Ten Billion

"Puzzle holes and shunting bodies"  --U.S. Design Patent

Developer
Gunpei Yokoi

U.S. Patent Priority Date
23rd of October, 1980


The mid sixties must have been a heady time within the offices of Nintendo. Having taken rein of the company several years earlier Hiroshi Yamauchi, grandson of the founder, was boldly making his mark - renaming the company, listing it on the Japanese stock exchange and expanding into all manner of esoteric side businesses  Of all the ventures attempted in this mad rush, the only one to stick was the one most obviously suited for a company that had been trading amusement for over seventy years. Ironically, this was a venture that Yamauchi merely happened upon. After spotting one of Nintendo's maintenance engineers with an extensible hand toy he had designed in his spare time as an intellectual exercise, Yamauchi seized upon its potential and the success of the Ultra Hand brokered new ground for the company to explore.

Leading the newly-formed toy department was Gunpei Yokoi, the selfsame engineer whose work inspired it all. Under Yokoi this team continued happily for the next decade-or-so, pumping out a steady yet multifarious streak of ingenuity encompassing board games, model kits, shootable targets, baseball tossing machines and a device for converting flashes of light into sound. By 1980, however, the push to capitalise on the emerging electronic game market had all but ended interest in the development of traditional toys. Yokoi's boundless invention was not to be suppressed, however, and his tumbler puzzle game Ten Billion became one of the exceptions.

Perhaps its best to begin by observing that Ten Billion is another example of a Nintendo product that unabashedly wears its influence on its sleeve. And as with the last time we saw this, it was a case of a success too massive to ignore. Rubik's Cube, just like UItra Hand, originated as a self-issued engineering challenge of its inventor Ernő Rubik - namely how to construct an independently transmutable 3x3x3 matrix of cubes. After several years of success in Hungary, the puzzle was exhibited internationally in January 1980 and soon gained notoriety as a relentlessly difficult, yet fiendishly addictive, brain teaser. It would become the world's highest-selling puzzle game, icon of the Poindexter, and even have its own Saturday morning cartoon show.

Ten Billion was clearly conceived to evoke the Rubik's Cube in that players must implement a series of algorithmic shuffles to restore the game's original state from any one of over four thousand billion permutations. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. Ten Billion is functionally a two-dimensional matrix - four rows of coloured balls across five columns interspersed around a cylindrical shell. Players can shift the balls from column to column by twisting the top or bottom pair of rows freely to the left and right.


...look, I'm finding this really difficult to describe. Best to start looking at a picture of it now because this is where it gets complicated.  The balls are shifted from row to row by pushing a plunger back and forth, but this only affects three of the five columns. Effectively, it shunts out three balls into separate holes (initially filled with black balls) such that they cannot be rotated. The game is solved when every column is comprised of four matching balls and the three black balls are returned to the "shunting holes".

It is perhaps not difficult to see why Ten Billion did not take off in quite the same way. It lacks the apparent simplicity of the Rubik's Cube, with multiple types of action required whose mechanics are not immediately intuitive. And its visual design is nowhere near as striking - a mishmash of clear plastic, black rods and unevenly stacked balls. Yet even using a computer-based simulation, I got the sense that this puzzle's outer appearance belies the same compulsive and bemusing gameplay that has driven generations of puzzlers to despair.

While it may not have a cartoon in which it helps a family of Hispanic children stop construction workers from dropping a boulder on an orphanage, Ten Billion was still a popular product of its time and has a humble legacy of its own. In 2007, Nintendo developed a star-shaped equivalent for release as a Club Nintendo bonus. In Germany, the puzzle made quite an impact under the name Teufelstonne and even inspired the release of a solution book. To this day, mathematicians and computer scientists are perfecting algorithms to solve it as efficiently as possible, with every permutation now provably solvable in just eighteen moves. And in the Phazon Mines of Metroid Prime, players can stumble upon a very familiar looking puzzle - included in tribute to the series' original producer.

Perhaps more importantly, Ten Billion was one of Nintendo's earliest truly international successes - aggressively patented, sold and marketed worldwide. Chasing the international success of the Rubik's Cube has led Nintendo out into wider waters, tempting them to form their own distribution channels within. And again, they have one man to thank.

Anyone could choose to emulate the Rubik's Cube, but it took a genius to design a puzzle that could match its playability and intricacy while feeling utterly like its own thing. And all polished off in the downtime between his work on the Game & Watch range. Gunpei Yokoi was truly one in ten billion.