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.)

Space Fire Bird / Space Demon

"Photon gun explosives"  --Space Demon instructions

Developer
Nintendo R&D3

Release Date
Space Fire Bird - October, 1980 
Space Demon - Late 1980 / 1981


At this stage in its history Nintendo were breaking into, but arguably not thriving in, the arcade market with a line-up alternating between mechanical innovations and generic filler. By and large, the company's arcade titles were mistakable for the work of any electronics manufacturer of the day and had yet to settle upon a cohesive sense of identity.

The dissatisfaction I had with the generic nature of Heli Fire goes doubly so for Space Fire Bird. Shooting-at-things-in-space was not a genre in scarce supply in 1980, fitting as it did both the technological capabilities and cultural zeitgeist of the time. There were, by my count, more than twenty-five other arcade titles on the market just featuring the word "space" in the title, with one of those already coming from Nintendo. And if you'd played any one since Space Invaders, you'd already know what to expect.

Space Fire Bird puts players in command of a fighter ship that moves along the base of the screen in a slight arc. Once you have parted with your coin a group of small ... space birds? ... spaceships? .. space butterflies? ... things swoop down towards you, deploying small red missiles that you must avoid while returning fire. Your spacecraft has one additional means of retaliation, however. On command you can activate your ship's force-field, which causes your ship to advance up the screen and destroy anything you manage to steer into. Think of it as a proto-starman, but one you must choose to utilise carefully as it is only available once per life.

Once you've dispatched a few of the whatever-they-are, you begin to encounter larger enemies that are most definitely birds. These take a couple more hits to take down, giving them a 'mini-boss' feel that softens the repetitiveness of your task. There's also an enemy counter which counts down from 50 whenever you destroy, or simply pass by, a target. After it reaches zero you move onto the next round which offers the same thing as the first, only with different enemy configurations. Still, it's nice to have a sense of progression to aim for other than the obligatory scoreboard.

A game can be repetitive yet still engaging, however, and Space Fire Bird fares a little better in this than some of its contemporaries. The spiraling descent patterns of the birds make them stimulating targets to track. Mowing down a screen of enemies with your force-field is satisfying, and the strategical element of choosing when to use it adds another layer of thought. The sprites are colourful, and the larger enemies are visually distinctive. The constant whirring noise made when enemies move is, to put it bluntly, intolerable, but sound was designed to play a much different role at this time. It wasn't about aural immersion, but about generating a distinct vocal tone that swelled and clashed against the noise of other machines, people and jukeboxes to form an intoxicating ambiance in which time could be lost as fast as the quarters.

...onto Space Demon, then, which I have tactically decided to include in this post because there's no way I could stretch it out into one of its own. And it is, essentially, just a reskin of Space Fire Bird - though the sources I've been searching through are so muddled I can't be sure if it was intended as a sequel or as an adaption for a foreign market.

The birds have been changed to demons, the...other things have been changed to...slightly different things, and the player's spaceship has been changed to a croquembouche. The force-field is slightly less powerful, in that it only takes you halfway up the screen, but other than that the two games are functionally identical. The only other thing to note is that Nintendo licensed out the development of this version to a smaller company known as Fortrek. Arguably this would make them one of their earliest "second party developers", if anyone ever felt compelled to argue over that.

So that's that then. Competent space shooters both, but nothing special. Nothing new. Nothing to encourage me out of the "review mode" this blog drifts into when there is little important to say. While Nintendo's early mechanical arcade games showed off some rather imaginative design, their eighties run of electronic arcade games has been disappointingly unoriginal thus far. And there is nothing I can see in this game to suggest their next effort will be any different.

Judge

"Each player depresses his button."  --Judge instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
4th of October, 1980 (Japan)

As we close out the initial "Silver" series of Game & Watch titles, it must be observed that the run has not been without a certain amount of repetition. Understandably so, for a company attempting to establish a template for working with a new technology. And true to form, Judge does utilise one of these existing templates - namely, the four button layout of Flagman. Yet with this familiar scheme the development team manage to add one more string to their bow: competitive multiplayer.

At first blush, one might assume that Judge is a game of pure chance (particularly those familiar with Mr. Game and Watch's moveset in Super Smash Bros.). After a short timer count, the two fighters hold up placards featuring a random number from one to nine. The fighter with the highest number has the strongest attack. So far, Judge would appear to have all the competitive nuance of the Electronic Love Tester.

But by giving each player two buttons - two options for action - Judge becomes something more. As soon as those placards are raised, each fighter must choose to either attack (if their number is higher) or dodge (if their number is lower). This almost completely strips away the element of chance and turns Judge into a game of both reflex and risk/reward assessment. By giving extra points to your opponent when the incorrect action is taken, the hesitant player may come off best against an over-eager opponent.

