Oil Panic

Two screens, one disaster, and you in the middle — Oil Panic showed that even with a strictly limited LCD display, something surprisingly ingenious could be devised. This Game & Watch title from the first half of the eighties made use of the fold-out dual-screen format and managed to extract gameplay from it that single-screen devices could not offer.

The principle of Oil Panic is based on catching drops of oil. On the top screen you catch escaping oil in a container and make sure it does not overflow; when it is full, you must pour it down at the right moment onto the bottom screen, where a helper waits with containers. The game thus cleverly links the action on both displays — you have to watch the upper and lower parts at the same time and coordinate two activities at once. That is precisely what made it an unusually demanding and clever title.

Dual-screen Game & Watch devices of this type were an example of how Nintendo pushed the boundaries of its own platform. Instead of a single display, they offered a fold-out construction with two screens, thereby expanding design possibilities. This format proved to be such a strong idea that it foreshadowed Nintendo's later dual-screen thinking. The same family also includes the cooperative Mario Bros., the first game where Mario and Luigi work together on a conveyor belt packing bottles.

The cultural significance of these titles lies in the fact that they expanded the notion of what a pocket game could do. The player no longer watched just one field of the screen but had to divide their attention — a concept that proved extraordinarily viable and returned to Nintendo many years later.

Clever design within the strict limits of LCD is exactly what Oil Panic excels at. It shows that the creativity of the designers was able to overcome technical limitations and turn the simple mechanic of catching drops into a tense interplay of both hands and both eyes.

Why play: For clever dual-screen gameplay that squeezed a surprisingly fresh and demanding experience out of the strict limits of the LCD display.