Yesterday marked 15 years since October 4, 1997, the day a highway accident claimed the life of one of Nintendo's greatest creators. And it's a little hard to believe it's already been that long. Gunpei Yokoi is still a well-known name among Nintendo fans. We've all seen to that. We've all contributed to keeping his memory alive since that tragic day, honoring him by remembering his contributions to our favorite hobby. And it's in that spirit that we're once again looking back on the life and achievements of Mr. Yokoi – now with a full 15 years of perspective to apply in examining how his legacy has continued to take shape through the modern Nintendo.

Gunpei Yokoi was one of the old-timers at Nintendo in Japan. We're starting to think of Shigeru Miyamoto as representing that role these days, but Yokoi was the man who mentored Miyamoto – he was the one who taught Shiggy the ropes in the first place. Gunpei became a pioneer for the company in the era before video games, designing a variety of best-selling toys like the Ultra Hand (an extending arm that could reach and grab things) and the Ultra Machine (an automatic pitching machine for baseball fans). And when video games did become the company's focus in the late '70s, he became one of Nintendo's first game designers.The Game & Watch series of handhelds is recognized as his biggest success from that first generation of game development, as the story goes that Gunpei one day observed a bored businessman fiddling around with the buttons on a small calculator while riding a commuter train. He saw the opportunity there, and brainstormed the small combination timepiece and video game units that served as the precursor to Nintendo's Game Boy.The Game Boy, unsurprisingly, was also his creation. Gunpei had soared through the '80s and helped Nintendo produce a huge variety of best-selling software titles – Kid Icarus was his, as was Metroid. But his true gift seemed to be in hardware design, as he was able to envision a portable system with interchangeable cartridges, the NES controller's button layout and a brilliantly monochrome screen. Brilliantly monochrome, that is, because Gunpei rightly predicted that pursuing a color display for a handheld in that era would be too draining on battery life – and the four-shades-of-green original Game Boy went on to surpass several full color competitors from other companies.After cataloging his many successes, all remembrances of Gunpei ultimately end up arriving at the Virtual Boy, which presented stereoscopic 3D gaming in the mid-'90s. And flopped. Badly. The Virtual Boy remains, to this day, Nintendo's one major misstep in video game hardware – and because it was Gunpei's brainchild, he's most often given the full degree of blame for its failure.What makes that situation worse is the timing of it all – the Virtual Boy was pulled from the market in 1996, Mr. Yokoi left Nintendo later that year, and just one year after that was 15 years ago.We never really got the chance to see what Gunpei would put his mind to next. In the single year of life he had left after leaving Nintendo, he did manage to guide the design of Bandai's WonderSwan – an underappreciated handheld. But he was only just getting started. And his time was cut short.It's still a little hard to believe he's gone. Death is not something our industry has to deal with often. When our favorite creators stop creating, it's almost always because they've simply decided to move on – as Bioware's doctors have done just recently. As CliffyB announced just two days ago. But these men aren't gone. Ray and Greg and Cliff could all very well take a break for a while, then come roaring back with a new company or new project or something. Like Keiji Inafune stepping away from Capcom but then continuing on with Comcept, there's rarely been any true finality when a big-name game designer has been "done" before.And, happily, Gunpei wasn't really done either. He died 15 years ago, yes. But the way he lived his life sent out so many ripples that we still haven't seen the extent of his legacy yet. Take the DS, or even more recently, the 3DS. That dual-screened, clamshell design that's still in use today belonged to Game & Watch units first – it's a direct descendent of Gunpei's creativity from decades ago.Take the Wii. Its incredible mainstream success baffled those who thought a modern console could only succeed by adopting the most cutting edge technology, but that was all just Gunpei's brilliant thinking at work once again – the same philosophy that kept the Game Boy using monochrome screens for so long, and successfully continues to define Nintendo's practices today.And take Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto. We praise Shiggy today. He is absolutely the world's most celebrated and successful video game designer ever. He deserves every accolade he receives, and yet he never would have received any of them without that guiding hand to point him to that path to success more than 30 years ago. Gunpei Yokoi, as Miyamoto's first supervisor and mentor, was the man who made the man.Gunpei Yokoi's time on this side of eternity was cut short. We never know how much time we're going to have. Our tombstones are emblazoned with three things under our names – a birth date, a death date, and a dash in the middle. We have no control over the first one – that's mostly up to our parents. We have more control over the second one, and yet still never know when it's going to come. But the one thing on that tombstone we do have full control over is that dash in the middle. That simple punctuation mark that sums up our entire lifetime of choices and experiences.Gunpei Yokoi did a lot with his dash. Let's all strive to do the same.

You can follow Lucas M. Thomas on Twitter, @lucasmthomas