. It launched in Japan on April 21, 1989, with a four-shade gray screen, no backlight and four AA batteries, and outside Japan it shipped with Tetris in the box. Atari, Sega and NEC all answered with backlit color handhelds, and all three lost. The Game Boy and Game Boy Color together reached about 118.69 million units. Our tech coverage also picks up the Analogue Pocket, an FPGA handheld built to play original Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance cartridges. One Game Boy, scorched when a barracks was bombed during Operation Desert Storm, still switched on with Tetris running, and it sat on display at Nintendo's New York store for years.