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Pick Up and Play, Part 8: Game & Watch Gallery 2

Marcel Pflug

Nov 13, 2025

4 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

If the first Game & Watch Gallery was a love letter to Nintendo's earliest handhelds, the sequel is a second helping, and a rarer one. Part eight of Pick Up and Play stays with the same brilliant format, bite-size classics in old and new clothes, but adds a collector's wrinkle that the first game did not have.

More classics, same perfect format

The Game & Watch Gallery 2 carries on exactly what made the first so easy to pick up. It gathers another set of Nintendo's Game & Watch handheld games and, as before, lets you play each one in a faithful Classic mode or a livelier, Mario-themed Modern mode. Every game inside is a self-contained few-minute burst of timing and reflex with a score to beat and nothing to lose by stopping, which is the whole reason the Game & Watch idea belongs at the heart of a series like this. It is comfort food for anyone who likes a quick round, and doubly so if you enjoy seeing a 1980s design and its modern reimagining side by side.

Japanese Game Boy Game & Watch Gallery 2 cartridge (import) — The Japan-only sequel, still in monochrome.

The line-up leans on the same deep well of early Game & Watch titles, classics such as Parachute and Chef, each rebuilt twice over. In Classic mode you get the game almost exactly as it was, all stark silhouettes and simple beeps; in Modern mode the action is restaged with Mario, Yoshi, Donkey Kong and friends, brighter graphics and the odd extra wrinkle to freshen up a decades-old design. Playing the two back to back is a quiet lesson in game design, showing how much personality you can layer on without touching the underlying rules that made the original work in the first place.

It is also Super Game Boy enhanced, a nice touch for a late-era original Game Boy title, dressing the old games up with a coloured border and a splash of on-screen colour when played through the Super Nintendo adapter.

As with its predecessor, the pick-up-and-play fit is total. Nothing here asks for more than a minute or punishes you for walking away; every game is a self-contained sprint for a high score. It is the sort of cartridge you leave in the Game Boy for exactly those moments when you want to play something and think about nothing, which turns out to be a rarer and more valuable thing than it sounds.

The one that stayed in Japan

Here is the twist that makes this one special to own. On the original monochrome Game Boy, Game & Watch Gallery 2 was a Japan exclusive. Western players did eventually get a version, but on the Game Boy Color rather than the classic hardware, which is why the plain grey-cartridge release in the collection is an import, and why collectors prize it precisely because its first outing stayed tied to the original machine. It is a small reminder that even a cheerful compilation of forty-year-old games can carry a real regional rarity for the people who go looking.

For a collector, that regional quirk is half the appeal. The cartridge in the archive is the genuine Japanese release, grey plastic and Japanese text, the version that asks you to go looking rather than simply buy it off a shelf at home. There is a particular pleasure in an object whose very ordinariness, a friendly compilation of tiny classics, sits right alongside a genuine scarcity on the original hardware. It is the kind of game that only makes full sense once you know the story of why it is here and not there.

The little handhelds refused to fade, too. Their flat, monochrome hero became Mr. Game & Watch, a fan-favourite fighter in Super Smash Bros., and Nintendo has since reissued brand-new Game & Watch units as collectibles for its anniversaries, charming players who were not even born when the format first appeared. Compilations like this one are a big part of why that memory stayed alive at all.

And with it, the shelf comes full circle. We started this series with Tetris, a game with no ending, and we finish with a cartridge that is really a museum of games that never needed one. Everything in between, the pills, the shells, the bat and ball, the grids and the drifting line, has been a variation on the same simple gift the Game Boy gave its players: something good to do with a few spare minutes, and no reason to feel bad about stopping.

That brings our first run of pick-up-and-play games to a close, from Tetris to two trips through Nintendo's own handheld history. To see these cartridges and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.