Though Game A allows a lone player to take on a computer opponent, Judge is first and foremost a multiplayer experience. Its instruction manual makes no bones about the fact that computer response times are predetermined, shattering the illusion of a thinking adversary and relegating Game A to a secondary concern. This is a game to be shared, a feeling enhanced by the fact that both players must hold the same game unit to play. Game & Watch just went social.

It is almost a surprise that it took Nintendo this long to get here. Social gaming is a common thread through-out the company's long history, from their origins in Hanafuda to their latest home console which launched under the slogan "Together. Better.". Even their short-lived stints investing in taxis and love hotels fit this pattern of bringing people together. Yet so far their electronic games have not quite held true to this ethos, with the Color TV Game series providing the only simultaneous multiplayer experience to this point. In a sense, Judge is not so much about ending a line as it is foreshadowing things to come - a time where electronic games are shared.

Unfortunately, the launch of Judge was not without difficulty. As enthusiasts of competitive multiplayer gaming won't hesitate to let you know, one of the hardest things to perfect is balance. It might be difficult to imagine how a game as simple as Judge could suffer from balance issues, but it was soon discovered that the launch units held a bias towards the left player. This came from an aberration in the scoring system - the left player would be rewarded with two points if the right player mistakenly dodged, whereas the right player would only be rewarded one point in the same circumstance. This bug was "patched" out for future sales and foreign market units, with the green case changed to purple to distinguish the two versions. A second example on the trot of Nintendo's commitment to correcting mistakes that rub against their design philosophy - for people to play together, they have to play fair.

So thus ends the first sub-series of the Game & Watch range. Looking back, each of the five games fulfilled their role as a diverting electronic toy, while demonstrating that constant and creative thought was put towards enhancing the player experience. Though there have been similarities amongst the titles, and none have risen above providing a singular simplistic mechanic, playing them in sequence gives one the sense of a team constantly refining their art and striving for improvement.

And by striking out into social gaming territory Judge opens up a whole new branch for this team to follow. It is proof, if we needed it, that the Game & Watch series still has a lot more to offer.

Heli Fire

"Native girl dancing on island boards submarine. Extra points!"  --arcade flyer

Developer
Nintendo R&D3

Release Date
September, 1980 (Japan)


While Nintendo has spent the first half of 1980 bedding into an emerging handheld gaming space, it should not be overlooked that they were still invested in conquering the arcade. With Pong luring people from far-and-wide into seedy bars, and Space Invaders creating a minor currency crisis, the arcade was fast establishing itself as an institution of youth entertainment - one a developing electronic entertainment company could not afford to ignore.

Nintendo had, by this point, made several efforts to break into the arcade - most lead by the company's earliest electronic game designer Genyo Takeda, and with presentation handled by a young industrial designer named Shigeru Miyamoto. They range from the insanely technical video-based light gun game Wild Gunman, to the dual-stick octodirectional shooter Sheriff, to the it's-not-Space-Invaders-promise Space Fever. Some are fascinating games in their own right, both forward-thinking and enjoyable, but few demonstrate that spark of player-centric ingenuity that was driving their toy and Game & Watch divisions (Yokoi, I believe that spark was called).

The first one to release within the scope of this blog, Heli Fire, is a typical case-in-point. In spite of a title suggestive of an aerial game, Heli Fire has the player maneuver a small submarine - a combat-ready vessel that can only shoot missiles upwards. The titular helicopters are the enemy, arriving in sets of varying colour, movement pattern and speed. While shooting these down, players must avoid the rockets and depth charges raining down from above in addition to an assortment of underwater obstacles. If you take too long to dispatch a squadron of helicopters, a wave of indestructible torpedoes march across the screen to take you out. And to further up the ante, the floor of the ocean rises as the game progresses to limit your areas of safety.

I'm not always the best judge of difficulty, but to me Heli Fire felt like a classic example of a hard-as-nails quarter-eater. The onslaught is relentless, even from the start, and though the submarine moves fluidly the game leaves very little margin for error. Indeed, many times the obstacles combine to form impassible barriers - as though the game just chose to take a life away through no fault of the player's own. Another aspect that makes me cry foul is the miniscule size of the target helicopters and the razor-thin hit-box of your own missiles. So many times a shot would glance across the edge of a helicopter I desperately needed to hit. I never got to see the dancing girls.

