Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi's fixes for Mario Bros., Yoshi and the Game Boy Pocket, from a newly translated 1997 memorial

Arcade Mario Bros. needed an enemy, and the team kept hitting the same wall. You punch the floor from below to flip whatever is standing on it, so the thing standing there had to be something that could be flipped. The memorial says the team struggled to find a creature “vulnerable to getting hit from below.” Gunpei Yokoi’s answer was turtles.

That is a design review settled in one word, and the memorial is full of them. Game Hihyou ran it after Yokoi died on October 4, 1997, at age 56, in a road accident on the Hokuriku Expressway. The magazine collected the people he had worked with, and Shmuplations posted the translation this week.

Shigeru Miyamoto goes first and affectionately calls Yokoi his “master.” His best story is about the Game Boy Pocket. Miyamoto kept asking why it couldn’t take AA batteries instead of AAA. Yokoi kept saying no. “With this model, making it small is the whole point,” he told him, as Miyamoto tells it, and then offered the way out: “Anyone who prefers AA batteries can play on the old model.”

So the old brick stayed on sale for the people who wanted fatter cells, and the new one got to be a pocket game console that fit in a pocket. (Two models, two jobs. Nobody had to lose.)

The same page credits Yokoi, via Miyamoto, with taking the original Tetris and adding competitive play and garbage blocks. A head-to-head puzzle game came out of what had been a solo one.

Satoshi Tajiri, who ran Game Freak, tells a different kind of story. He had built a Yoshi prototype where you fed Yoshi from above, dropping food into his mouth. Yokoi’s note was to quit moving the falling food and control the character at the bottom instead. In the memorial’s words, the pitch started “Instead of moving the falling food,” and the game you now know turns on the plates you swap at the bottom.

It is one change to what the player’s hands are attached to. Same food, same Yoshi, different game.

Mario & Wario went through the same wringer. The original concept was a sleepwalker wandering aimlessly, and an earlier idea had “a sleeping Mario waking up as a semi-transparent ghost.” Then, in the page’s wording: “But Yokoi said, ‘A bucket is much easier to understand.’” The next line concedes the bucket is a bit disrespectful to Mario, and also the clearest option. Mario got the bucket.

The rest of the page fills in the man. Satoru Iwata of HAL Laboratory remembers watching Yokoi “hold the controller and give direct instructions” on Balloon Fight and wondering why a general manager at Nintendo was that involved. Hiroshi Imanishi, who worked with him in the development department, says “Yokoi was always adamant that copying other people was useless.” And Tsunekazu Ishihara of Creatures recalls Yokoi saying how much he had wanted a strap hole on the Game Boy Pocket, like the ones on cell phones.

That last one is the funniest line in the piece, and it makes the battery fight look smaller. The man who held the line on AAA also wanted the thing to hang off a phone-style strap.

Expect designers to keep passing this memorial around, because it hands over a method without a manual. The method gets harder to practice every year, too. Modern teams ship feature lists, patches and roadmaps, and a feature list is the opposite of a bucket.

It also arrives as Tajiri’s generation runs studios of its own. Whether any of them still tell a team to flip the prototype upside down is something the memorial can’t answer, since the man who said it to Tajiri died in 1997.

The page doesn’t say who got the bucket line.