There is a specific smell to a Game & Watch that has been sealed in its original polystyrene clamshell since the Reagan administration. It is the smell of slightly off-gassed ABS plastic, of decades-old foam slowly returning to dust, and — if you are unlucky — of an LR44 button cell that gave up the ghost sometime during the Major government and quietly ate the contacts. I have inhaled that smell more times than is probably healthy over the last two years, because I set myself a slightly stupid project: to play every single Game & Watch title Nintendo released, end to end, on original hardware where possible, and to work out which of them are still actually good.
Not nostalgic. Not historically significant. Not “important to the medium.” Good. Pick-up-and-play-on-the-train, refuse-to-put-down good. Because for all the reverence we heap on Gunpei Yokoi’s first great commercial triumph — the device that paid for the Game Boy, established Nintendo’s handheld philosophy, and arguably invented the D-pad — most writing about the Game & Watch treats it as a museum piece. A cute, beepy artefact behind glass. I wanted to know what survived the journey.
The answer, after sixty units, somewhere north of 400 hours of play, and one very patient partner: twelve. Twelve Game & Watch titles that still hold up in 2024 as games you’d genuinely want to play, not just own. Some of them are the famous ones. Several aren’t. One of them I’d put against any modern mobile arcade game without hesitation. Here’s how I got there, and which twelve made the cut.
A Brief History Lesson, Because Context Matters
You probably know the origin story, but it bears repeating because it shapes everything about how these games play. The legend, as told by Yokoi himself in numerous interviews before his death in 1997, goes that he was riding the Shinkansen and saw a bored businessman fiddling with an LCD calculator. The lightbulb moment: what if the calculator’s segmented display could play a game?
The first Game & Watch, Ball (released 28 April 1980 in Japan as Ball, later marketed elsewhere as Toss-Up), was the result. It cost ¥5,800 at launch — roughly £18 in 1980 money, or around £75 in today’s terms once you account for inflation. Nintendo expected to sell 100,000 units. They sold three million across the Silver series alone. By the time the line wound down with Mario the Juggler in October 1991, Nintendo had shifted approximately 43.4 million units across 60 distinct titles, organised into the Silver, Gold, Wide Screen, Multi Screen, New Wide Screen, Tabletop, Panorama, Super Color, Micro Vs., and Crystal Screen series.
The Technical Reality of Segmented LCDs
Here’s the thing about Game & Watch hardware that I think gets glossed over: every single “sprite” you see on screen is pre-printed onto the LCD layer. The processor — typically a Sharp SM5xx-series 4-bit microcontroller running at around 32-64 kHz — does nothing more than switch those pre-printed segments on or off. There is no frame buffer. There is no animation system. The “running man” in Fire isn’t running; he’s actually six entirely separate images of a man that flicker on and off in sequence to imply motion.
This sounds limiting because it is limiting, but it’s also why the best Game & Watch designs feel so distinctive. Designers couldn’t add new graphics on the fly. Every possible game state had to be designed, drawn, and silkscreened onto the display at manufacture. The game design and the visual design were inseparable, baked into the glass. When you understand this, you understand why so many Game & Watch games feel like elegant little puzzle-boxes — they had to be, because the alternative was a mess.
RAM was measured in nibbles, not bytes. ROMs maxed out at around 2KB on the most complex Multi Screen titles. The buzzer is a single piezoelectric speaker capable of three or four distinct tones. Battery life on a pair of LR44s averaged between 100 and 200 hours of continuous play, which is one of the great unsung achievements in consumer electronics history — your AirPods would be jealous.
How I Tested These Things (And Why It Matters)
Before I get to the list, a methodology note, because I’m aware “playing every Game & Watch” can mean very different things. I played each title in three contexts:
- On original hardware, in good cosmetic and electrical condition, with fresh batteries. Roughly 51 of the 60 units I sourced this way. The others I played on the Game & Watch Gallery compilations for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance, and on the MAME-based MADrigal simulators, which are remarkably accurate.
- For at least one full hour per title minimum, attempting both Game A and Game B modes where applicable, and pushing to the kill screen or score cap where reachable.
