How the Walkman, Game Boy, Liquid Death, and Pokémon Became Surprise Hits

In 1979, an unknown Sony engineer by the name of Kozo Ohsone unveiled a miniaturized stereo cassette deck with headphones that let anyone listen to music anywhere, without bothering anyone. Nobody had asked him to make it. His colleagues told him it was ridiculous—no one would be caught dead wearing headphones in public. His boss told him no one would buy a tape deck that couldn’t record. But Sony Chairman Akio Morita instantly seized the potential of this new device. He’d reportedly always wanted to listen to opera on long flights, and he was willing to bet others felt the same way about the music they loved, too. The Walkman’s lessons are still relevant today. It demonstrates how consumers inevitably pick convenience over specifications, how smart companies know when to follow the customer’s lead, and how groundbreaking innovation can only emerge from thinking counterintuitively. Western innovation often follows a familiar script: Identify a market opportunity, engineer the best solution, pack it with features, and launch with maximum fanfare. It’s logical. It’s data-driven. And it’s also why product roadmaps are cluttered with features nobody asked for and nobody uses. Meanwhile, Japan has spent the past 50 years quietly rewriting the rules. Not through superior technology—the early Walkman’s sound quality was mediocre; the first Game Boy’s screen terrible. Not through better marketing—emoji weren’t marketed at all, while manga and anime are created purely for domestic readers, with foreign audiences an afterthought. Yet these things sell, in massive quantities, around the world. The reason? Japanese innovators stumbled upon a set of principles that directly address the psychological forces working against new ideas. And when Western companies apply these principles, they succeed too. Principle 1: Convenience always trumps technology. In 1989, Sega, NEC, and Atari battled for market share by packing their portable gaming consoles with cutting-edge color screens and state of the art processors. Engineer Gunpei Yokoi took the opposite tack with Nintendo’s Game Boy. The screen was an old-school monochrome LCD. The processor was a last-generation chip. On paper, it should have been crushed. Instead, it became one of the best-selling gaming consoles in history. What happened? Yokoi called his approach “lateral thinking with withered technology.” The Game Boy’s “inferior” screen and poky processor made it easy to manufacture and sell at a kid-friendly price. It also made it durable—and gave it 40 hours of battery life versus competitors’ four. Most importantly, it had all the best games: Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, and later, Pokémon. Yokoi understood something fundamental: Consumers didn’t care about the state of the art. They “hired” products to make their lives easier. In the language of jobs-to-be-done theory, kids didn’t want the best game system—they wanted the most fun one. This anecdote has implications beyond Japan. Consider Crocs. Fashion magazines have declared the foam footwear dead more times than disco. Yet they persist. Why? Because Crocs understood the same principle as Nintendo: Nobody cares about aesthetics when you solve the real problem: footwear you don’t have to think about. Healthcare workers, parents, those walking dogs at five in the morning: They don’t choose Crocs for looks. They chose them because they could slip into them in seconds—and hose them off equally quickly when needed. The key insight: Ease often matters more than features. Bells and whistles that add functionality may also add frictions, such as complexity and cost. Being technically “worse” is often strategically better. Principle 2: “The street finds its own uses for things.” When science fiction author William Gibson wrote, “The street finds its own uses for things,” he was talking about technology in cyberpunk futures. But he might as well have been describing Sony’s experience with the Walkman. The executives were convinced it would only appeal to kids studying for exams late at night. The street had other ideas. City-dwellers wanted to escape the monotony of subway commutes. Joggers wanted music for their runs. Teenagers wanted private musical worlds. Final score: 200 million units sold. A similar pattern played out with emoji. Designer Shigetaka Kurita created them in 1999 as graphical flourishes for telecom DoCoMo’s mobile internet service. But teenagers quickly discovered the glyphs, peppering their texts with them. Apple and Google soon incorporated emoji palettes into their devices. What Kurita had envisioned as “clip art” became the fastest-growing language in human history. This isn’t about luck. It’s about listening. Every product contains possibilities its creator never foresaw, but only the creators humble enough to watch how people actually use it, rather than how they were supposed to, ever find out what those possibilities are. This is relevant beyond Japan’s market. TikTok began life as a virtual karaoke platform called Musical.ly. But users instead began posting short-form videos of themselves. Soon communities such as FoodTok and BookTok emerged as powerful forces, launching culinary careers and single-handedly turning unknown authors into bestsellers. None of these use cases appeared in any product roadmap. But ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, leaned into it, rebuilding the algorithm to surface the content people actually engaged with. The result: a platform valued at more than $200 billion, built on use cases its founders never imagined. The key insight: Your customers are conducting free R&D on your behalf. This requires overcoming the impulse to defend your vision against how customers are “misusing” it. Principle 3: Embrace the power of limitations. In 1985, Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto needed a hero for his new video game, Donkey Kong. The problem? He only had a 16×16 grid of pixels to work with—so tiny, you could barely make out any details. Miyamoto tackled the problem through subtraction. A hat eliminated the need to draw hair. A mustache created a recognizable face without needing a mouth and nose. Overalls provided contrast to distinguish arms from body. Every design choice solved a pixel-level problem. “Constraints forced us to be inventive,” says