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.