Just In: Game & Watch Gallery, a Museum on a Cartridge

Long before the Game Boy, Nintendo made its name on tiny single-game handhelds with fixed LCD screens. This arrival is the console looking back fondly at its own ancestors: Game & Watch Gallery, a 1997 cartridge that is, in effect, a small museum you can hold in one hand.

Gunpei Yokoi's Game & Watch, revived on the machine that replaced them. The circle of Nintendo life.

What It Is

Game & Watch Gallery is a 1997 Game Boy title that brings Nintendo's pre-Game Boy handheld games onto the console in collectible form. Each included Game & Watch game can be played in an original-style Classic version and in a Mario-themed Modern remake, so the cartridge offers both faithful preservation and a fresh reinterpretation. It also hides an unlockable gallery of the original Game & Watch animations, which gives it the genuine feel of a small museum on a cartridge. This is the US edition; the Japanese follow-up, Game & Watch Gallery 2, is catalogued separately in the collection.

Nintendo Preserving Nintendo

There is a beautiful circularity to this game. The Game & Watch series, launched in 1980, was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the same engineer who would go on to create the Game Boy, so this cartridge is the Game Boy paying tribute to its own designer's earlier work. By offering each game in both its original form and a modern remake, and by tucking away a gallery of the source animations, Nintendo effectively turned a commercial product into an act of preservation, keeping its own history playable rather than letting it fade into obsolete plastic. It is a company curating its past on the very hardware that succeeded it.

That mission chimes exactly with what a collection like this one tries to do, which is part of why the game is such a satisfying thing to hold. It is preservation folded into play: a child in 1997 could enjoy the modern Mario versions while unknowingly meeting the very games that launched Nintendo's handheld empire seventeen years earlier. Paired with its Japanese sequel already in the collection, it lets the whole Game & Watch revival be traced across regions, one cartridge looking back at another looking back further still.

Why It Joined the Collection

A game that is itself an act of preservation belongs naturally in a preservation-minded collection. Game & Watch Gallery documents Nintendo's own reverence for its pre-Game Boy history, links the console directly to its designer's earlier work, and pairs with the Japanese Game & Watch Gallery 2 to map the whole revival. Keeping it holds on to a cartridge that doubles as a museum of the handhelds the Game Boy replaced.

Game & Watch Gallery is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.