Game & Watch

~ the eulogy ~

The story Nintendo tells about the origin is that Gunpei Yokoi, on a Shinkansen, watched a businessman with nothing to do press the buttons on a pocket calculator. Segment LCDs and calculator chips were cheap by 1979 and Sharp had spare production for them. The product that came out of it was a single game, permanently burned into a display that could only show the shapes it had been made to show, with a digital clock in the corner so a grown man could be seen holding one.

Ball went on sale on 28 April 1980 at ¥5,800. Nintendo was still mostly a playing card and toy company at that point, with a hit-and-miss arcade business, and the handhelds turned out to be the thing that paid. Around sixty titles followed over the next eleven years, across a run of formats with names like Wide Screen and Table Top, and the series sold 43.4 million units, with 30.53 million of those going outside Japan.

The last one was Mario the Juggler, released on 14 October 1991. It was a remake of Ball, which is a neater ending than most product lines get. By then the Game Boy was two years old and selling in numbers that made a single-game device look like a fossil.

~ the dossier ~

~ the cross ~

In 1982 Yokoi needed to fit two-axis control into a clamshell case a few millimeters thick for the Multi Screen version of Donkey Kong. A joystick was out of the question. What he came up with was a flat cross with four contacts under it, pressed with a thumb.

That shape then went onto the Famicom controller and from there onto essentially every controller made by anybody for the next thirty years. Nintendo held the patent and licensed it out. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave the D-pad a Technology and Engineering Emmy in 2008, twenty six years after it was drawn to fit inside a toy.

~ what it paid for ~

Money is the part usually left out. Game & Watch arrived when Nintendo was carrying debt from a failed arcade push, and the handhelds generated the cash that funded the development of the Famicom. The console business that defined the company for the next four decades was financed by a calculator with a jumping man on it.

The hardware lineage is just as direct. The Multi Screen models folded shut, put a game across two panels and had a hinge in the middle, which is the Nintendo DS twenty two years early. Yokoi took the same philosophy of cheap mature parts used cleverly into the Game Boy, shipped it in 1989, and killed his own product line with it.

~ the clones ~

Nintendo had no official channel into Turkey in those years, so what arrived in the shops was the format rather than the brand. LCD handhelds with unlicensed characters, brick game units with a Tetris variant and a hundred numbered modes, sold on street tables and in stationery shops for what a toy costs. The line ended in 1991, when I was seven, and the thing I could actually have picked up was a copy of it made by somebody else.

Nintendo went back to the shape on 13 November 2020 with a Game & Watch running Super Mario Bros., in the original gold and red, sold as a collectible rather than a toy. It is a nice object. It is also emulation in a case, which is the opposite of a device that could only ever show one game.

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