Game & Watch Gallery

Before there was the Game Boy, there were the Game & Watch — and this collection is both a reverent and playful return to the very roots of Nintendo. Game & Watch Gallery gathers the legendary handheld LCD games that Gunpei Yokoi devised at the turn of the seventies and eighties, and packages them in modern form on the very console that is essentially their direct descendant. It is nostalgia in your pocket, but the kind that can still entertain.

The collection offers the classic LCD titles in two versions each. „Classic“ reproduces the original stark game exactly as it looked on the standalone handheld toys — flat segmented images, plain rules, pure reflex-driven gameplay. The „Modern“ version then dresses the same principles in a coat of real graphics and characters from the Mario world, adding power-ups and bonus elements. So you have side by side a museum exhibit and its contemporary, juicier variation.

Gunpei Yokoi, father of both the Game & Watch and the Game Boy itself, built these games on the philosophy of „lateral thinking with withered technology“ — taking cheap, proven components (LCD displays from calculators) and squeezing maximum fun out of them. The Game & Watch were an enormous commercial success that put Nintendo on its feet in the video game business and foreshadowed the whole era of handhelds. Gallery is therefore more than just a compilation — it is a reminder that Nintendo started out as a maker of toys and clever gadgets.

The magic of these games lies in their directness. No stories, no menus — just an accelerating pace, one wrong move and it's over, an ending that tempts you into an immediate rematch. Right and left, catch falling objects, juggle, firefighters with a trampoline — principles half a century old, and yet instantly understandable and surprisingly gripping. The dual presentation also offers a pleasant comparison of how far game design came in just a few years.

The Game & Watch Gallery series continued with further installments that gradually added more classics, becoming a living archival line of Nintendo. For anyone interested in where modern handheld gaming came from, this is the ideal gateway.

Why play: A playful tribute to Nintendo's roots — retro mini-games in two forms, an ideal dose of nostalgia and pure arcade fun for your pocket.