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Nintendo designers on Game & Watch's history
In honor of the new Game & Watch Ball reward available through Club Nintendo, the company released a translated Iwata Asks interview about Nintendo's first experiments with handheld games. The designers and engineers describe just how early the technology was -- it was based on calculator chips, and the games were all designed around the same limits imposed on calculators' numerical displays. "So if a chip can calculate eight digits," explained Takehiro Izushi, "that's 7 segments [each number is built from 7 segments] times 8 digits for a total of 56 segments. And there's the decimal point and symbols like the minus sign. We made the Game & Watch: Ball game using a chip that could display 72 segments." And 28 of those went into the score/time display! Elsewhere in the interview, the developers share early concept art for the devices (like the image above) and detail the process of making a new version of the Ball handheld for Club Nintendo.
Game & Watch: Ball now available as Club Nintendo reward
Do you possess enough Club Nintendo coins to purchase a small, uninhabited tropical island? Why not spend your fake currency on this, instead: The promotional program's latest reward is a reproduction of Game and Watch: Ball, in which you play a juggler who's tasked with keeping a number of always hastening circles suspended in the air. We guess the plural nature of your profession's materials would make the title Balls more appropriate, but ... no. No, we won't be doing that. The game (and Watch) will run you 1,200 coins. Also added to the list of rewards is a reversible carrying bag for whatever model of DS you're currently toting around, which costs 250 coins. We guess you could put other things in there, too. Like Game and Watch: Ball! That, ladies and gentlemen, is called synergy.
