Game & Watch

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> *For the mascot of the franchise, see Mr. Game & Watch.*
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## General Information

### Composer

Yoko Mizuta
Jin Sugita

### Platform

Nintendo DS, Nintendo DSi, FM-7, Sharp X1, PC-8800 series, BBC Micro, Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari 7800, Coleco Adam, Wii U, Commodore 64, Atari 2600, Game Boy Advance, Wii, Famicom Disk System, Intellivision, ColecoVision, Atari 8-bit family, Nintendo Switch, Game Boy Color, Game Boy, Nintendo 3DS/Wii U, Xbox, Playstation

The **Game & Watch** series, abbreviated as **G&W**, is a total of 60 handheld video games that were released between 1980 and 1991. The games were released a year before *Donkey Kong*, three years before the Famicom, and a whopping nine years before the Game Boy was released. While not Nintendo's initial entry into the video game market, it was one of their most successful products in the early 80s. After Nintendo started to develop popular series, such as *Donkey Kong*, *Super Mario* and *The Legend of Zelda*, they constructed games based on these titles, and even made games that starred popular characters such as Mickey Mouse and Snoopy. The idea of the *Game & Watch* was conceived by Gunpei Yokoi, and was commercialized for the Game & Watch at the Museum of Classic Chicago Television.

A multiple of companies help Nintendo create their Game & Watch units, including Mego, CGL, Ji2l, Futuretronics, Bienegraeber&co, and Videopoche. While the games themselves were virtually unchanged, the box that the game came in were different as each one was custom made by the respective company.

Years after the Game & Watch brand was created, Nintendo honored the franchise by referencing it in the *WarioWare* series and making Game & Watch compilations, known as the *Game & Watch Gallery and Game & Watch Collection* series.

## Character

*Main article: Mr. Game & Watch*

Mr. Game & Watch is considered the mascot of the franchise of the same name. The composite character is introduced in the *Super Smash Bros,* series, debuted in *Super Smash Bros. Melee* for the GameCube. In retaining with the limitations of the Game & Watch's animations, Mr. Game & Watch's physical appearance is depicted as a flat 2D silhouette male character with choppy, frame-by-frame animations, and a design replicating a stick figure (albeit with a bulkier frame). The *Smash Bros.* series debuted an original character representing the series as a unique and distinctive "mascot," and made him a playable fighter from *Melee* onwards.

While some Game & Watch titles starred specific characters, such as Mario in *Mario's Cement Factory*, a majority simply starred nameless, simple-drawn characters. These characters, due to the LCD display of the Game & Watch, could only move in alternating, preset frames, similar to the numbers on a calculator. In addition, the animation's frames were monochrome, simply being black LCD frames against a preset background.

In translating this era of gaming to *Smash*, several of these generic characters' animations and abilities were combined into one new entity, Mr. Game & Watch. Visually, Mr. Game & Watch's standard design most heavily resembles the individuals in requirement of rescue from *Fire* and the pedestrians from *Manhole*.

Since debuting in *Melee*, Mr. Game & Watch has made a few appearances in other games. He has a minor speaking role as the host of one of the menus in *Game & Watch Gallery 4*. He has also made a number of cameos in Nintendo's variety of installments, including multiple entries in the *WarioWare* series, *Donkey Kong Country Returns*, *Rhythm Heaven Fever*, and *Super Mario Odyssey*.

## Reception

Even before Nintendo's future as a leading competitor in the video game market was shaped by the breakout video arcade hit that was the original *Donkey Kong* in 1981, the company had been finding some small success in the video arcade game industry throughout the 1970's. During this timeframe, one of Nintendo's first game designers, Gunpei Yokoi, is said to have realized the appeal of a portable device that doubled both as a watch and as a miniature game machine when he watched another passenger riding a Shinkansen bullet train using an LCD calculator as a means of passing the time. As head of Nintendo's "Nintendo Research & Development 1" team, Yokoi developed and released the first entry in what became a long-running line of dedicated handhelds under the *Game & Watch* name, *Ball*, known as *Toss-Up* in the US, near the end of April 1980. As per the definition of a dedicated console, each *Game & Watch* device was a handheld with a single built-in game, almost all with a harder "Game B" mode, and what became a long-running series of *Game & Watch* portables initially displayed very basic monochrome graphics on Liquid-Crystal Display screens. Also, as per the title of the product line, each game doubled as an electronic timepiece. A total of 59 *Game & Watch* games were developed and released between 1980 and 1991, including some games released after Yokoi's more famous handheld creation, the Game Boy.

The first *Game & Watch* game became the earliest Nintendo electronic product to garner major success, even before the industry-defining success of *Donkey Kong* just a year later, and the entire series sold over 43 million copies. The series is credited with making handhelds vastly popular and setting up for Nintendo's future handheld console business with the Game Boy line, as well as inspiring various other toy companies, most notably Tiger Electronics, McDonald's, and the Soviet Union's Elektronika, to create their own dedicated handhelds. The series of dedicated handhelds gradually became more technologically advanced over the years and went through several different models that were designed to deliver some more creative twists to each individual game, including a clam-shell design with two separate screens displaying graphics simultaneously, and a panorama screen that used projections into a mirror to display color graphics. As many modern retrospectives note, this particular "Multi-Screen" design was a forerunner to Nintendo's 21st century dual-screened handheld platforms, the DS and the 3DS, and bore a very close resemblance to them.

