Lion

"Run back and forth with chair."  --instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
29th of April, 1981

The video game industry has a habit of evolution through mitosis. Whether it be players, sticks or screens developers periodically reach that point where they ask the inevitable question - "If it works with one, why not try two?". The results are never entirely predictable. It often proves to be more than a mere quantitative doubling, but something that fundamentally alters the core function of the game. In the case of Game & Watch, such an evolution would occur twice in just thirteen months. And the first of these evolutions came in the unassuming final entry of the Gold series known simply as Lion.

The centrepiece of Lion is a three-storey tall cage in which the player must contain a number of...well, lions. They do this by steering two chair-wielding zoo-keepers up and down - one on the left and one of the right. Though there has been some aspect of multitasking since the series' beginning, this is the first Game & Watch title to split the players' attention over two distinctly moveable characters. Keenly aware that they were pushing their audience into unfamiliar territory, Nintendo's developers designed this game to be sympathetic by maintaining vertical symmetry in visuals and in controls.

It is easy to miss the novelty of multitasking in an age where people have grown accustomed to having a phone in one hand, a game in the other, and a third screen blasting out their favourite television programme over the top (possibly with their second favourite programme on picture-in-picture). But game-players of the eighties were not as used to being stretched in this cognitive direction, and the appeal of this challenge affirmed it as a mainstay in the future of the Game & Watch range.

There are teething troubles, however. The player can only move one of the two zoo-keepers on each 'frame', which can stymie the flow of movement at times. And with only three positions for each character, it's easy to get trapped in the rhythm of centre-react-centre with no need for strategic thinking. On the positive side, Lion's scenario is perhaps the best use of Game & Watch's trademark 'perpetual crisis' so far. This time, the player is not relieving a disaster in progress but containing a disaster yet to happen. A disaster that will only happen if the player is inattentive, at the very time their attention is being carefully bisected.

In terms of retrospective celebration, Lion's share of the attention has not been wanting. It has hit that coveted trifecta of Game & Watch Gallery bonus, WarioWare microgame, and Smash Bros. stage hazard. Rarely though is it mentioned in discussions of Game & Watch classics, and I would not have suspected it to make the leap forward that it does. Eight games and two product lines in, this franchise continues to be surprising. The golden age is by no means over yet.

Crossover

"A plurality of polarizing plates."  --U.S. patent abstract

Developer
Nintendo

U.S. Patent Priority Date
10th of March, 1981

Though this blog's arbitrary starting point of 1980 was fitting in many respects it inevitably causes some aspects of Nintendo's past to be misrepresented. And for nothing is this more true than their production of toys, where the dying gasps of a decade-strong venture come across as little more than momentary interruptions to a different story. But the truth of it is, it's very much the same story. It was through toys that this aimless ancient business found its focus. It was through toys that its staff learned lessons of design, and of play, that proved vital to their future success.

It was a crucial chapter of Nintendo's history. And this is where it ends.

Crossover is a combinatorial conundrum that clearly extends from the lineage, and massive commercial success, of Rubik's Cube. And just like the last such product from Nintendo, the permutations arise from extraneous components being shunted in and out of the play-field. In this case, there are eight squares which slide in and out of a 4x4 matrix  - that is, one spare for each row and column. The entire top casing is semi-transparent to allow players to see the outliers and keep track of the game's current state.

...to a point. There's a slight wrinkle in that each square of the 4x4 grid has a fixed semi-transparent cover which polarises light in one of two alternating directions. And the twenty-four movable tiles underneath likewise alternate between two polarisations. If the polarisations of the tile and cover agree, light passes through. If not, the light is blocked and the resultant square appears to be filled. The goal is to cycle the tiles around until all polarisations clash and the playfield is one solid colour.

I hope that description made the mechanics of Crossover clear to you.  And if it did, would you mind explaining them to me sometime?

It is clear from the design of this puzzle that the challenge, and the intrigue, of Crossover revolve around it being as obfuscated as possible. The patent delights in claiming that the difficultly players have in identifying and remembering the underlying configuration makes it "more interesting and complicated". In my mind, it is more of a two-edged sword. The reduced physicality of the mechanism immediately make it seem less intuitive, and less fair, than Ten Billion. Coupling that with an intangible manipulation of electromagnetic wave forms, and the whole thing feels purpose built for frustration rather than fun.

Admittedly, this was the trend of puzzles at this time. And it is difficult to speculate on just how fun this all might have been without a physical Crossover unit in front of me. But judging by the quantity produced, and the very limited international distribution, I feel safe in saying that Crossover did not quite match the success of its predecessor. In the end though, the question of whether it was a failure or not is almost an irrelevancy. Crossover might come as the end of a long legacy of toys and puzzles, but it should not take the blame for ending it.