My main issue with Heli Fire, however, would be its generic scenario - which has a distinct lack of that ineffable Nintendo touch. It feels like a game any other company could have made. In fact, another company seems to have, as Heli Fire bears quite a close similarity to Taito's Polaris - another sky/sea combat game where you control an upwards-shooting submarine. The only date I could find for Polaris gave it a November release, but with the vagueness of records from this time I'm unwilling to state definitively which company might have influenced the other. Most likely, considering the length of development time, it was neither - and simply a case of both companies following where naval combat games would logically go with improving technology.

Heli Fire is fun in small doses with distinctive colours, smooth controls, a fast pace and a brutal difficulty curve. But with no character of its own, I find it difficult to get enthused about this unmentioned piece of Nintendo canon. Nintendo may be making strides in the handheld market, but they will need to shake things up if they want to stand-out in the arcade.

Fire

"The evacuee jumps up from the life net and falls down a little rightwards."  --Fire instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
31st of July, 1980 (Japan)

With Fire we are again blessed with a unequivocally simplistic title that lays out the tone the designers were trying to strike. This time, we are faced with a primal force - a word that leans close into our collective intelligence and whispers "danger". No carefree circus act, no jaunty pirates, no mere garden disturbances. Flames lick the skies, desperate victims leap out from windows, and emergency workers struggle against the odds to save them all. And with each miss now represented by an angel of the departed, there is no mistaking that here we have a life-and-death situation.

So how does this tally with the need for nonthreatening premises I jabbered on about last time? Well, I think one could argue that Fire marks an early turning point for the range in terms of courting the public. As Game & Watch games were designed in tandem to accommodate a two-month manufacturing time, Fire is likely to have been the first designed under knowledge of the retailer reaction to Ball. True, Nintendo used to be quite adept at hiding sales figures from their employees, but as Fire saw the development team swell in size by the addition of two more personnel (Masao Yamamoto and Takehiro Izushi), there must have been some awareness that the future of the Game & Watch range was now more secure than ever before. What better time to introduce danger and death?

Looking at the parabolic arcs of the fire evacuees, a sinking sense of familiarity returns. Yes, here we have yet another juggling game, but again its designers have found ways to put little twists on the format. Most notably, the evacuees one must juggle with the firemen's 'life net' follow a unidirectional path from left to right - giving one a sense of constant progression rather than Sisyphean torment. The number of possible positions the player can occupy has been reduced to just three, but this simplicity is compensated by the complexity of the targets' movement. There are also no incremental increases of speed to ramp up the difficulty, which instead comes through increasing the numerousness of the evacuees the player has to track.

These are changes that make Fire, in my own personal opinion, a more satisfying game to play. Every evacuee taken to the ambulance feels like an accomplishment; a life saved. And even though the torrent of victims is still never-ending (there must have been a real housing crisis), Fire shakes the structure up a bit by introducing a soon-to-be-standard Game & Watch element - the temporary reprieve. For every 100 points scored, the number of evacuees leaping from the flames briefly subsides. This gives the game a nice sense of flow - a just-have-to-get-to-the-next-hundred urgency that compels you forward.

It's not surprising to me that Fire became one of the go-to games for representing the early line, appearing on Game & Watch Gallery, Game & Watch Gallery 3 and Game & Watch Gallery Advance. Actually, it's appearance on G&WG3 raises an interesting issue. An unlockable bonus "secret" claims that early units of Fire were horizontally mirrored due to a mistake by the LCD manufacturer. This is quite an intriguing error, as the prototype designs for Fire show the game was clearly intended to flow left-to-right - and the asymmetrical clock figures (so designed since Flagman to reduce LCD segment usage) could not be easily flipped. It is also a claim that seems difficult to corroborate, despite coming from Nintendo itself, as no erroneous units appear to have surfaced.

Still, if this story is true then it is a testament to the pride in their work this team held - that they took such care in crafting a cohesive experience that a version of Fire with leftwards motion would not be tolerated, in spite of essentially identical functionality. And perhaps even an early sign of the importance of rightwards motion in the future of the company.

Vermin

"A smiling face of a mole is indicated"  --Vermin instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
10th of July, 1980 (Japan)

At a fundamental level, Vermin is a game about reaction and time-management. The player must track a number of objects moving towards them from several possible paths. The controls are just two buttons - left and right - which shift both of the character's hands in unison. These hands must be lined up with their target as they arrive, with no extra input required. It is a straight-forward blend of judgment, reflex, timing and multi-tasking with progressively increasing speed and no end goal aside from failure. Sound familiar? It should - because this is more or less just Ball turned upside-down.