- In real-world handheld conditions — on trains, on sofas, in queues — not just at a desk. This actually matters, because some of these games feel completely different when you’re using them the way they were designed to be used.
I also gave each game what I came to call the “third session test.” Lots of Game & Watch titles are charming for ten minutes and then dead in the water. The question I kept asking: would I voluntarily come back to this game a third time, after the novelty had worn off? Most of them, no. These twelve, yes — repeatedly, and often.
The Twelve That Still Hold Up
I’ve ordered these roughly from “great but flawed” up to “I genuinely think this is one of the finest pieces of arcade design Nintendo has ever produced,” but honestly any of the top six could swap places depending on the day. Prices quoted are rough UK collector market averages from late 2024 for boxed-and-complete examples in working condition.
12. Helmet (Gold Series, CN-07, February 1981)
Let’s start with something unfashionable. Helmet is a Gold Series title in which a little workman has to walk from the left of the screen to a door on the right while spanners, wrenches and assorted ironmongery rain from above. You can pause under three pre-set shelters. That’s it. That’s the game.
What makes Helmet hold up is the rhythm. The falling-object patterns shift in subtle ways as you score points, and the three safe zones force you into a stop-go-stop cadence that has the same satisfying push-and-pull as Crossy Road four decades later. It’s the purest expression of Yokoi’s “lateral thinking with withered technology” philosophy: a game made from nothing but timing.
Boxed examples currently fetch £180-£240. Loose units are more like £60-£90 and play identically.
11. Mickey Mouse (Wide Screen, MC-25, October 1981)
One of the first licensed Game & Watch games and a quiet masterclass in tension management. Mickey runs a chicken coop. Eggs roll down four chutes. You move between four positions catching them in a basket. Miss one and a chick hatches; miss three and it’s game over.
The thing that elevates Mickey Mouse above its many imitators (and Nintendo themselves reskinned this design at least four times — most notably as Egg in the Wide Screen series, which is mechanically identical) is the speed curve. The acceleration is brutal but fair. You can hit a “miss” state where Minnie appears at the side of the screen and gives you a slap on the back, which is genuinely funny in a way 1981 hardware shouldn’t be capable of.
Expect to pay £120-£180 for a clean Wide Screen unit. Avoid the yellowed examples — the Mickey Mouse silkscreen looks dreadful when the plastic has UV-aged.
10. Donkey Kong II (Multi Screen, JR-55, March 1983)
The original Donkey Kong Multi Screen gets all the glory — and we’ll come to it — but its 1983 sequel is, controversially, the better game. Donkey Kong II ditches the arcade adaptation pretence and instead has you climbing chains while DK Jr. tries to free his dad from a cage. The two-screen layout (lower screen for the climb, upper screen for the rescue) is used much more intelligently here than in the original, and the bird and spark enemies create a layered threat hierarchy that feels almost three-dimensional.
The cross-shaped directional pad on the left side is the direct ancestor of every D-pad ever made. Yokoi’s team developed it specifically for the Multi Screen series because the original separate-button arrangement couldn’t comfortably support games requiring four-way movement. It’s astonishingly comfortable even today. Hold a Donkey Kong II next to a modern Joy-Con and you’ll be struck by how close Nintendo got it on the first attempt.
£200-£280 boxed. The clamshell hinge is a common failure point — inspect before buying.
9. Snoopy Tennis (Wide Screen, SP-30, June 1982)
The most criminally underrated Game & Watch. Snoopy stands at the net. Charlie Brown, Lucy and Schroeder lob tennis balls at him from various positions on a tree. You have three positions: low, mid, high. Match the height, swing at the right moment, return the ball. Get it wrong and Woodstock laughs at you, which never stops being delightful.
The reason Snoopy Tennis works where so many similar “match the height” Game & Watch games (and there are many — Octopus, Mario’s Cement Factory, etc.) fall flat is the read-and-react window. Nintendo’s designers found the exact timing where you can just process the incoming threat if you’re paying attention, but not if you’re complacent. It induces a kind of focused flow state I’ve only otherwise found in Tetris and proper rhythm games.