Ever since it started, Nintendo's toy department was a one man show. And that one man was no longer available. In some ways, Gunpei Yokoi was a victim of his own success. The engineer who wiled away his leisure time puzzling out the Ultra Hand was now in such hot demand there was precious little time for side projects. The rapidly swelling Game & Watch line was the pride of the company, and had grown an insatiable international market with which no polarising puzzle-box could ever complete. After two decades of building the company to the point where it was poised to conquer the world, Nintendo's toy division suddenly found itself a step back from where the company was headed. The best it could offer was to come to a dignified end, close this chapter of Nintendo's history, and pass its proud legacy on. So it did.

And yet here, in the throes of amiibo fever, one cannot shake the sense that this chapter might not quite be over yet.

Helmet

"While a worker is outside the building, the number of falling tools increases."  --instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
21st of February, 1981

With the first title of the Gold series being a confident restatement of old ideas in a shiny new chassis, the responsibility fell to its successor to shrug off the sense of "same old, same old" by delivering something as yet unseen.  In Helmet, this is achieved by inverting the standard Game & Watch structure. Players are tasked with moving construction workers between two buildings beset by a constant rain of wrenches and buckets. Instead of "be here at time x", we have "don't be here at time x" for the very first time.

This humble negation makes for a marked psychological shift. The player is no longer the fearless hero burdened with rescuing others, but the hapless victim of circumstance. They become imperiled instead of empowered, which goes against the grain of the contemporary gaming experience. To underline this, the game was given a bitterly ironic title. The titular helmet is an irrelevancy, providing no defense against the player's inevitable failure.

Having rendered the player vulnerable, the designers gleefully seize the opportunity to toy with their emotional state. The door each worker has to reach opens and closes sporadically, yanking away any hope of refuge on a whim. Though this introduces chaotic randomness into the discrete and rational world of Game & Watch it comes across as playful rather than cruel, and the team's prior commitment to fair play is maintained in subtle ways.

For instance, the deadly implements fall in order from left to right which enables players to foresee the 'beat' on which an object will strike. Each implement also has a unique 'tick' so that the game's audio encodes information about its state. And the threat of progressively increasing difficulty is relegated to Game B only, giving new players the chance to ease into the rhythm. Against the random cruelty of that heinous door, these elements are vital to provide the hope of victory - a psychological helmet that will encourage the player onwards.

As the first Game & Watch game where the player character is directly at risk, Helmet drops the facade of friendly approachability the series has used to win over new consumers. In its place is a gesture to a dark new future where players can be thrown weaponless into a maelstrom of danger, but with a gentle reassurance that once this danger is understood it can be overcome.

Pause

I am currently moving to a new city and will not have a stable Internet connection over the next week or so. Because of this, I'm putting Leaving Luck on a brief hiatus. The current plan is for normal service to resume on Tuesday the 4th of November.

UPDATE: Real life has intervened. Leaving Luck will now resume on Tuesday the 18th of November. Okay, okay 25th. But I mean it this time.

If you own a Wii U, why not spend the intervening time testing out a small browser-based game I developed? Simply point the Wii U Internet Browser here to try it.

Manhole

"Manhole to manhole."  --instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
29th of January, 1981

At the start of this new year Game & Watch enters a new phase known as the 'Gold' series, named after the colour of their shiny new face plates. While there are some steps forward technologically speaking - most notably the inclusion of coloured background elements - this new series is distinguished more by a change in confidence than a change in hardware.  The gold plating states, rather emphatically, that these are products not afraid of proclaiming their own value. It is also the series with which Nintendo strengthens its commitment to overseas markets. The Silver series had been released in North America under the label "Time Out", and with titles that were somehow more inscrutable than their Japanese counterparts (including Fireman Fireman, Toss Up and The Exter Minator). But from here on out Nintendo have the temerity to push both their own name and the Game & Watch brand into the spotlight. (And just between you and me, I think this'll work out for them.)

Though it marks the start of a new era, Manhole is not so much about breaking new ground as it is about confidently delivering everything the developers have learned so far. Those who have been reading along may have noted that every Game & Watch game so far fits into two overall strands - there are the two-buttoned games of catch and the four-buttoned games which push towards the experimental. Manhole matches the mechanic of the former with the button layout of the latter. Players work as a hapless maintenance worker who is given the unenviable task of filling four open manholes with the only available manhole cover. All to save the pedestrians obliviously strolling across gaping chasms from getting their shirts wet.

