The sound is maddening: high-pitched, scratchy beeps, fretting around a three-note sequence in a minor key. It’s a danger signal–the sound of worry building, of panic tightening its grip. And it is speeding up. My palms are sweating, my thumbs seem to be moving faster than my mind, and nothing can be allowed to distract me. Babies are tumbling from the window of a burning building, and I must use a stretcher to bounce them into a waiting ambulance. If my concentration lapses they will hit the ground and ascend as winged angels before my eyes. I am four years old.
Now that full-colour, surround-sound universes exist between the clammy paws of every young gamer, it’s hard to conceive of how the first generation of Game & Watch handhelds, with their monochrome LCD screens, their crude gameplay and their whimsical, eccentric scenarios, could have been as addictive as they were. But trust me: these things were digital crack. They were also the first dispatches from the frontier of a strange, new place: the uncompromising imagination of the Japanese game-writer.
At this primal stage in the evolution of handheld entertainment, Nintendo had no proprietary characters–no mustachioed Italian plumbers or lumbering oversized apes. Widescreen and Multiscreen concepts were a way off, as were games that snared their players through the appropriation of beloved creatures such as Snoopy and Mickey Mouse. The notion of a console capable of playing a variety of games inserted as separate cartridges was pie in the sky, and “GameBoy” was merely a nonsense word with potentially suspect connotations.
Furthermore, because no distinction existed between hardware and software, each handheld was solely dedicated to the realisation of one designer’s vision–be that a deadly building site raining with falling tools (HELMET), a plague of moles that had to be eradicated with hammer blows to the head (VERMIN) or a drilling platform in flames (OIL PANIC). The games offered a plethora of handheld crises; an infinite supply of tiny figures in need of help.
Like so many of the best ones, the idea for the “Game & Watch” device (or Gēmu ando Uotchi or ゲーム＆ウオッチ) came unbidden. Even on a bullet train, it seems boredom can strike. And when an employee of the Nintendo toy corporation called Gunpei Yokoi noticed the salaryman across the aisle from him idly prodding at the buttons of his LCD calculator, he had a brainwave. No mathematics were in progress: the man was simply passing the time.
Yokoi-San realised that the potential existed to create hand-held games using the same Liquid Crystal Display technology as the calculators. Because they wouldn’t use power-hungry LED displays like previous ‘portable’ games, they could run off a pair of tiny watch batteries, which would make them truly pocket-sized–and the screens would benefit from the same crisp definition of the calculators themselves. The first generation of Game & Watch devices arrived soon after.
The year is 1980. I am living in Tokyo with my family, and by some incomprehensible stroke of good fortune I end up with two of these freebies from the future, presented to my father as business gifts by smiling, bowing men in suits, and swiftly passed on to me as their capacity to keep me rapt and silent becomes clear (however aggravating the beeping, which cannot be stopped). Any attempt to transcribe the excitement that the arrival of these items caused in my four-year-old brain would involve popping and banging sounds unsuited to a sober, disinterested review, so let’s stick with the more measured critical voice of thirty years’ distance.
The games are called FIRE and MANHOLE, and they are as handsome as they are addictive. Clad in brushed metal and durable coloured plastic, they even feature tiny kickstands so that a game can double as an interesting home clock. The controls are striking, too: big red buttons in tough rubber. These are no mere toys: they’re singular digital timepieces with games built in.
Upon opening the box, I am enveloped in the heady smell of factory-fresh consumer electronics that will continue to excite for the rest of my life (no tea-soaked madeleine will ever have as much sensory resonance for this geek as new circuitry breaching its shrink-wrap). Inside, each game is presented in a moulded polystyrene tray with a separate battery well, partly to give the user the thrill of switching the game on for the first time and seeing the display come to life, and partly to avoid potentially toxic battery leakages. There are also detailed instructions, wherein profuse congratulations are offered to the purchaser. While these are a nice gesture, they are hardly necessary: I am more than capable of self-congratulation for this feat of ownership, and (another pattern for life) I’m far too keen to get the thing fired up to be dealing with mere bits of paper.
A game of FIRE starts out simply enough. At first, the infants tumble from the building at a sedate, almost boring pace. But the better you do at saving them, the more the action hots up. The device beeps with ever more manic urgency as the situation deteriorates, finally blurting out a heart-stopping squelch of failure when a victim slips through your net. Lose one and an angel appears in the top right hand corner of the screen; lose three and it’s all over. The novice would be best advised to proceed with Game A. When you have mastered that then try your hand at Game B–which is the same, only faster.
MANHOLE presents a different, but no less frantic situation. Here, hapless figures charge in from all four corners of the screen, and your job is to prevent them from falling down one of four different manholes by leaping into place in time to form a makeshift bridge. Again, you only have three lives to lose, and again, success only leads to an intensification of the problem. There are no ‘levels’. There is no way to ‘win’ or ‘complete’ a game. The contract between player and game is simple: things get worse until people die.
These games presented their poor, addled users with something they never knew they wanted: nightmarish situations that could be taken out of the pocket and plunged into at any given time. The sounds that got faster the more trouble you were in; the challenge presented to fingers and thumbs as the required level of dexterity increased; those little Nintendo figures intent on self-harm, with you and your God-like buttons their only hope of survival: they were devices designed to ramp up tension indefinitely; the very antithesis of the anti-stress toy.
Even today, starting a game is an undertaking I can’t abandon (and besides, there is no ‘off’ button). When I dig out FIRE and MANHOLE from time to time, insert the fiddly silver batteries, and push the button, I feel an old, familiar tingle of unease. The nightmare is just as real, the rising panic is the same as ever, and I am every bit as vulnerable to the Game & Watch trance as I was thirty years ago. It is an altered state of bug eyes and finger spasms, from which you emerge perplexed that life is neither monochrome, nor pixilated, nor constantly a heartbeat from disaster.
