Game & Watch Gallery: The Game Boy Remembers Where It Came From

Most games look forward. Game & Watch Gallery looks back, and that is exactly what makes it special. Released in 1997, near the end of the original Game Boy's life, it is a cartridge that reaches back seventeen years to the little single-game LCD handhelds that made Nintendo a toy giant in the first place. It is, in a real sense, a museum you could fit in your pocket, which is why it feels so at home in ours.

A museum of Nintendo's handheld past, in a single cartridge.

Before the Game Boy, there was the Game & Watch

To understand the Gallery, you have to go back to 1980. That was the year Nintendo released the first Game & Watch, a slim LCD gadget that played a single built-in game and doubled as a clock. It was the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi, the same engineer who would later design the Game Boy itself. The Game & Watch line sold in enormous numbers and, crucially, gave the world the cross-shaped directional pad, the humble D-pad that every controller has used ever since.

The games themselves were tiny marvels of restraint: juggle three balls, catch falling manhole workers, guide a diver past an octopus. Each one did a single thing and did it beautifully, squeezing surprising tension out of a fixed set of LCD segments. The Game Boy is a direct descendant of these devices, so a Game Boy game that celebrates them is a family reunion.

Juggle, catch, dodge, repeat: 1980 called and it still holds up.

Classic and Modern

Game & Watch Gallery is built around a clever two-way idea. In Classic mode, you play faithful recreations of the original Game & Watch games, preserved almost exactly as they were, right down to their stark, segmented look. In Modern mode, the same games are reimagined with fuller graphics, music and Mario-universe characters, so that the diver becomes a familiar face and the juggler picks up a red hat. It is preservation and reinvention on one cartridge, and you can flip between the two to see how far a simple idea can travel.

Tying it together is an unlockable gallery. As you play and rack up points, you earn glimpses into Nintendo's handheld history, a reward that is really an invitation to learn where all this came from. Few games of the era were so openly curatorial about their own past, and for a company that usually looks resolutely forward, it was a rare and warm-hearted bit of self-reflection.

A sequel, and a small series

The idea proved popular enough to continue. A sequel followed on the Game Boy, adding more of the classic games in the same Classic-and-Modern format, and the concept carried on to the Game Boy Color afterwards. The naming across regions is a famously tangled affair, with different territories numbering the games differently, but the spirit never changed: keep the old games alive, and dress a few of them up for a new audience.

The Sequel - Game & Watch Gallery 2

That is what makes these cartridges quietly moving to hold. They are the Game Boy tipping its cap to the machines that made it possible, and to the engineer who designed both. A collection like ours could hardly ask for a more fitting artefact.

You can find Game & Watch Gallery and its sequel in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.