G4 | Tech News on G4 | Games, Gear, Gadgets & Gigabytes

back to -|- Tech News index -|- Andy Barratt column archive -|- Send Us Your Feedback

When Nintendo announced the DS; and I mean the original, silver behemoth and not its ice cool, slimline brethren - I got a severe case of déjà vu.

I mean, strip away the wireless play, the stylus pointer and all the other amazing innovations they packed in - including it seems, the ability to print money. But just stop short at the dual screen, the very thing that makes the DS what it is and why it’s named as such, and rewind handheld gaming by about 22 years, and like me you’ll most likely arrive at the MultiScreen Game & Watch series.

Nintendo’s Game & Watch handhelds started life in 1980, supposedly when a member of the corporation’s gaming design team took inspiration from a bored businessman playing with a regular calculator on his daily commute and decided to give him something else to occupy his fingers with.

The anatomy of the original G&W games comprised of a screen measuring around 6cm diagonally, with control buttons to the right and left of it. And as you might’ve worked out by the name, as well as a game the units also served as alarm clocks.

They didn’t have “graphics” per se; instead a permanently printed landscape or environment coupled with various LCD segments represented the game action. For example, to move a player from the left of the screen to the right might involve seven clicks of the “right” button, through seven different segments. Difficult to imagine in this day and age of textures and polygons, eh?

Each game usually had two modes of play – Game A and Game B, with the latter usually meaning a faster version of Game A.

They started out simple, such as the series debut title “Ball” – requiring the player to move their character left and right to juggle faster and faster balls, or “Fire” – where you had to move a lifesaving trampoline back and forth to bounce a relentless stream of people diving from a burning building into a waiting ambulance.

But the series got more and more ambitious, eventually moving from one screen to two, and even introduced some more familiar titles such as Donkey Kong (in an actually fairly faithful LCD reproduction of the arcade original) and Mario. Even Zelda got a look in towards the end of the format’s lifespan.

And, as ludicrous as it sounds today, the G&W series was the first video game unit to sport a D-Pad direction control for the left thumb.

The G&W brand was eventually stretched to title almost all Nintendo’s home gaming output outside of the NES system, including the tabletop range, which whilst still LCD in the same way as the very first G&W games, were backlit and displayed in full colour.

Many classic titles have over the years been ported to the DS and GameBoy – the machine that obviously meant the end for the G&W range because of the cartridge based game format, but still Nintendo continue to refer to their first foray in handheld gaming with Mr Game & Watch starring in the Super Smash Brothers series, the release of Mini Classics – tiny re-releases of early G&W games oddly in a miniature GameBoy style casing, and finally the DS. I think you’ll find it hard to dispute that in developing the replacement for the GameBoy, the Nintendo people took a good long look at their lineage and found the inspiration for their greatest handheld ever right there in the G&W. What better homage could the world’s leading handheld gaming video company pay the machines that started the ball rolling?

About G4 in Canada
G4 Canada (formerly TechTV Canada) launched in September 2001. G4 is the one and only television station that is plugged into every dimension of games, gear, gadgets and gigabytes. Owned Rogers Media Inc., the channel airs more than 24 original series. G4 is available on digital cable and satellite. For more information, see www.g4tv.ca.

Tech News on G4

Mr. Game and Watch

March 11, 2008

By Andy Barratt - G4 Canada