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.