Game & Watch

Game & Watch is a series of handheld electronic games made by Nintendo from 1980 to 1991. The idea came from Gunpei Yokoi, who is said to have been inspired by watching a commuter pass the time by playing with a pocket calculator.

Each Game & Watch plays one game, sometimes with a second, harder mode. The graphics are fixed segments printed into the LCD, which are switched on and off to show movement, so every unit is built around a single game. As the name suggests, every model also works as a clock, and most have an alarm.

Nintendo released 59 or 60 different games, depending on how they are counted, in series such as Silver, Gold, Wide Screen, Multi Screen, Tabletop, Panorama and Micro Vs. The dual-screen Multi Screen models, including Donkey Kong in 1982, introduced the cross-shaped directional pad that Nintendo later used on the NES controller, and their clamshell design returned decades later on the Nintendo DS.

Around 43 million Game & Watch units were sold. Nintendo has brought the name back several times, most recently with the Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. and Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda units released in 2020 and 2021.

Because each game is its own piece of hardware, a Game & Watch emulator has to simulate the unit’s 4-bit microcontroller and draw its LCD segments from scans of the real screen. MAME is the way to play these games today: it emulates nearly every Game & Watch model, together with many other LCD handhelds from the same era.