Search

Pick Up and Play, Part 7: Game & Watch Gallery

Marcel Pflug

Feb 25, 2024

3 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

This series has been about the games you can play in a spare minute, so it would be strange not to visit the machine that started the whole idea. Long before the Game Boy, Nintendo made its name on tiny single-game handhelds you kept in a pocket and played at a bus stop. Part seven of Pick Up and Play is the cartridge that brings those little classics back to the Game Boy itself, a neat piece of history folding in on itself.

Game Boy Game & Watch Gallery cartridge (US) — The Game Boy's own ancestor, back on a cartridge.

The original pick-up-and-play machine

Game & Watch was Nintendo's line of pocket LCD handhelds, launched in 1980, each one built around a single simple game and, as the name promised, a clock. They were the work of Gunpei Yokoi, the same engineer who would later design the Game Boy, which makes this cartridge a quiet family reunion. Game & Watch also gave the world something every player now takes for granted: the cross-shaped directional pad, first used on the multi-screen Donkey Kong model before it became standard on every controller since. In other words, the Game Boy owes its designer, its philosophy of cheap portable fun, and even the shape of its d-pad to the games gathered on this cart.

The Game & Watch line ran through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, spanning dozens of models and tens of millions of units, each a slim slab of plastic with a segmented LCD screen that could only light up pre-drawn shapes. From that limitation came real ingenuity: games like Ball, where you juggle to a rising rhythm, or the multi-screen folding units that packed two displays into a clamshell case. They were cheap, near indestructible and instantly understood, and for a whole generation they were the first video game you could carry in a coat pocket.

That thrift was a philosophy, not an accident. Yokoi built his career on what he called lateral thinking with seasoned technology: taking cheap, well-understood parts and using them in clever new ways rather than chasing the cutting edge. It is the same instinct that later made the Game Boy a monochrome, battery-sipping machine in an age of colour rivals, and the same instinct that let it comfortably outsell them. Game & Watch is where that thinking was first proven, one pocket handheld at a time.

Two ways to play, one museum on a cartridge

The Game & Watch Gallery from 1997 does more than reprint the old games. Each included title can be played two ways: a Classic version that faithfully recreates the original monochrome handheld, and a Modern version that redraws the same game with Mario characters and a little more colour and personality. You get to feel the stark, elegant simplicity of the 1980s original and then see it reimagined, side by side. Better still, the cartridge hides an unlockable gallery of the original Game & Watch animations, so as you play you are also assembling a small museum of Nintendo's earliest handheld history. For a project like ours, a game that is itself a little museum is impossible not to love.

There is even a gentle hook to keep you coming back. Scoring well in the Modern versions earns you stars, and those stars gradually unlock the Classic modes and the gallery of preserved originals, so idle high-score chasing quietly turns into curating a little exhibition. It is a clever way to make you appreciate the history rather than just skim it: you earn the museum by playing the games, one good run at a time.

As pick-up-and-play goes, this is the platonic ideal. Every game inside is a bite-size test of timing and reflex with a running score and no ending to reach, exactly the format Game & Watch perfected forty years ago. You switch it on, catch a few falling parachutists or flip a few pancakes, chase a better score, and switch it off none the worse for stopping. It is the whole philosophy of this series in a single cartridge.

For our purposes it is almost too perfect. Every game here was designed, four decades ago, around the exact idea this series celebrates, that a good game can last thirty seconds and still be worth switching on for. Playing them on the Game Boy, the machine their own creator went on to build, closes a loop that most compilations never even notice is there.

This is the US edition; its Japan-exclusive follow-up, Game & Watch Gallery 2, is next in the series and also lives in the collection. To see this cartridge and the rest, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.