Around £140-£200 for a tidy boxed example. The Peanuts licensing makes Snoopy units slightly pricier than equivalent unlicensed Wide Screens.
8. Mario Bros. (Multi Screen, MW-56, March 1983)
Not the arcade game — this is a different beast entirely, and predates the arcade Mario Bros. by three months. You play both Mario and Luigi simultaneously, on a bottling line, moving cake boxes from conveyor belts onto a truck. Both screens active at once, both characters needing input constantly, both belts running at different speeds.
It is, essentially, the world’s first commercially released two-handed coordination game. Your left thumb manages Luigi’s screen; your right thumb manages Mario’s. The cognitive load when both belts speed up is genuinely intense in a way that reminded me, weirdly, of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Different game, same “two systems pulling your attention” pleasure.
The fact that this design didn’t get more imitators is a minor mystery. £180-£250 boxed. A standout title that doesn’t get talked about enough because it has nothing to do with the better-known arcade Mario Bros.
7. Octopus (Wide Screen, OC-22, July 1981)
One of the Wide Screen series’ biggest sellers and the game that, in its Game & Watch Gallery 2 remake, introduced a lot of millennials to Yokoi’s design language. You’re a diver descending through tentacles to a sunken treasure chest, grabbing gold, and surfacing. The octopus’s eight tentacles swing in independent but predictable patterns. The treasure-grabbing animation requires you to stay still and exposed for two beats — an exquisite risk/reward decision built into a single button press.
Octopus is a great example of how Game & Watch design uses the LCD’s limitations as an actual mechanic. Because the tentacles can only be in pre-printed positions, you can learn the wave patterns and time your run perfectly. It rewards observation and pattern recognition in the same way Pac-Man‘s ghost AI does. The Game B mode adds a second diver going in the opposite direction and is significantly harder.
Around £100-£160 boxed. One of the more common Wide Screens, which keeps prices reasonable.
6. Donkey Kong (Multi Screen, DK-52, June 1982)
The headliner. The one everyone owned, or wanted to. Donkey Kong Multi Screen sold somewhere north of eight million units worldwide, making it comfortably the best-selling individual Game & Watch ever produced. It also won the 1982 Arcade Awards “Best Hand-Held Video Game” prize, which felt like a coronation at the time.
Does it hold up? Yes, but with caveats. The two-screen layout is used cleverly — bottom screen for the lower platforms, top screen for the rivet-pulling finale — and the D-pad debut is, as mentioned, a landmark in handheld input design. The compression of the arcade original into LCD form is genuinely impressive: the rivet mechanic, the hammer, even Pauline’s HELP! animation all survive intact.
Where it dates slightly is the difficulty curve, which spikes hard around level four and then plateaus. The arcade Donkey Kong has a much more elegant ramp. But as a pocket-sized translation of a beloved game, made with the absolute minimum of resources, it’s still remarkable. £250-£400 boxed; the cosmetic condition of the bottom screen matters a lot, as the lower LCD picks up scratches from the closing motion.
5. Parachute (Wide Screen, PR-21, June 1981)
One of the earliest Wide Screen titles and, for my money, the most pure. Parachutists fall from a helicopter. You move a boat along the bottom of the screen to catch them. Miss one and a shark eats them, which is dark in the way only 1981 Nintendo could get away with.
The genius of Parachute is that it has three lanes of approach, each with a slightly different timing, and the helicopter’s path means you can predict where the next parachutist will appear but not exactly when. It’s prediction-plus-reaction, blended together, with about as elegant a difficulty curve as anything Nintendo has ever made. I’ve had multiple sessions where I’ve lost an hour to “just one more run.”
The form factor matters here too. The Wide Screen units are, in my opinion, the most ergonomically perfect Game & Watch design — they fit the adult hand better than the Silvers, weigh less than the Multi Screens, and the two-button layout is ideal for left/right movement games. Parachute is the Wide Screen’s purest expression.
£140-£200 boxed.
