1003 Games that made me what I am
Boom
In the early 1980s, video games started to appear everywhere. People played them at the arcade, at home, and yes, even on a wristwatch.
We couldn’t get enough. In 1983 I was at school in my eighth grade, some of my friends had watches that made everyone be jealous. This small wonders made a dull lecture almost bearable.
The GM-10 was Casio’s earliest animated game watch. Using the two pushers on the right, you maneuver your ship and fire missiles to fend an alien attack. The Game-10 also features a chronograph and alarm. The 301 was very similar.
In the late 1970s Nintendo the Kyoto, Japan-based company was more well known for toys and Hanafuda cards than video games. Like American companies at the time they were producing a line of first generation consoles named “Color TV Game”. As the 80s began and games like Space Invaders was becoming the hottest things around in Japan, Nintendo not only started work on their own arcade games, but also found a new market by repurposing newly cheapened calculator tech and making the first truly handheld video games in the form of Game & Watch.
Incredibly primitive by today’s standards, G&W was a novel approach to gaming 30 years ago. Each system was dedicated to a single title, and almost all had two modes, Game A and Game B, with Game B being the more difficult of the two. It did all that plus it told you what time it was and you could set an alarm too. If you want a more in-depth look at Game & Watch’s creation, read this fascinating edition of Nintendo’s Iwata Asks.
By this time circa 1893 the most popular toys at the playground were the Game & Watch by Nintendo. Very few people had them but they grabbed all the attention and small crowds were gathered around them. We played them in turns and I will have amassed something like 30 seconds in a week of playtime.
Game & Watch Fire: Bouncing the non-descript humanoids from place to place seems straightforward, but rapidly the task of keeping as many as five different victims in the air, hurtling toward the ambulance becomes an intense experience.
The problem with G&W was that they were too expensive. Early in the decade of 80 the Portuguese economy was in tatters with the country close to bankruptcy and under the intervention by the IMF. G&W were seen as luxury items available to very few.
Instead of a G&W I got a cheap imitation, a LCD with the game CAR RACE. However at the time I was the happiest kid in the world.
