Manhole

One of the oldest and at the same time purest games in the entire Nintendo Game & Watch line is built on a single, brilliantly simple idea: pedestrians cross over collapsed manholes and you must cover the hole in time so that no one falls down. Manhole is a textbook of how to extract maximum tension from a minimum.

The player controls manhole covers at four spots and moves them to where a passing figure will step in a moment. Whoever comes a step too soon, whoever a step too late, one hole uncovered at the wrong moment and the pedestrian disappears into the sewer. As people accumulate and the pace grows, the calm repositioning turns into desperate anticipation, where you no longer manage to think and play purely on instinct.

Manhole belongs to the first wave of Game & Watch, pocket LCD games that Nintendo began producing in 1980 according to a design by Gunpei Yokoi. These devices ran on economical displays with a permanently printed image and lighting-up segments, and besides the game they also served as a digital watch with an alarm, hence indeed the name of the whole line, "game and watch."

Culturally, Game & Watch played a key role: they launched the worldwide market for handheld electronic games, tested on millions of units the business model that the Game Boy later fully exploited, and moved Nintendo from a maker of toys and cards into the ranks of the major players in the entertainment industry. Titles like Manhole are a reminder of the days when anything that lit up and responded to a button was considered a game.

From today's perspective, Manhole enchants with its austerity and with how quickly an innocent little thing turns into a stressful chase for points. It has no ending, no story, just you and increasing speed. Exactly the kind of elegant gameplay that modern game design often seeks in vain.

Why play: For a demonstratively pure arcade idea from the dawn of pocket gaming that, even after decades, entertains with instant, easily learned tension.