It's been a while since Junhei Yokoi left Nintendo, and if you ask him how he feels during this time, it's actually hard for him to express.

There are advantages to doing it yourself, first of all, almost everything is decided by yourself.

The blueprint you want, as long as it is realistic, can almost become a real product.

However, there are also many bad points.

The first is that the budget is much smaller, and the second is that the quality of the new company's personnel is also poor.

It's not that they can't finish the job at hand, but compared to those at Nintendo who have been running in for a long time.

They had some difficulty understanding the concept of Yokoi Gunpei.

It's not like an old husband and wife, you know what to do by patting your ass.

Instead, it needs hand-in-hand guidance, but fortunately, after such a long period of guidance, it is finally on the right track.

The name of this handheld is called the Magic Swan, and the English abbreviation is S.

What's so magical about it?

The magic of this is that this game machine can be played not only horizontally, but also counting.

So how do you manage to play both sideways and count?

The answer is simple, it's a matter of adding a few more buttons.

In fact, as early as Nintendo's time, Gunhei Yokoi had this idea.

However, his idea was rejected without going through discussion.

Why was it rejected?

Because the rest of the discussion didn't make sense whether the game was played horizontally or vertically.

And the added keys add to the cost.

Although a button may not seem to cost much, a gaming handheld is likely to sell tens of millions of units.

With so much sales as a basis, any little bit of cost will be magnified into a very huge cost.

Probably only when Yokoi Junhei started his own business did he have this kind of freedom to do whatever he wanted.

Of course, this freedom to decide things at will is not necessarily a good thing for a person.

In terms of high probability, the correctness of a group's perception test is often more robust than a person's decision-making.

Because, a group of people has the ability to bind each other, that is, everyone can supervise each other and cooperate with each other to complete an idea.

But what about one person?

Maybe in the beginning, the decisions made were fine.

But gradually, a yardstick is lost.

There is no control over one's own behavior.

And what he said in Yiyantang will make him really think that he is the only truth in the world.

However, Yokoi does not seem to be bothered by this problem.

Because the S handheld is very successful.

As for why it succeeded?

The route is still the old path that Yokoi Junhei himself once walked.

What's the old way?

It is to use the lowest possible price to make every handheld.

And in terms of game lineup, S's game lineup is not bad at all. Even in the eyes of some players, it is even better than Wanhu's handheld.

Players like Square Enix, who already have the confidence to fall out with Nintendo, strongly support the development of S.

On it, there are not only new works of various own game series, but even exclusive games dedicated to S.

If you ask them why they do it?

Is it just to repay the kindness of Yokoi Junhei?

No, at least not entirely.

Square Enix is a commercial enterprise, and while commercial enterprises can sometimes be emotional, they almost never act completely emotionally.

All actions need to be linked to commercial interests, that is, any decision-making action needs to be based on whether it can be profitable.

If they can make a profit, they will continue to do it.

If they can't make a profit, they give up trying.

Obviously, S, in the leaning of the decision-makers, did not disappoint. It can even be said to be very successful.

The console sold more than two million units in the game.

Yokoi Junhei, a grass-roots company, has also become one of the owners of a large game platform in one fell swoop.

Of course, all this is of course due to Yokoi's own efforts, but in fact there are some bonuses from others.

For example, Jing Junping has two major shareholders.

They are Wanhu and Bandai.

Wan Hu can say that his business is to make video games. Supporting S also plays an important role in suppressing the Game Boy series for Wanhu himself.

However, Bandai is different.

Today's Bandai is more accurate to call it Bandai Namco.

Bandai itself is a toy company that has repeatedly wanted to enter the video game market for a piece of the pie.

But unfortunately, the threshold of the video game market is really high, and Bandai itself has not made a game with relatively good sales.

Therefore, when the economy was in decline, they used their abundant capital to merge with Namco, a giant in the video game industry that was caught in the vortex of real estate development.

In this way, Bandai, which owns a lot of animation rights, will be able to make its own games.

The games that have been produced have also been successful.

But is that just satisfying?

No matter how good the game is, if you don't have your own platform, you're working for others in vain.

As a result, Bandai was looking for an opportunity to build its own gaming platform.

Yokoi Junpei's departure just made Bandai see this opportunity.

They specifically wanted to invite Gunpei Yokoi to join Bandai Namco and develop a new handheld for Bandai Namco.

However, Gunpei Yokoi did not like this.

He left Nintendo, of course, because of the failure of VrBoy, but also because of his change of mentality.

Originally wanted to serve only one company in his life, Junhei Yokoi found that most of them were accepted, and things would not go as he thought.

Many of my ideas are excellent, even if the president will support me.

But in reality, there is no possibility of failure, and if you fail once, you will lose everything.

VrBoy is one such opportunity.

Although he thinks that his behavior is not too out of line, but the world is like this, no matter what he does, there are people who don't like it.

Even, if it weren't for Takahashi who had saved himself, Yokoi Junhei would not have accepted the investment of Wanhu, and as for Bandai Namco, it would be another love story.

However, the success of S is actually indispensable for Manho and Bandai Namco.

Wanhu provides a perfect sales channel for S, saving Yokoi Junhei from establishing a sales system by himself. In a short period of time, the S handheld machine has been spread all over the book.

And Bandai Namco provides one manga and anime adaptation game after another, which forcibly raises the popularity of S.

The success of S is not only due to the efforts of Gunhei Yokoi himself, but also a process of history.