Yokoi started at Nintendo maintaining assembly line machines, back when it was a playing card company. He built an extending toy arm in his spare time, the president saw it, and it became a hit.
He went on to make the Game & Watch and then the Game Boy. The Game Boy had a greenish monochrome screen when competitors had color. It lost every spec comparison and won the market anyway, because the batteries lasted forever and it was cheap and nearly impossible to break.
He called his approach "lateral thinking with withered technology": take mature, well understood parts and find a new use for them. The Virtual Boy was a rare miss, and he left Nintendo soon after. He died in a road accident in 1997.