Game & Watch began with a calculator chip. The one inside Ball, the first game, could light 72 segments, the little fixed shapes an LCD calculator uses to build its digits. Nintendo spent 28 of them on a four-digit score and clock, and drew the juggler and his balls with the other 44. Everything a player saw moved by switching printed shapes on and off. From that start in April 1980, Gunpei Yokoi’s team made one pocket game after another for eleven years. By Nintendo’s count the series sold 43.4 million units, and one of them, the 1982 Donkey Kong, gave Nintendo the cross-shaped control pad it put on the NES and the Game Boy.
Fast facts
- Maker: Nintendo, designed by Gunpei Yokoi’s research and development team.
- First game: Ball, April 1980 in Japan.
- Last new game: Mario the Juggler, 1991.
- Games: 59, across about ten formats.
- Sales: 43.4 million (12.87 million in Japan, 30.53 million overseas), by Nintendo’s count.
- Display: a liquid-crystal screen of fixed, printed segments, driven by a chip of the kind used in calculators.
- Power: button-cell batteries, the kind used in watches and calculators.
- In Britain: distributed by CGL.
A game made of segments
Nintendo’s own developers explained the design in a 2010 interview with Nintendo’s president, Satoru Iwata. Yokoi is said to have had the idea after watching a man on the Shinkansen bullet train play with a calculator. The developer Izushi confirmed the part that matters: “The chip used in Game & Watch was the same as in calculators.”
An eight-digit calculator needs 7 segments a digit, 56 in all, plus a few more for the decimal point and minus sign. The chip in Ball could drive 72. Every character pose and every position of every ball had to be one of those segments, drawn in advance and printed on the screen, and a game was the order in which they lit up. That is why Game & Watch movement jumps from spot to spot: the character has nowhere else to be.
The team counted segments closely. The developers said that from the second game, Flagman, the thousands digit of the score could show only a “1”. That saved four segments, so the score topped out at 1999, and the saved segments went into the game. The clock was probably added late, they thought, because the display has no colon between hours and minutes: a colon would have cost a segment.
Before a game went near a chip, it was built as a light box. Kano drew the screen artwork, the drawing was copied onto film in a darkroom, and the programmers Izushi and Yamamoto cut acrylic to match and fitted grain-of-wheat bulbs, the tiny lamps used in model trains, behind each shape. The test models were about the size of a sheet of A4. The team tuned the timing on them until a missed catch felt fair. Where players would think they had caught a ball, Izushi said, “we made the game’s judgment a little loose.” Yokoi reviewed every one, and often sent them back: “Why not try it once more?” Working in turns, Izushi and Yamamoto could put out one game a month.
Cheap parts on purpose
Yokoi’s name for this approach, as Retro Gamer records it, was “Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology”: using mature, cheap components in new ways. David Sheff’s history of Nintendo quotes Yokoi directly: “The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.” Calculator displays were everywhere by 1980. Sheff says the team chose components from Sharp.
Retro Gamer quotes the journalist Lara Crigger on the argument this settled inside Nintendo: “Some people at Nintendo wanted to use fancier technology in the Game & Watch, technology that would have reduced battery life and raised costs, but Yokoi insisted that affordability was key”. The button-cell batteries fitted the same thinking. They were small, cheap to replace and lasted a long time. Each unit also told the time and, from the Gold series on, had an alarm, which Retro Gamer points out made it a useful watch for children who could not afford a digital one.
The cross-shaped pad
A joystick, Retro Gamer says, “would impede the Game & Watch’s portability”, so Yokoi looked for controls “that would take up less space”. The early games used a couple of buttons, usually for left and right or for jumping.
In 1982 Nintendo tried something new. Donkey Kong Jr. had “four buttons arranged in a cross shape, with each one corresponding to up, down, left and right”. The multi-screen Donkey Kong of the same year had the single cross-shaped pad, the D-pad, that Retro Gamer‘s 2004 history says “later graced the NES controller and GameBoy”. The same history calls Donkey Kong the series’ first million-seller.
