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.