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Watch & Learn

29-Jul-2008 Meet the grandfather of handheld gaming: Game & Watch

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In the late 1970s, Nintendo was thinking of ways to keep itself alive. At that time, it was still only a playing card company, and since playing card sales had started to drop in the mid-1960s, Nintendo was finding itself inching closer and closer to bankruptcy.

Its president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, had tried to keep Nintendo afloat by branching the company into different services. For a while there was a Nintendo taxi service in Japan, as well as a number of Nintendo 'love hotels' (the details of which we won't go into). Unfortunately, none of these different plans were making Nintendo any money.

Its only recent success was in the toy market where, thanks to the imagination of an inventive factory worker named Gunpei Yokoi, they had released a handful of popular children's toys, such as the Ultra Hand (an extending arm that could grab things), the Ultra Machine (a baseball launcher) and the Beam Gun (a light gun that made targets fall over).

Way Of The Gunpei
Yokoi's toys were so successful in Japan that he was promoted to a researcher's role and given his own research and development team where he could come up with ideas for new toys. This team, named R&D1, would later develop the likes of Donkey Kong, Metroid, Kid Icarus and Super Mario Land.

As Yokoi was sitting on the train home from work one night he saw a bored man messing about with a calculator in order to pass the time. Yokoi started to wonder if people might be interested in a portable gaming device. After all, the arcade video game boom was just taking off in Japan: games such as Space Invaders, Asteroids and Galaxian were taking in hundreds of millions of yen throughout the country.

Duly, his R&D team got to work on a prototype.
To keep costs down, Yokoi decided to make use of the extremely cheap LCD technology that was already available in calculators and watches. Eventually he came up with a small device with a couple of buttons and an LCD screen with a simple game that could be played to pass the time during boring plane journeys and the daily commute. After adding a clock function to the top of the screen for good measure, the device was given the simple name Game & Watch.

The first Game & Watch, Ball, was released in April 1980. In it, players moved a man's hands left and right to juggle balls that could land on one of three different areas. It was basic, but most importantly it was fun. Ball was a great success and Yokoi was ordered to design more Game & Watch devices. Four more were released that same year - Flagman, Vermin, Fire and Judge - and all became extremely popular in Japan.

Boxing, a rare Game & Watch game later re-released as Punch-Out!!

And Then There Was Kong
Realising it had finally found success in electronic games, Nintendo decided it would try to expand this further and enter the arcade market. After a couple of failures, Yokoi was teamed up with a first-time game designer called Shigeru Miyamoto (sound familiar?) and together the pair created the arcade game Donkey Kong, with Miyamoto designing the game and Yokoi making it. The rest is history.

Although Nintendo would go on to great success with Donkey Kong and eventually take the home console world by storm with the Famicom/NES, Yokoi always had a love for handheld games and so his team continued to create new Game & Watches over the years. Some were original titles, while others were based on popular NES and arcade games: Donkey Kong Jr, Super Mario Bros and Zelda all got the Game & Watch treatment. In total, 59 different Game & Watches were released, incorporating 47 different games (some were re-released in different designs), with the last released in 1991.

The importance of the Game & Watch is often overlooked. Most people look at Donkey Kong as Nintendo's first big game, but had the first batch of Game & Watches failed then there's a good chance that the company would have scrapped game production and chucked it into its pile of other failed attempts at diversifying, like the taxi service and love hotels.

Mother Of Invention
It's even stranger when you consider how influential the Game & Watch was in Nintendo's future. The first ever D-Pad, invented by Yokoi, was created for the Donkey Kong Game & Watch. As well as this, later Game & Watches were released as special 'multi screen' versions. You only have to look at some of these (like the orange Donkey Kong shown below) to see how they were clearly the main inspiration for the Nintendo DS nearly two decades later.

Both controllers for boxing were hidden in a compartment inside the handheld

Most importantly, the Game & Watch is proof that right from the very beginning Nintendo has focused on fun over fancy flashiness.
In an interview years ago, Yokoi spoke about his theory, which he referred to as "lateral thinking of withered technology". Basically, what this meant was that he believed it was better to take cheap technology which already existed and make use of that to create something fun, rather than spending more time and money developing newer technology and making use of fancier graphics.

In fact, when you think about it, this has been the case from the Game & Watch (LCD calculator technology turned into a game) to the Game Boy (sticking with a cheaper monochrome display instead of a coloured one), to the N64 (cartridges instead of CDs), to the DS (a much weaker processor than the flashy PSP) and finally to the Wii (enhanced GameCube hardware instead of expensive, graphics-pushing chips).

In this way, although it's not immediately obvious, the Game & Watch set the standard for Nintendo's philosophy on gaming. Even though the Game & Watch is considered ancient now in terms of gaming history and people may mock its basic graphics, its principles of affordable and fun gameplay still sum up Nintendo to this day.

Chris Scullion

Screenshots

The controllers double up as reels for the cables	This mini table arcade game is the rarest type of Game & Watch	Spitball Sparky was one of two colour G&W's that were released
Three games were released in a gold-toned aluminium case	In Parachute G&W you have to catch falling people in your boat	Panorama G&W. The top screen is a mirror which reflected the upside-down game display
The first five titles were the smallest and were made of chrome	The Donkey Kong G&W had the first ever D-Pad	Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch

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Posted by Spoon-man

I still have the Mario Bros two-screen game where you made bricks. The game used to belong to my mum, who dislikes all video games except Puzzle League DS. It's a good game as well.
Shame you can't get much for it on eBay (last time I checked - not that I want to sell it) and that it took those small, round watch batteries.
The middle handheld in the top picture (in the headline banner) is the one I have, by the way.

Posted by Connor92

Being 16, the only way I could own a game and watch is by paying a mad price for it on eBay. That didn't stop me from getting the very first hand held Zelda

I'd say the main reason I got it was just really for bragging purposes, but when you look at the Duel Screen ones and compare it to the DS, it helps you see just how far hand helds have evolved. The resemblace is almost startling, yet the way they both play is completely different.

Then again, why throw out a design when there's nothing wrong with it?

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