Alright, I suppose I am selling it short. Vermin includes a number of subtle shifts to the format - more than enough to distinguish the two games at a time when there are more than twenty Pong machines on the market. For a start, in Vermin you shift the whole character from side to side which functions slightly differently than only shifting the hands. Cornering your character becomes an issue, as you may not leave yourself enough time to reach a target on the other side of the play-field  (leading to a strategy of constant centering). The speed also seems more hectic - perhaps because the warning time is now reduced as you can only track a small portion of each target's approach.

But the key difference between the two titles is that this time there's an enemy to fight, as reflected in its one-word title - a monicker of repulsion and antagonism. The conflict itself, however, is pointedly low-stakes and lacking in any immediate danger. By combining two recurring Nintendo motifs, moles and gardening, Vermin constructs a motivating yet nonthreatening premise.

And the nonthreatening aspect is more crucial than you'd initially expect, considering this is a product still hoping to entice new audiences into trying out a strange new form of play. The last thing you want to do is scare them off by making their initial, inevitable, difficulties unpleasant. Hence the response to failure is a gentle tease rather than a discouraging rebuke, with your three allowable misses represented by nothing worse than the mocking faces of the moles you let through. (And with this, the final piece of the three-life system falls into place.)

Perhaps it is also worth observing something about our protagonist that might be lost in a time when Mr. Game & Watch is the face of the range. The instruction manual of Vermin refers to this character as a 'puppet', just as the Ball manual refers to its character as a 'doll'. This is quite an interesting decision - to embed additional artifice within the game unnecessarily by suggesting the player character isn't even real within their own game. You could argue that this was a choice made to excuse the basic and segmented shapes the developers were using at this early stage, but the fact that the puppet theme continues through to the enhanced versions in the 1995 compilation Game Boy Gallery suggest it as more of an aesthetic choice. Perhaps the intention was to reaffirm the range's commitment to play, and to reassure wary buyers that these games would be at home within their toy box.

So with the life-system cracked, and more thought put into story-telling (...so to speak) than ever before, Vermin is another solid entry in a promising young series of games. But with two out of the three having rather similar mechanics, it would be nice to have something a little different next time.

Flagman

"The flagman repeats the foregoing motion"  --Flagman instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
5th of June, 1980 (Japan)

While Ball was a title of stark straight-forwardness, the expectations on a game called Flagman are slightly more obscure. Its name and central game-screen image bring to mind a semaphore signaler, or perhaps even Boolean flags for the computationally minded (an apt allusion considering the binary nature of Game & Watch visuals). In either case, Flagman sounds like a game that is explicitly programmatic. It speaks of a game that is not interested in disguising the fact that it all boils down to code. It is too busy trying to disguise the fact that it's Simon.

Released in 1978 by Milton Bradley, Simon is one of the earliest success stories in portable electronic gaming. The device was comprised of four distinctly-coloured buttons, behind each of which was a light. These lights would flash in a sequence of increasing length which the player would have to replicate. This simple see-and-repeat memorisation game became a top-selling item for its first Christmas, making enough of an impact to establish a sizable cultural legacy of its own.

There is little doubt that a competitive toy manufacturer undertaking massive investment in electronic gaming would be well aware of Simon's success. So we can take it as read that Flagman is a bit of a rip-off, but I think excusably so. The physical reality of the product is differentiated enough to make Flagman a viable alternative rather than a pale imitator. Not to mention that the liberal use of other companies' successes was the bread-and-butter of the pre-console game industry, and in many ways responsible for its rapid innovation and expansion. Even Simon itself owes more than a passing debt to Atari's unsuccessful Touch Me game.

Of course, that Flagman purloins its gameplay from Simon is only a half-truth, as Flagman is the first Game & Watch title to offer two distinct gameplay styles. While Game A has the same progressive memorisation task as Simon, Game B is solely concerned with reaction. The flagman flashes one number and you have to press the corresponding button as quickly as you can. But even though this second mode is based on an entirely different cognitive skill, the monkey-see-monkey-do aspect never goes away.

And this, ultimately, is what saps away any lasting interest I could have in this title. Simple tests of short-term recall and response times are all well and good under the polygonal gaze of Dr. Kawashima, but offer little to form a compelling game experience in and of themselves. Perhaps Nintendo were even aware of this at the time, as Flagman was to become the only game of the initial "Silver" series not featured in their television commercial.

Stuck with the constraints of its own technology, Flagman can do little to enliven these mental exercises - but that's not to say no effort was made. "The flagman" is a quaint character - a bandana-wearing pirate with an infectious grin who paints numbers on the bottom of his feet. And the varying frequency of beeps give the sensation of a musical tune, such that the player can imagine that the flagman is dancing to a steadily increasing beat.