4. Fire (Wide Screen, FR-27, December 1981)
Originally released as part of the Silver series back in July 1980 (RC-04), Fire got a Wide Screen remake at the end of 1981, and it’s the Wide Screen version I’d recommend. Two firemen hold a trampoline. People jump from a burning building. You bounce them across the screen into an ambulance. Miss one and they hit the ground, which the game depicts with a gravestone — again, 1981 Nintendo doing 1981 Nintendo things.
The reason Fire holds up so well — and the reason it’s been remade by Nintendo more times than almost any other Game & Watch (it’s in Game & Watch Gallery 1, 2 and 4, and as an unlockable in WarioWare D.I.Y.) — is that the core mechanic has an absolutely beautiful failure mode. You’re not failing at “catching” things; you’re failing at maintaining a continuous chain. Once a person is on your trampoline, they keep bouncing whether you like it or not, and you have to maintain your position to keep them in the air while also catching the next jumper.
It’s juggling. Pure, mathematical juggling. And it scales up to a frankly absurd level of difficulty in the high score range, where you’ll be tracking three or four bodies in the air at once. I lost an entire Sunday to this game last spring.
£120-£180 for the Wide Screen version; the Silver original is rarer and commands £300+.
3. Manhole (Gold Series, MH-06, January 1981)
Now we’re into the top three, and I’m aware Manhole is going to be the controversial pick. Bear with me.
Manhole is a Gold Series game where four pedestrians cross a bridge with four open manholes. You have a single manhole cover that you can position under any of the four gaps to stop them falling in. The pedestrians walk at slightly different speeds. The cover has to be moved continuously and you have to predict where the next foot will land.
This is, structurally, one of the most sophisticated games in the entire Game & Watch library. It’s pure spatial prediction. You’re not reacting to threats; you’re managing a continuous, escalating logistics problem with one resource and four demands on it. It scratches the same itch as Diner Dash or Overcooked, except it does it with a 4-bit microcontroller and a piezo buzzer.
The Gold Series form factor is also a small joy in itself — that gold faceplate, the slightly chunkier feel, the satisfying click of the side switches. These are gorgeous objects. Manhole got a Wide Screen remake (NH-103) in 1983 with slightly different mechanics, and a New Wide Screen version, and it’s been in multiple Gallery compilations, but the original Gold is the best.
£280-£400 boxed; the Gold Series tends to attract collectors as much as players, which pushes prices up.
2. Vermin (Silver Series, MT-03, July 1980)
The third Game & Watch ever released. A gardener whacks moles with two hammers as they pop out of five holes. That’s it. That’s the entire game.
It’s also one of the most perfectly designed action games Nintendo has ever made. Vermin is the platonic ideal of “easy to learn, impossible to master.” You have a left hammer and a right hammer, each covering different sets of holes, with one shared hole in the middle that either can hit. As speed increases, you’re essentially playing Whac-A-Mole with the additional cognitive load of deciding which hammer to use for the middle hole.
That central hole is the masterstroke. It’s an apparently trivial design choice that turns the game from a simple reflex test into a genuine decision-making exercise. Whenever a mole pops up in the middle, you have to make a sub-second choice about which side’s hammer you can afford to commit to, based on what else is happening across the screen. It’s chess for your thumbs.
The Silver Series casing is the least ergonomic of all the Game & Watch lines — that flat, rectangular slab without any concession to the human hand — but the game underneath is so good that it doesn’t matter. The Silvers are also the rarest line, with Vermin in particular being uncommon in good condition because the silver-coated faceplate scratches easily.
£300-£500 boxed; £150-£220 loose. A grail object as well as a great game.
1. Chef (Wide Screen, FP-24, September 1981)
If I could only keep one Game & Watch — if a fire broke out, if the apocalypse came, if Marie Kondo arrived at my door — I’d keep Chef.
You’re a chef with a frying pan. Pieces of food bounce up and down. You have to keep them bouncing by hitting them at the right moment. A cat occasionally bats food back into play from the side. A mouse occasionally steals food. Miss too many and a dog gets cross with you.
