Game & Watch

Game & Watch (Japanese: ゲーム&ウオッチ Gēmu & Uotchi; called Tricotronic in West Germany and Austria) is a line of handheld electronic games produced by Nintendo from 1980 to 1991. Created by game designer Gunpei Yokoi, each Game & Watch features a single game to be played on an LCD screen in addition to a clock, an alarm, or both. It was the earliest Nintendo product to garner major success.

Origin and design

In 1977, Gunpei Yokoi, traveling on the Shinkansen, saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. Yokoi then thought of an idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature game machine for killing time.

The units use LR4x/SR4x "button-cell" batteries, the same type used in most laser pointers or handheld calculators. Different models were manufactured, with some having two screens and a clam-shell design (the Multi Screen Series). The Game Boy Advance SP, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo 3DS later reused this design.

Titles available in Game & Watch form vary from Mickey Mouse to Balloon Fight, including Nintendo staples such as Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and Mario Bros..

Handheld electronic game

Handheld electronic game(s) are very small, portable devices for playing interactive electronic games, often miniaturized versions of video games. The controls, display and speakers are all part of a single unit. Rather than a general-purpose screen made up of a grid of small pixels, they usually have custom displays designed to play one game. This simplicity means they can be made as small as a digital watch, and sometimes are. The visual output of these games can range from a few small light bulbs or LED lights to calculator-like alphanumerical screens; later these were mostly displaced by liquid crystal and Vacuum fluorescent display screens with detailed images and in the case of VFD games, color. Handhelds were at their most popular from the late 1970s into the early 1990s. They are the precursors to the handheld game console.

History

Early handheld games used simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effects. Notable early handheld games included the Mattel Auto Race (1976) and Mattel Electronic Football (1977) which featured very simple red-LED displays; gameplay involved the player pressing buttons to move his car or quarterback icon (represented by a bright dot) to avoid obstacles (represented by less bright dots). In 1978 the Milton Bradley Company entered the handheld market with Simon, a simple color-and-sound-matching game. Simon had no dedicated display, but featured four colored, lighted buttons; the original version was large enough to be used as a tabletop game or a handheld; later versions became increasingly smaller. The same year, Parker Brothers also released Merlin, a more sophisticated handheld which could play six different games using an array of 11 buttons with integrated LEDs. Despite their relative simplicity, each of these early games was highly successful.

List of Game & Watch games

This is a list of Game & Watch games released by Nintendo, along with their format and date of release, if known. See lists of video games for related lists. Several of these games were collected and re-released as ports for the Game & Watch Gallery series for Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. The games also were re-released as stand-alone titles for the Nintendo Mini Classics series in the late 1990s. Digital versions of the games were created as DSiWare which was released for Nintendo DSi in 2009 (2010 internationally) and for Nintendo 3DS in 2011.

Models

Games

Ball

Ball, also known as Toss-Up, is a Game & Watch game released as a part of the Silver series on April 28, 1980. It was the first Game & Watch game. It is a single-screen single-player Game & Watch.

It was rereleased exclusively via Club Nintendo to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Game & Watch, with the Club Nintendo logo on the back. Unlike the original release, this version includes a mute switch. For members of the Japanese Club Nintendo, after an announcement in November 2009, it was shipped in April 2010 to Platinum members. For members of the North American Club Nintendo, it was available for 1200 coins from February 2011. For members of the European Club Nintendo, it was available for 7500 stars from November 2011.