The *Game & Watch* products themselves initially depicted cartoon-shaped characters resembling black silhouettes on white backgrounds, but as the series went on, several games within it based on external IPs unrelated to Nintendo, namely the *Mickey Mouse*, *Popeye* and *Peanuts* cartoons, were released. Starting from 1982, *Game & Watch* titles also began depicting *Mario* and *Donkey Kong* characters as Nintendo's business in video games took hold, and near the end of the series' release history, *Balloon Fight* and *The Legend of Zelda* also made incidental releases in handheld *Game & Watch* form, alongside uniquely-themed titles utilizing mechanics and gameplay concepts from NES games such as *Ice Climber* (*Climber*) and *Devil World* (*Squish*). After the line was retired in 1991, bookended with a remake of *Ball* called *Mario the Juggler*, Nintendo began to make occasional references to, and ports of, the *Game & Watch* brand; in between 1995 and 2002, five installments of a series called *Game & Watch Gallery* were released on the Game Boy family of consoles, each compiling several of the original games and offering them both in their original monochrome appearances and with remade "Modern" versions featuring *Mario* characters and settings alongside up-to-date gaming design elements like health collectibles, extra levels, and faux-3D movement, as well as non-playable "Museum" animations based on extra games - additionally, a variety of *Game & Watch* titles, particularly those featuring *Mario* characters, would be rereleased by MGA Entertainment in the 2000s as keychains known as *Nintendo Mini Classics*, alongside new licensed titles based on IPs such as *Star Trek*, *The Smurfs*, and *Harry Potter*, and prior to this in the early 1990s, around the time when the *Game & Watch* brand was winding down, Nintendo licensed out their characters for an unrelated but similarly-named brand of LCD games, the *Game Watch* by Nelsonic. *Game & Watch* games have also been included as minigames in Nintendo titles such as *Wario Land II*, the Game Boy Camera, *Personal Trainer: Cooking*, and the Nintendo DS Digital TV Tuner. More famously, a collective representation of the various black-silhouetted characters seen throughout the earlier games, Mr. Game & Watch, debuted as a surprise playable character in 2001's *Super Smash Bros. Melee*. After the success of *Melee*, Nintendo put cameos of this character in several other games, such as the *WarioWare* series, *Super Mario Odyssey*, *Rhythm Heaven Fever*, and *Donkey Kong Country Returns*, and while the *Gallery* series has never returned, two *Game & Watch* compilations were released on the DS for Club Nintendo subscribers, and a variety of games were released as downloadable software for the DSi. Mr. Game & Watch also reprised his role in *Super Smash Bros. Brawl*, with an important plot relevance in the game's story mode, and has made a major appearance in all of the *Super Smash Bros.* series since then as well. A recreation of the original unit of *Ball* was released as a Club Nintendo reward in Japan, albeit with a slightly different exterior to emphasize its status as a replica.

On September 3, 2020, 29 years after the original Game & Watch series' discontinuation and as part of the celebration of the 35th anniversary of *Super Mario Bros.* (and to an extent the 40th anniversary of the Game & Watch console series), Nintendo announced *Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros.*, a full-color screen Game & Watch system featuring ports of *Super Mario Bros.* and *Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels* as well as a *Mario*-themed version of *Ball*. It has a limited release starting November 13, 2020 and lasted until March 31, 2021. In similar fashion, Nintendo announced the *Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda* during E3 2021 as part of the celebration of the 35th anniversary of *The Legend of Zelda*, featuring *The Legend of Zelda*, *Zelda II: The Adventure of Link*, and the non-colorized Game Boy version of *The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening* along with a *Zelda*-themed version of *Vermin*. It was released on November 12, 2021.

## Trivia

* The creators of the "Homestar Runner" series of cartoons have created an online game, known as Pigs on Head, based fundamentally on the G&W brand.
* Mr. Game & Watch's Final Smash in the *Super Smash Bros,* series beginning in *Super Smash Bros. Brawl* onwards, transforms him into the Octopus, found in the LCD Game & Watch game titled "Octopus."
* In *Super Paper Mario*, the Flipside/Flopside Pits of 100 Trials and minigame, Hammer Bash, resembles the Game & Watch's Black and White LED screen.
* The Game & Watch multi-screen line was the primary inspiration for the *Nintendo DS* system, more so with the *Nintendo DS Lite* system.
* The *Game & Watch* universe has the fewest trophies in both *Melee* and *Brawl*.
* The *Game & Watch* universe has the least amount of music tracks for a universe with a dedicated music category in *Ultimate*, with two tracks.
	+ Prior to version 10.0.0, it shared this distinction with the *Final Fantasy* universe.
* *Game & Watch* is the only universe with a playable character to have its first game released on a handheld that is not the Game Boy.
* *Brawl* is the only game in the series where Mr. Game & Watch's stage is unlocked alongside himself. *Melee* and *Smash 4* require completing a challenge after unlocking him, while *Ultimate* has the stages available at the start.
* The *Game & Watch* universe is the oldest universe represented with a playable character, debuting one month before the *PAC-MAN* universe.
* *Egg* is the only *Game & Watch* title represented in *Smash* to not be the basis for one of Mr. Game & Watch's moves, instead only being represented via a sticker in *Brawl*.

## References

1. ↑ Commercial at the Museum of Classic Chicago Television.