There are even a few faltering steps forward for Game & Watch as a series. Along with providing a Game B that is more than simply a challenge option, Flagman introduces the archetypal three-life system and adds a colon to its time display (which had to be omitted on the Ball units). The figures aren't labeled, however, which makes the display difficult to interpret for first-time players. Still, it's progress - and quite soon for a game released just six weeks after its predecessor.

For such a simple title, there's a fair bit to say about Flagman. It breaks new ground for the Game & Watch range, introduces diversity in the experiences that range offers, and even shows how its simple format can emulate larger physical games. But by delivering gameplay as a singular cognitive action that is not in vogue as an independent pasttime, it is easy to appreciate why this game of memory is often forgotten.

Ball

"When it is released, the game will automatically start"  --Ball instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
28th of April, 1980 (Japan)


I put a lot of thought into how best to begin this blog, I promise. How to strip away decades of accumulated cultural knowledge to see the original context of these games more clearly. How to transport the reader back to a time where even the simplest electronic amusement was a technological marvel. But then I settled on the game I would begin with, and realised that its title would say all this more emphatically in just four letters than I could ever manage.

Ball.

One word. One syllable. One immutable physical fact. Everything you need to know about how removed we are from the modern gaming industry is laid bare by the fact that the start of a whole new line of products, one of the year's most significant releases, could get away with a title as brazenly simplistic as Ball.

Yet in some ways there is no title more appropriate. Everyone has an innate understanding of what a ball is. For many of us, it is one of the very first toys we experience. We throw it, it bounces, and we laugh. A microcosm of cause-and-effect from which we start to grasp the physical laws of our Universe and find the joy within. And this is precisely what Ball had to do - introduce tentative players to the unknown laws of its own physical Universe.


The choice to base the very first Game & Watch title on the act of juggling is intelligent in this regard. By requiring players to track a moving ball, Ball subtlety emphasises that these games will represent movement as ticks between discrete LCD images. The goal of the game - don't drop the ball - is both naturally intuitive and immediately engaging, which makes it ideal for encouraging the game into new hands. And juggling is a natural blend of judgement, reflex, timing and multitasking - cognitive functions that will become defining staples of the Game & Watch range across its decade-long life.

Moreover, here we already have evidence of Nintendo as a developer that accepts the constraints upon their game and shifts its design to accommodate them. Tying the movement of the juggler's hands together works to both simplify input and raise the stakes. Separating the balls into just three distinct trajectories, and introducing challenge with unpredictable transition times, makes good use of the 72 image limit imposed by technological limitations. Even the pillars at the side of the screen are there to disguise LCD wiring that could not be hidden. For what is essentially a pilot device, Ball feels honed - refined both physically and psychologically.

Admittedly, the entirety of Ball is so trivial by modern standards that a game of similar complexity can be placed as an easter egg in a music player application in the built-in software of Nintendo's current portable system. But as the beginning of a line which would introduce many innovations that are still evident in that same system, Ball has significance and value beyond the surface that is well worth celebrating. The current staff of Nintendo would appear to agree, going to extraordinary lengths to accurately recreate the game in 2010 as a consumer loyalty reward.

I am not pretending that Ball was the first game of note Nintendo developed. But I could think of no better starting point for this blog than a game which simultaneously rings in a new philosophy of game design and the most exciting decade in the history of the industry. It really does mark the start of a whole new game.

Play ball.

Start

One hundred and twenty-five years ago a company was established to produce and market hand-made playing cards. You know its name. Almost everyone knows its name.

That this humble Japanese enterprise would endure for multiple generations, and numerous changes of business, mean it was surely dealt a lucky hand. For it to then find meteoric ascension as a manufacturer of electronic games during the early eighties suggests they had the luck of the Gods.

But to survive this success would prove the greatest challenge of all. The company founded on games of chance would have to leave luck behind. They would have to discover how to stand as both a pioneer in a new artistic medium, and an iron-fisted rein-holder for a fledgling industry. They would rise. They would fall. They would produce masterpieces of interactive entertainment, and masterpieces of manipulative commerce.

And how better to tell this story than with the games they made.

This twice-weekly blog will attempt to track the development of Nintendo across the eighties, nineties and noughties by examining every game the company published in chronological order. Each entry will aim to be more than a review, but an exploration of each game's context and how Nintendo developed through their creation. (Plus a little bit of review as well, because there's no point in neutering the joy these games bring by divorcing my blog from the subjective experience of playing them. And frankly, it's hard to shut myself up sometimes.)

If anyone finds themselves reading this, by purest chance, then I welcome you to join me in this strange endeavour. Play along from the very beginning, or take a warp pipe right to the latest entry.