game and watch
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Collecting & Obsessing: Game & Watch
Throughout the 1980s, Nintendo's Game & Watch series of handhelds provided the soundtrack to innumerable school playgrounds across the globe. A pre-Game Boy attempt to capture the portable games market, Game & Watch titles were relatively cheap but sturdily built toys which came with a single game and, as the name suggests, a watch. For the best part of eleven years, Nintendo kept manufacturing these forerunners to its other handheld devices, only for the Game Boy and Tetris to emerge in 1989 and squash the whole enterprise flat.Nevertheless, the spirit of Game & Watch lives on through the hundreds of individuals who collect the games. For this one-off piece, DS Fanboy decided to interview two hardcore collectors in a bid to understand their love of Nintendo's first portable phenomenon.Both 35-year-old Michael Panayiotakis (founder of Mike's Nintendo Game & Watch forum and the author of a quite superb FAQ on the subject) and 38-year-old Andy Cole possess the kind of retrolicious Game & Watch collections that we would maim (and possibly kill) for. To find out what they love about this charming series, why they collect Game & Watch, and why they dedicate so much time and money to their hobby, hit the break for our full interview. Once you've done that, don't forget to browse our gallery for a pictorial history of the Game & Watch phenomenon!%Gallery-25216%
Do want: complete Game & Watch collection
If you're currently sitting on $4,000 worth of spare change, we have a purchase to recommend to you. A UK-based collector has just placed his the entire collection of 59 Game & Watch handhelds on eBay, along with the rare so-called "60th" model.$4,000 is a big outlay, and not all of these are boxed, but complete collections of anything don't come along every day -- especially complete collections of something as desirable as Game & Watch handhelds.[Via GameSniped]
In-depth walkthrough of DS TV reveals Game & Watch inclusion
We knew just about how many people in Japan were going wild for this thing, but now you can count us among those who want one. Although we would have no use for it outside of one feature. The DS TV Tuner, it turns out, also includes some classic gaming action, bundling in the retro Nintendo title Game & Watch Fire. We've placed a video of a version of Game & Watch Fire in action past the break, so be sure to give it a gander.
Promotional Consideration: Multi Screen
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.Gunpei Yokoi, the same engineer who would eventually go on to father the Game Boy and Metroid, was riding home one evening on a bullet train when he spotted a bored businessman randomly pressing buttons on an LCD calculator to entertain himself. Believing that commuters would enjoy passing the time with handheld video games, Yokoi soon developed a set of portable gaming systems which also doubled as watches/alarms -- the Game & Watch.This week, we'll take a look at several ads for the fourth Game & Watch series, the Multi Screen, whose clamshell case and vertically stacked screens would later serve as inspiration for the Nintendo DS's design.