Miyamoto. They helped him create one of the most recognizable characters in modern history, in a grid barely larger than a postage stamp. You can see this principle in action with Twitter’s iconic 140-character tweet. It wasn’t a design choice. It was all that was left from reserving 20 characters for a person’s username within the 160-character SMS limit. Twitter played up this constraint, leading to a kind of haiku for the internet age. You can flip this thinking to look at things from the consumer side, too. Trader Joe’s started life in the 1960s as a convenience store chain in California. Then 7-Eleven arrived. Unable to compete with the giant, founder Joe Coulombe began thinking unconventionally. What if he did the hard work of choosing products for customers? A normal supermarket’s 50,000 products became a select 4,000. This “less is more” mindset made Trader Joe’s one of the most profitable grocers in America. The key insight: Your constraints are your opportunity. Look at them with the right eyes and they stop being obstacles — they become the solution. Principle 4: Create products for markets that don’t exist yet. Transformative innovation doesn’t just serve markets—it creates them. And markets that don’t exist yet don’t show up in surveys. In 1967, an amateur singer by the name of Shigeichi Negishi dreamed of hearing his voice over speakers. He wired an 8-track tape deck to a microphone and a cross-fader, popped in an instrumental tape, called over his family, and inadvertently convened the world’s first karaoke party in his kitchen. Eventually, the sing-along machine would become a global phenomenon. But at the time, it was dismissed as a wacky contraption, for amateurs were still too scared to sing in public. Finally, a rival creator hit on the idea of paying bar employees to coax reluctant customers up to the mic. As more and more experienced being stars for the duration of a song, karaoke spread throughout Japan—and the world. The challenge: Innovations create resistance by definition. The big question for innovators is how to strip away enough of it for people to overcome their hesitations. We’ve seen this principle in action in the West. In 2009, ad creative Mike Cessario noticed something odd: The rock musicians onstage were drinking water out of Monster Energy cans. Sponsorship required them to hold Monster, but they needed hydration, not caffeine, so they’d quietly swapped the contents. Eight years later, he launched Liquid Death: canned water with punk-rock branding. The market research would have screamed: “Water is free. This is a solution without a problem.” Liquid Death proved otherwise by intuiting something data couldn’t show. The job to be done wasn’t hydration—it was identity. A “hard-looking” soft drink appealed to many: Teens who wanted to feel cool, non-drinkers who wanted to fit in at parties, and concertgoers who wanted something festive without the hangover. As of March 2024, the canned-water company was valued at $1.4 billion. The key insight: Distinguish between serving markets and creating them. Creating new markets requires understanding the “jobs” people need done—even if they can’t always articulate them. Principle 5: Know what your data can’t tell you. We live in an era of unprecedented customer insight. A/B tests, analytics, surveys, behavioral tracking. But this wealth of information is a double-edged sword. It can crush innovation before it starts. Data excels at telling you what customers think about what already exists. Where it fails is predicting what customers think about things that don’t yet exist. Focus groups famously rejected the minivan, the VCR, and the iPhone. Shueisha, publisher of the world’s biggest manga magazine, Shonen Jump, understands this paradox intimately. Every week, they ask young readers to rank their favorite titles through surveys. Those that rank poorly get cancelled. It’s data-driven publishing. But Shueisha also gives Jump editors wide leeway to make their own decisions, based on experience, instinct, or simply gut feel. Take Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball—300 million volumes sold, a multi-billion-dollar anime and gaming empire that’s arguably the most famous Japanese pop franchise in the world. But when it debuted in 1984, the eccentric and gag-driven series did very poorly in surveys. The data said cancel. The editor, Kazuhiko Torishima, felt otherwise. Torishima believed Toriyama had more potential, encouraging him to get out of his comfort zone. Toriyama pivoted the manga from a comedic adventure into an epic martial arts competition. Readers responded enthusiastically—and it’s barely waned since. Had the decision been purely data-driven, Dragon Ball would have ended in its first year. Had Shueisha followed the surveys blindly, they’d have lost more than a franchise — they’d have lost a cultural empire. You can find similar examples in the West. In 2009, Stewart Butterfield’s game company was building an online game called Glitch that nobody wanted to play. But while building Glitch, the team created an internal messaging tool they called Slack. Butterfield realized other companies could use it, too. The problem was, he had zero enterprise experience—and the messaging market was crowded. Butterfield ignored the data and trusted his gut: If his team loved using Slack, maybe others would too. Salesforce bought them for $27.7 billion in 2021 — for a tool that was never supposed to be a product. The key insight: Use data to understand the present, but trust your intuition about the future. Data tells you what is. Intuition tells you what could be. . . . The ongoing popularity of Japanese products is testament to a quiet know-how that anyone can adopt. These aren’t uniquely Japanese principles, but Japan has applied them more consistently, across more industries, for longer than almost anyone else. The next time a good idea stalls, resist the urge to pile on features. The best innovations don’t push harder, they clear a path. Japan’s most transformative innovators didn’t succeed by building bigger; they succeeded by making it easier to say yes. As the Walkman’s creator knew: Think like that and you rewrite the rules. Think conventionally, and you’re forever bound by them.

How the Walkman, Game Boy, Liquid Death, and Pokémon Became Surprise Hits

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