Game & Watch (Universe)

The **Game & Watch** (ゲーム＆ウォッチ, *Gēmu ando Uotchi*) universe is a franchise 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. This console inspired Nintendo to make the Game Boy. It was the earliest Nintendo product to garner major success. The series popularized handheld electronic entertainment and set up for Nintendo's later Game Boy line of portable consoles. For predating even 1981's *Donkey Kong*, the *Game & Watch* series is sometimes labeled a critical forerunner in Nintendo's modern video game business.

## Franchise description

Prior to his work in Nintendo in video games, where he would eventually create the first games in the *Metroid* and *Kid Icarus* series, Gunpei Yokoi was traveling on a Shinkansen Bullet Train, when he saw a businessman pressing buttons on a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) calculator in an attempt to kill time. It occurred to Yokoi that there could be an audience for a handheld machine meant specifically for game-based entertainment, so as head for Nintendo's R&D1, he created the first games in what would be a long-running line of *Game & Watch* handheld dedicated consoles (dedicated in that each individual unit had one game built into it). The games in the franchise were released as "subseries" based on the consistent design of each Game & Watch. The first set of G&W games released in 1980 was called the "Silver" series. The Game & Watch made handhelds vastly popular, and prompted other companies, such as Tiger Electronics, to produce similar devices of their own.

After the first *Game & Watch* games helped carve more of the path towards gaming as a mainstream commodity, a path formerly started by such products as *Pong* and *Pac-Man* and would later be continued by *Nintendo* in releases such as *Donkey Kong* and then *Super Mario Bros.* for the NES, new subseries of *Game & Watch* games were developed and released in the years afterward, and they would eventually be superseded by the Nintendo Game Boy, which was the first handheld to be able to play more than one game. The sequel subseries to *Silver*, *Gold*, was made in 1981, and further new subseries of Game & Watch products that were released in the years afterward were the *Widescreen* (1981-1982), *Multiscreen* (1982-1989), *Tabletop* (1983), *Panorama* (1983-1984), *New Widescreen* (1982-1991), *Super Color* (1984), *Micro Vs. System* (1984), *Crystal Screen* (1986), and much later in 1998, the *Mini Classics* series. Throughout the Game & Watch's entire history, approximately 59 distinctive titles were released. The name of each subseries generally denotes the physical build and layout of the game devices in that subseries, such as games in the *Multiscreen* subseries being "clamshell"-designed, handheld devices, with two separate screens displayed simultaneously, one above the other. The Yokoi-designed, multi-screen layout of *Game & Watch* gaming devices is extremely similar to the design of the modern-day, handheld gaming devices, the Nintendo DS.

The games themselves were generally simple in design, especially so for the earliest of the games, such as *Manhole*, which comes packaged with the e-Reader for Game Boy Advance. They often had buttons titled "Game A" and "Game B", where selecting one game mode over the other would affect difficulty. As the rest of the gaming industry expanded and developed, the *Game & Watch* series became somewhat less antiquated; it would soon play fully ported versions of *Donkey Kong*, *Balloon Fight*, *Super Mario Bros.*, and *The Legend of Zelda*. *Game & Watch* games were not limited to known Nintendo characters either; there were also games based on Disney's Mickey Mouse, and several of the games featured an unnamed, fully black-colored character in particular.

After the *Game & Watch* series was superseded by the Game Boy and its many future successors, the *Game & Watch* name took its place as an artifact from gaming's early history. When HAL Laboratory was designing *Super Smash Bros. Melee* in 2001, it decided to renew historical appreciation for the franchise by featuring properties from *Game & Watch* in *Melee* as a playable franchise, alongside such major game franchises as *Mario* and *Zelda*. To this end, they gave the unnamed character from several of the games the identity of Mr. Game & Watch, and made him to be the playable "mascot" of the *Game & Watch* series. *Game & Watch* has since become a better known subject among the gaming community, enough that properties from it make occasional cameo appearances elsewhere, such as a false clone of Mr. Game and Watch appearing as an NPC in *Wario Land 4* for Game Boy Advance.