Mechanically, Chef is a variation on the Fire juggling concept, but with two enormous improvements. First, the food doesn’t just bounce up and come back down on the same trajectory — the chef’s pan-flick sends food in arcing paths that depend on timing and position, so you’re not just maintaining a chain, you’re actively curating where each ingredient goes. Second, the introduction of the cat as a chaos agent — the cat occasionally yeets food back into the air in unexpected ways — adds a moment-to-moment unpredictability that makes every run feel different.
The result is a game with all the meditative rhythm of Fire but with genuine emergent moments. I have had runs of Chef that felt like jazz solos — three things in the air, the cat doing something stupid, the mouse approaching, and somehow I’m still holding it all together by the skin of my teeth. The closest modern equivalent is probably Threes! or the better moments of Tetris Effect: simple mechanics that, in the upper difficulty bands, become almost transcendent.
Chef was the Game & Watch I played most during this project, by a country mile. Long after I’d “finished” reviewing it, I kept picking it up. That, more than anything else, is the measure of a game that holds up.
£130-£190 boxed; one of the more available Wide Screen titles, mercifully. Get one. Genuinely.
The Build Quality Question: Why These Things Still Work
One of the things that becomes obvious when you handle sixty of these is how absurdly overbuilt they are. The Game & Watch was Nintendo’s first piece of dedicated gaming hardware sold internationally, and they hadn’t yet learned the cost-cutting tricks of later generations. The casings are solid ABS with substantial wall thickness. The button contacts are gold-plated. The LCDs themselves are remarkably resistant to the segment-rot that affects much later LCD hardware (yes, I’m looking at you, original Game Boy).
The Multi Screen units in particular feel like miniature Filofaxes — the hinges are properly engineered, the magnetic latches still click satisfyingly four decades on, and the closing action protects the screens during transport. I have a Donkey Kong Multi Screen that has clearly been carried in some child’s pocket every day for half a decade in the early 1980s, and it still works perfectly. Try doing that with a Nintendo Switch.
The Display Reality Check
That said, the displays are showing their age in specific ways, and this is the single biggest practical concern for collectors. Game & Watch LCDs are reflective (not backlit), which is why they were so power-efficient, but they relied on the polariser film bonded to the front of the display. That film yellows, develops dark spots, and in the worst cases can show a creeping “tide line” of degradation that eventually obscures the playfield.
You can replace polariser film if you’re handy with a soldering iron and a hair-dryer — the retro repair community has documented the process extensively, and replacement film is available from various suppliers for around £8-£15 per sheet. But it’s fiddly work, and a botched repair will ruin the unit. My advice: budget for inspecting any Game & Watch you buy under a bright light, and walk away from anything with significant polariser damage unless the price reflects it.
The Buzzer and Switches
Audio on these units is one piezo speaker producing two or three pitches, plus a click for button-presses on some units. After 40+ years, some buzzers have weakened, producing a thin, reedy sound rather than the chirpy beeping you remember. This is essentially unfixable without parts donor units — the piezos are bonded into the case during manufacture and weren’t designed to be serviced.
Switches, by contrast, are usually fine. The membrane domes used in Game & Watch hardware were already mature technology by 1980, and they hold up. The most common failure mode is contamination — sweat, dust, decades of pocket lint — rather than mechanical wear. A careful disassembly and clean with isopropyl alcohol will revive 90% of “broken” units.
Performance: What “Performance” Even Means Here
Asking about performance on a Game & Watch is a bit like asking about the top speed of a metronome — it’s both meaningless and entirely the point. These devices run their game logic on a fixed clock at a fixed frame rate (typically 4-8 Hz refresh on most titles), and they don’t slow down, speed up, or stutter. They are the most performance-stable handhelds ever made, because there’s effectively nothing to perform.
What this gives you, as a player, is the most consistent input-to-feedback loop in handheld gaming. The lag between pressing a button and seeing the on-screen response is typically under 50 milliseconds, which is faster than most modern touchscreen devices. You can feel this when you switch from a Game & Watch to, say, a modern emulator handheld and try to play an action game — the modern device feels mushy by comparison, because the LCD response time alone is often worse than the entire Game & Watch input chain.
This consistency is, I think, a huge part of why the best Game & Watch designs still feel so good. They’re operating in a sweet spot of human reaction time and machine response that modern hardware has, paradoxically, lost.