Manhole's 'catch'-y mechanics are at once familiar yet subtlety renewed. With four buttons to play with, every position is one press away no matter where the player is. Pedestrians come along in two streams - top and bottom - which progress on alternating beats. This rhythm-based information encoding allows successive pedestrians to come extremely close to one another while retaining the developers' commitment to 'fairness'.  As in Fire, the rate of pedestrians decreases upon every 100 points but Manhole goes one further by subtracting a miss when the player's score reaches 200 and 500. Again, this change enhances the psychology of the game. By giving players the opportunity to redeem their mistakes through perseverance no game session ever feels too far gone. It should be no surprise that this change will become another standard for future Game & Watch titles.

As mentioned above, the Gold series' greatest contribution was the introduction of coloured background elements. In Manhole, they have quite a modest start - just orange brick bridges and blue water hazards. More impressive is the way these harmonise with the LCD assets, with bedraggled pedestrians appearing to struggle on the water's surface despite existing on a separate plane. Manhole is also a showcase for how sophisticated the development team's LCD crafting has become and how this feeds back into the game's emotive design. The player can't help but emphasise with the workman when his face expresses every ounce of discomfort he feels bearing the weight of every passer-by with his hands, head or rear.

It is also worth highlighting how these presentational elements build towards a new aesthetic for Nintendo. Manhole is, even more so than Fire, part of a genre I like to refer to as "urban chaos". Its design, both visually and mechanically, arise out of an attempt to engage with everyday experience - in this case, the careless walking through a world held together by the effort of unknown others. So many games of the time, including Nintendo's own efforts, are built around either the standard-issue extraordinary (space battles, air/sea warfare) or abstracted game concepts (mazes, ball games). Manhole is quite unique in its attempt to gamify the mundane - to find the adventure in the familiar, and to inject heroism and valour into the struggle of the working man.

This is a concept their arcade department would do well to take note of.

Ten Billion

"Puzzle holes and shunting bodies"  --U.S. Design Patent

Developer
Gunpei Yokoi

U.S. Patent Priority Date
23rd of October, 1980


The mid sixties must have been a heady time within the offices of Nintendo. Having taken rein of the company several years earlier Hiroshi Yamauchi, grandson of the founder, was boldly making his mark - renaming the company, listing it on the Japanese stock exchange and expanding into all manner of esoteric side businesses  Of all the ventures attempted in this mad rush, the only one to stick was the one most obviously suited for a company that had been trading amusement for over seventy years. Ironically, this was a venture that Yamauchi merely happened upon. After spotting one of Nintendo's maintenance engineers with an extensible hand toy he had designed in his spare time as an intellectual exercise, Yamauchi seized upon its potential and the success of the Ultra Hand brokered new ground for the company to explore.

Leading the newly-formed toy department was Gunpei Yokoi, the selfsame engineer whose work inspired it all. Under Yokoi this team continued happily for the next decade-or-so, pumping out a steady yet multifarious streak of ingenuity encompassing board games, model kits, shootable targets, baseball tossing machines and a device for converting flashes of light into sound. By 1980, however, the push to capitalise on the emerging electronic game market had all but ended interest in the development of traditional toys. Yokoi's boundless invention was not to be suppressed, however, and his tumbler puzzle game Ten Billion became one of the exceptions.

Perhaps its best to begin by observing that Ten Billion is another example of a Nintendo product that unabashedly wears its influence on its sleeve. And as with the last time we saw this, it was a case of a success too massive to ignore. Rubik's Cube, just like UItra Hand, originated as a self-issued engineering challenge of its inventor Ernő Rubik - namely how to construct an independently transmutable 3x3x3 matrix of cubes. After several years of success in Hungary, the puzzle was exhibited internationally in January 1980 and soon gained notoriety as a relentlessly difficult, yet fiendishly addictive, brain teaser. It would become the world's highest-selling puzzle game, icon of the Poindexter, and even have its own Saturday morning cartoon show.

Ten Billion was clearly conceived to evoke the Rubik's Cube in that players must implement a series of algorithmic shuffles to restore the game's original state from any one of over four thousand billion permutations. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. Ten Billion is functionally a two-dimensional matrix - four rows of coloured balls across five columns interspersed around a cylindrical shell. Players can shift the balls from column to column by twisting the top or bottom pair of rows freely to the left and right.


...look, I'm finding this really difficult to describe. Best to start looking at a picture of it now because this is where it gets complicated.  The balls are shifted from row to row by pushing a plunger back and forth, but this only affects three of the five columns. Effectively, it shunts out three balls into separate holes (initially filled with black balls) such that they cannot be rotated. The game is solved when every column is comprised of four matching balls and the three black balls are returned to the "shunting holes".

