Nintendo & Gunpei Yokoi Murder Conspiracy Debunked

Gunpei Yokoi was Nintendo's lead inventor since the 1960s, responsible for Game & Watch, Game Boy, co-designing Mario, and much, much more. His philosophy was combining old technology with new ideas to make products that are affordable, innovative, and most of all, fun. As Miyamoto put it, Yokoi made

Nintendo what it is today. But in 1996, he left to start his own company and make a handheld called WonderSwan. As hardware, it was better than Game Boy in every way, but he was killed in a car accident before it was finished. Many believe Nintendo orchestrated the crash to maintain their handheld monopoly. One

of the drivers was a Nintendo employee, after all. Some think it was a Yakuza hit job because of Nintendo's hanafuda past. Others say, instead of WonderSwan, he was murdered for Virtual Boy's failure. There's variants, but the general idea is the same, that the car accident was no accident at all. Over

the past year, we made a trilogy of Gunpei Yokoi videos, his hour-long life story, another about Virtual Boy, and a finale on WonderSwan. And under all of them, we got a lot of comments saying Nintendo took him out. Many of them very confident it's a cold, hard fact and a matter of historical record. It's a

prominent theory that's been around a long time, and on a surface level, you can see how people connect those dots.

Nintendo lost their console empire to Sony and couldn't risk losing Game Boy, too. The company had historical links to the Yakuza, and thus, Nintendo had the motive, and the Yakuza had the means and opportunity. But the more you dig into the details, the less sense it makes.

Before we get into debunking, we should establish we are qualified to do so. Over the past year making those Yokoi videos, we read his 1996 autobiography and his 2010 biography with unused interviews recorded before his death. We also got consultation from the author of his French biography, Florent Gorge, who

met with Yokoi's family and in our opinion is the best Nintendo historian out there. >> [music] >> We read basically everything Yokoi had ever written and every contemporary article written about him and interviews with the staff of Koto Laboratories, the company he founded [music] that made

Wonder Swan. You'd be hard-pressed to find a channel that knows more about Yokoi than we do and we have a lot of affection and admiration for him. If there was evidence of murder, we'd be screaming it from the rooftops. We also realize this is a delicate topic, so we want to make it clear from the top. This

isn't meant to be morbid or cynical clickbait. Like our Yokoi trilogy, we're not expecting a lot of views. Compared to something like Pokémon trivia, these videos take twice as long to make and only get half the clicks. But we were inspired by Yokoi's stories and thought they were worth telling. We also think

rumors about his murder are a blemish and a distraction from how he should be remembered. Other channels don't seem interested in debunking them and since we probably have more receipts than anyone, [music] it might as well be us.

And with all that said, first we'll examine the crash itself. A lot of folks are fuzzy on the details, which is understandable since a lot of info is not online. So we had our translator in Japan get records from the National Library. First, we got the initial report from the local Ishikawa