Battery Life: Genuinely Astonishing
Two LR44 button cells will run a Game & Watch for somewhere between 100 and 250 hours of continuous play, depending on the model. Multi Screens skew towards the lower end because they have two LCDs to power; Wide Screens are the long-haul champions, with some units capable of well over 300 hours on a single set of batteries.
To put that in context: my Steam Deck OLED gives me about 6-8 hours of Vampire Survivors on a charge. A Wide Screen Octopus will give me, conservatively, 250 hours on batteries that cost £1.20 from Wilko. There’s a moral lesson in there about hardware design priorities that I won’t belabour, but it’s worth sitting with for a moment.
The clock function — the “Watch” half of “Game & Watch” — runs continuously and barely affects battery life at all. I have units that have kept correct time for months on the same batteries that I’m also using to play.
Software: The 60 Titles, Sorted
I’ve talked about the twelve that hold up. Let me give you a quick tour of the rest of the library, because if you’re going to collect these, you should know what you’re collecting.
The Solid Tier (the ones that are good but didn’t quite make my twelve)
About fifteen more titles I’d happily play again: Lion, Judge, Flagman, Egg (the Mickey Mouse reskin, mechanically identical), Turtle Bridge, Fire Attack, Mario’s Cement Factory (tabletop version), Donkey Kong Jr., Greenhouse, Rain Shower, Lifeboat, Pinball, Black Jack, Squish, and the underrated Climber.
These are all good games. They just didn’t quite cross the threshold of “I’d voluntarily come back to this a fourth time.” Several came very close — Judge and Turtle Bridge in particular were on and off my final list multiple times. If you find any of them at a reasonable price, grab them.
The Forgettable Middle
About two dozen titles are perfectly competent and entirely unmemorable. Helmet‘s many imitators, the various Popeye reskins, the Crystal Screen experiments (which look gorgeous in a museum but are washed-out and hard to read in actual use), and most of the Panorama series (the angled reflector gimmick is novel for ten minutes and then just inconvenient). Buy them for completion if you must; don’t expect to play them.
The Outright Misfires
Yes, Nintendo made bad Game & Watches. The Micro Vs. series — five head-to-head units where two players share one screen with separate D-pads on each end — is a noble experiment that doesn’t really work because the screen is too small to share comfortably. The Super Color line’s two-tone red/green displays are eye-strain machines. And some of the very late titles (Mario the Juggler, Zelda) feel like Nintendo phoning it in, having clearly already moved on mentally to the Game Boy.
Value: What Should You Actually Pay?
The Game & Watch collector market has, like most retro hardware markets, gone slightly mad in the last five years. Prices roughly doubled between 2018 and 2023, with the pandemic-era boom pushing rare titles into genuinely silly territory. Things have cooled slightly in 2024, but you should still be prepared.
Budget Tier (£50-£120 per unit)
Loose, well-loved Wide Screen units of the more common titles — Octopus, Parachute, Chef, Snoopy Tennis, Fire. This is, honestly, where I’d suggest starting. You get most of the best games, in playable condition, without breaking the bank. Don’t sweat cosmetic condition too hard if you’re buying to play rather than display.
Mid Tier (£150-£300)
Boxed Wide Screens, loose Multi Screens including Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., and most Gold Series titles. The sweet spot for a serious player-collector. Box presence does matter for resale value, but a complete-in-box example often gives you an unsun-yellowed unit, which is a real benefit.
The Grail Tier (£500+)
Boxed Silver Series titles, the Tabletop series in good condition (those colour-filter overlays are fragile and rarely survive), Crystal Screen units in working order, and anything sealed. The Zelda Multi Screen (ZL-65) regularly hits £600-£900. The Panorama Mickey Mouse can crest £1,000 in box. These are collector pieces, not playing pieces.
The Modern Alternatives
If you don’t fancy any of the above, there are good options. Nintendo’s own 2020 Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. and 2021 Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda reissues retailed at £45 each and are excellent little objects — beautiful build, accurate emulation of the original Ball Game & Watch alongside the NES games, and an authentic clock function. They’re not the same as playing originals, but they’re a fraction of the price.