Ten formats
Nintendo kept changing the case around the same idea. Retro Gamer counts about ten formats:
| Format | From | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Silver | 1980 | The first five games: Ball, Flagman, Vermin, Fire and Judge. |
| Gold | 1981 | Three games, with an alarm and a small fold-out stand. Manhole came first, in January 1981. |
| Wide Screen | 1981 | A screen about 30 per cent larger. Ten games, including Octopus and Fire Attack. |
| Multi Screen | 1982 | Two screens in a case that folded shut, starting with Oil Panic in May 1982. Donkey Kong followed, then Zelda in 1989. |
| Tabletop | 1983 | Colour, reflected from a mirror, but large and run on C batteries. Four games. |
| Panorama | 1983 | A smaller colour version with a fold-out mirror. |
| Super Color | 1984 | A standard LCD with a colour overlay. Only two games. |
| Micro Vs. | 1984 | Two players, each with a small controller that stored in the case. |
| Crystal Screen | 1980s | A transparent screen, sold as a luxury item but easily damaged. |
| New Wide Screen | 1980s | The Wide Screen design relaunched, including Donkey Kong Jr. and Mario the Juggler. |
The early Silver games sold slowly. Retro Gamer says sales took off with Fire in July 1980. After the NES arrived, the handhelds became a sideline. Zelda in 1989, the same year as the Game Boy, was the second-to-last new game. The last, Mario the Juggler in 1991, was a remake of Ball with Mario as the juggler.
Selling millions
Nintendo had little presence outside Japan at the time, so other companies sold the games abroad. Retro Gamer names them: Mega in the USA, CGL in the UK, Ji21 in France, Videopoche in Belgium and Futuretronics in Australia, some of which put their own names on the boxes. CGL’s British advertising in Computer & Video Games at the end of 1981 sold the idea as “At last. A watch that’s fun”. It listed five games, Headache (the British name for Helmet), Parachute, Octopus, Lion and Manhole, on sale “at larger branches of Boots, Rumbelows, Selfridges and Hamleys”.
Sheff writes that Nintendo shipped Game & Watches “by the tens, and then hundreds, of thousands”. Bootleg copies from other Asian manufacturers cost it “potential millions”, but the company “nevertheless made many millions” from the units it sold. When Iwata read out the lifetime total in 2010, 12.87 million in Japan and 30.53 million overseas, 43.4 million in all, the developers who had made the games were hearing it for the first time. “Back then,” Izushi said, “sales figures never made it to the developers.” Retro Gamer’s 2004 history gave a much lower figure, “over 12 million”, which is close to Nintendo’s figure for Japan alone.
Sources
- Nintendo, Iwata Asks: Game & Watch (2010), with Nintendo developers Kano, Izushi and Yamamoto. Part 2, “Using a Calculator Chip”: the calculator idea, the calculator chip, Ball’s 72 segments and 28-segment counter, the “1” in the thousands place and the 1999 limit, the missing colon, Ball (April 1980), Flagman (June 1980) and Manhole (January 1981). Part 3, “Test Models with Little Bulbs”: the darkroom, acrylic and grain-of-wheat bulbs, A4-sized test models, the loosened catch judgment, Yokoi’s reviews, one game a month. Part 4, “Absorbed in Development”: 12.87 million in Japan, 30.53 million overseas, 43.4 million in total. https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Iwata-Asks/Iwata-Asks-Game-Watch/Iwata-Asks-Game-Watch/2-Using-a-Calculator-Chip/2-Using-a-Calculator-Chip-223003.html
- Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004, Game & Watch feature: Ball in April 1980; slow early sales until Fire in July 1980; the formats and their titles; Oil Panic as the first Multi Screen game in May 1982; Donkey Kong’s cross-shaped pad and million sales; “over 12 million” sold; Mario the Juggler (1991) as the last release.
- Retro Gamer issue 55, 2008, “Retroinspection: Game & Watch”: Lara Crigger on “Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology”; the joystick and the early buttons; Donkey Kong Jr.’s cross of four buttons; the clock, alarm and button-cell batteries; the Gold, Wide Screen, Tabletop, Panorama, Super Color, Micro Vs. and Crystal Screen formats; the overseas distributors including CGL; Zelda (1989) and Mario the Juggler (1991).
- Retro Gamer issue 114, May 2013: 59 games and more than 43 million units over 11 years.
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999), chapter 2, “In Heaven’s Hands”: Yokoi on “mature technology”, the calculator market, Sharp components, sales and bootlegs.
- Computer & Video Games issue 2, December 1981: CGL advertisement for Game & Watch (“At last. A watch that’s fun”).