It is perhaps not difficult to see why Ten Billion did not take off in quite the same way. It lacks the apparent simplicity of the Rubik's Cube, with multiple types of action required whose mechanics are not immediately intuitive. And its visual design is nowhere near as striking - a mishmash of clear plastic, black rods and unevenly stacked balls. Yet even using a computer-based simulation, I got the sense that this puzzle's outer appearance belies the same compulsive and bemusing gameplay that has driven generations of puzzlers to despair.

While it may not have a cartoon in which it helps a family of Hispanic children stop construction workers from dropping a boulder on an orphanage, Ten Billion was still a popular product of its time and has a humble legacy of its own. In 2007, Nintendo developed a star-shaped equivalent for release as a Club Nintendo bonus. In Germany, the puzzle made quite an impact under the name Teufelstonne and even inspired the release of a solution book. To this day, mathematicians and computer scientists are perfecting algorithms to solve it as efficiently as possible, with every permutation now provably solvable in just eighteen moves. And in the Phazon Mines of Metroid Prime, players can stumble upon a very familiar looking puzzle - included in tribute to the series' original producer.

Perhaps more importantly, Ten Billion was one of Nintendo's earliest truly international successes - aggressively patented, sold and marketed worldwide. Chasing the international success of the Rubik's Cube has led Nintendo out into wider waters, tempting them to form their own distribution channels within. And again, they have one man to thank.

Anyone could choose to emulate the Rubik's Cube, but it took a genius to design a puzzle that could match its playability and intricacy while feeling utterly like its own thing. And all polished off in the downtime between his work on the Game & Watch range. Gunpei Yokoi was truly one in ten billion.

Computer TV Game

"Game?"  --in-game text (translated)

Developer
Nintendo

Release Date
1980


So far we have encountered games for the arcade, and games for the hand. But for many Nintendo's home turf will always be the living room. Under the iron fist and titanic initiative of Hiroshi Yamauchi Nintendo had not been idle even there, releasing several dedicated gaming machines known as the Color TV Game series. The first four to release were the Pong machines Color TV Game 6 and Color TV Game 15, racing game Racing 112  and ball-and-paddle game Block Kuzushi - all released between 1977 and 1979. With their bright colours, sleek casings and attractive price points, each of these games found moderate success amidst the sea of clones, selling in the order of half a million units each.

But then it all went wrong.

To find out how, we first need to hop back to 1977 when Nintendo developed a table top arcade unit Computer Othello - a version of the strategic tile game where players attempt to sandwich each other's pieces and capture the ones between. The modern incarnation of Othello actually originates in Japan, where the early nineteenth century English game Reversi was evolved and renamed during a surge of popularity in the early seventies. With gaming parlours a popular leisure destination for both youths and working adults, Computer Othello had a strong market base to tap and acquitted itself well.

Now three years later, Nintendo sought a quick and dirty method of transferring this game from the arcade to the home. Their solution? To take the game board of the arcade version and build a new shell around it. The result? An oversized, hefty, power glutton of a system with a price point that would make eyes reel. When Computer TV Game first released it cost ¥48,000. In today's terms that would be, using my wide knowledge of international exchange rates and the Japanese inflation index, a lot. At any rate it was enough to buy the Color TV Game 6 five times over, or the entire run of Game & Watch to date with money left over for the next three.

And all for a dedicated system that's sole purpose is to replicate a board game any half-interested household would already own. True, the availability of a computer opponent is a novel addition, and fed into the contemporaneous obsession with computerised engines in competitive Chess. But while that kind of novelty might be worth a coin in the arcade, it is not enough to warrant the average worker's wages for a typical week. Needless to say very few units were ever sold, and the rarity of the system has held up their ridiculously expensive nature to this day.

Even if you could overcome the price, Computer TV Game is mistakes all the way down - from the nondescript title to the controls used to move your cursor (there only appears to be buttons for moving right and down). You have to wonder what breakdown in business logic caused something to release in this state. Where was the feasibility study? Where was the market assessment? Where was anyone who could look at the size, practicality and cost of this monster and shake their head? It's a dire portent for the future of this company. They might have peerless designers and boundless ambition, but when Nintendo fails they fail big.

But it is said you learn from your mistakes. And if that's true, then Nintendo must have learned an awful lot from Computer TV Game. Here's hoping that their next attempt to infiltrate the home takes these lessons on board. They might not get another chance.

(This entry would not have been possible were it not for this post from the superlative blog Before Mario, the source for most of the information above and quite frankly a much more interesting read. Sorry. I did try.)