The Game & Watch Gallery series for Game Boy/Color/Advance (released 1997-2002) contains “Modern” remakes of about 30 of the original titles, with colour graphics and Mario-themed sprite work. These are excellent in their own right and play well on a Game Boy Player or Analogue Pocket. The Gallery games are also where most modern players first encountered titles like Fire, Chef, and Manhole, and the “Classic” mode in each compilation includes the original LCD versions playable on the Game Boy screen.
For absolute completeness, the MADrigal simulator suite — a free passion project by Sergio Madrigal — accurately emulates all 60 Game & Watch titles plus dozens of competitor LCD games. Runs on a potato. Doesn’t have the tactile pleasure of the originals, but it’s the easiest way to sample the whole library and decide what to chase.
The Collector Community: What I’ve Learned
The Game & Watch collecting scene is small, niche, and unusually pleasant compared to most retro hardware communities. The two main hubs are the handheldmuseum.com archive (a meticulous catalogue maintained for decades) and the various dedicated subreddits and Discord servers, plus the annual gatherings at retro events like the Replay Expo in Manchester and Play Expo Blackpool.
A few community-learned tips I’d pass on:
- Always test before paying full price. The battery contacts on Game & Watch units corrode badly when left with dead batteries inside (and most that have been in attics for decades have). A unit that doesn’t power on may need nothing more than contact cleaning, but it may also need a complete board recap.
- Inspect the LCD with the unit OFF. All Game & Watch displays show their full segment array when powered off in a certain light — you can see every sprite ghosted on the screen. This is the best way to spot dead or degrading segments before you turn the unit on and get distracted by the running game.
- Don’t trust eBay photos. Polariser yellowing is very hard to capture accurately in phone photos, and many sellers (innocently or otherwise) don’t realise their unit looks dingy. Ask for video, or buy from established retro dealers like Console Passion or Retro Game Base in the UK.
- Provenance matters less than you’d think. Unlike some retro hardware, Game & Watch units have very few significant variants. A unit is essentially a unit. Don’t pay a premium for “first run” claims unless verified.
- Reproduction boxes exist and are rampant. If you’re paying box-and-complete prices, learn to recognise reproductions. Original Nintendo boxes have specific paper stocks, ink colours, and inner-tray constructions that repros generally don’t match.
What the Game & Watch Got Right (That We’ve Forgotten)
Playing through all sixty of these in sequence, what struck me most wasn’t the variability in quality — it was the consistency of philosophy. Even the bad Game & Watch games are bad in interesting ways. They’re bad because someone tried something. There are no cynical Game & Watches; no titles released purely as cash-grabs. Compare that to, say, the Tiger Electronics LCD library of the late 80s and early 90s, which contains some genuinely depressing licensed schlock.
The other thing the Game & Watch got right, and that modern handheld design has largely forgotten, is the idea that a game can be complete. A Game & Watch title isn’t a service. It doesn’t update. It doesn’t have downloadable content. It doesn’t beg you to come back tomorrow for your daily reward. It is, in every sense, a finished object — designed, shipped, played, set aside, picked up again because you want to, not because the game has hooks in you.
I’ve found, after two years with these things on my desk and in my coat pocket, that I increasingly resent the contrast with modern mobile games. The Game & Watch respects your time in a way Royal Match simply does not. It asks for ten minutes, gives you ten minutes, and leaves you alone. There’s a profound and slightly mournful design lesson there, if anyone in Cupertino or Kyoto is still listening.
Practical Recommendations: How to Start a Collection
If you’ve read this far and you’re tempted, here’s my actual buying advice, in priority order.
If You Have £100
Buy a loose Chef, Octopus, or Parachute from a reputable seller. Test that it works. Play it for a month. See if you actually like it. Most people who think they want a Game & Watch collection turn out to want one good Game & Watch and that’s plenty.
If You Have £300
Buy two Wide Screens (suggested: Chef and Snoopy Tennis) and one Multi Screen (Donkey Kong or Mario Bros.). This gives you the three best form factors and three top-tier games. You will not need anything more unless you catch the bug.
