The 8-Bit Book - 1981 to 199x completes the 8-bit home computer trilogy of the acclaimed Golden Years series, covering over two hundred of the most influential, inspiring and downright interesting computer games of the 8-bit era.
Ten years after his death, Gunpei Yokoi has been reduced to legend: condensed, marginalized and re-packaged as a Nintendo creation myth instead of a man. You'd think there'd be entire encyclopedias profiling this Japanese Doc Brown, the prolific inventor who engineered the D-Pad, Game and Watch, R.O.B., Game Boy, Virtual Boy, a dozen or so children's toys and the Super Mario Land, Fire Emblem, Kid Icarus and Metroid franchises. Not so. Instead, most official Nintendo histories gloss over Yokoi's contributions, and many books and websites - if they're even translated into English - echo the same rudimentary, unsubstantiated stories. Even Yokoi's own obituaries wander off topic. The man was so vague and ghostly, he may not have even existed at all.