If You Have £1,000
Build a curated top-twelve set. Use my list above. Aim for loose-but-good-condition Wide and Multi Screens, plus one or two Golds if you can find them. You’ll have a collection that contains 90% of what the Game & Watch line was actually good at, for less than the price of one sealed Zelda.
If You Have £5,000+
Now we’re into proper collector territory, and at this point my advice is: stop reading game reviews and start reading hardware preservation guides. Buy boxed. Buy from established dealers. Photograph and document everything. Consider climate control. And, please, actually play them occasionally — there’s nothing sadder than a Game & Watch collection that exists purely as a display case.
Verdict: The Game & Watch in 2024
Here’s where I’m supposed to give a final score, and I’ve been thinking about how to do this for several thousand words now. You can’t really score a 44-year-old product line as if it were a new release. What you can do is ask whether it still earns its place in a thoughtful gaming life today, and the honest answer is: yes, more than I expected when I started this project.
The Game & Watch was, in its time, a miracle of cost-effective design. It is still, today, a miracle of design — full stop. The best twelve titles I’ve listed here are not historical curiosities. They are working, playable, frequently brilliant little games, each one a self-contained argument for a kind of game design discipline that the industry has largely abandoned. They have things to teach us about constraint, about elegance, about respecting the player’s attention.
Are they all worth their current market prices? Honestly, no. The collector market has run ahead of the play value on many titles, and you should buy with your eyes open about that. But if you can find a good Chef, Vermin, or Manhole for sensible money, you will own a piece of gaming history that is also — crucially — still a good time on a Tuesday evening when you don’t want to commit to anything more demanding.
Nintendo’s recent reissue programme (the 2020 Mario and 2021 Zelda units) suggests they themselves remember what these objects were. I’d love to see them go further — a proper compilation release for Switch 2, perhaps, with all 60 original titles emulated faithfully, would be a fitting tribute and a genuine service to gaming preservation. The Game & Watch Gallery games are wonderful but they’re not comprehensive, and the originals deserve to be widely playable rather than locked behind eBay prices and aging hardware.
The Score
If I have to put a number on it: 9/10 for the Game & Watch line as a whole, on the strength of those twelve standout titles and the form-factor innovation that birthed the entire handheld industry. The middle and lower tier games drag the average down somewhat, but no library of 60 titles maintains a consistent standard, and the peaks here are very high.
For the twelve titles I’ve covered in detail: 9-10/10 across the board. Chef, Vermin, Manhole, and Fire would each be modern classics in any era. Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong II, Mario Bros., Parachute, Octopus, Snoopy Tennis, Mickey Mouse, and Helmet are excellent designs that have earned their reputations and then some.
Final Thoughts
I started this project expecting to find that the Game & Watch was charming but mostly outdated — the kind of thing you’d want to own one of, play for an evening, and put back on the shelf. I ended it with a small, carefully chosen collection on my desk that I play almost daily. Chef sits next to my keyboard. I pick it up when I’m thinking, or on hold to my bank, or waiting for a build to finish. It is, four decades after release, still doing the job Yokoi designed it to do: making a small, dead moment of life slightly more interesting.
That, in the end, is the test that matters. Not historical importance, not collector value, not the warm bath of nostalgia. Does it still work? Does it still entertain? Does it still earn its space in your pocket?
For these twelve, the answer is an emphatic yes. They are pocket-sized arguments for an entire philosophy of game design — that constraint breeds elegance, that simplicity is harder than complexity, and that the best games respect you enough to let you go when you’re done. Forty-four years later, those are not lessons we can afford to forget.
Gunpei Yokoi died in a car accident in October 1997, sixteen years after he watched that businessman play with a calculator on the Shinkansen. He never saw the Nintendo DS, the 3DS, or the Switch — every one of which carries his fingerprints in its design DNA. But I think he’d be quietly pleased that, in 2024, there are still people sitting on trains, watching the world go by, with a little plastic-and-LCD descendant of Ball in their hands. Some things, it turns out, are worth keeping.