Game and Watch - Videogame History #14 - Retro Review
In the 1980s Nintendo was still a very new company in the world of video games, in those years they had a good audience in the gamer market with Color TV Games, simple consoles which had certain games incorporated depending on the model, being the last in selling the Computer TV Game (in this one it was possible to play Othello), but in that company there were ingenious minds and teachers who always wanted to contribute something new to the market, making understand that there are always innovations in the gamer world, one of those people was the great Gunpei Yokoi.
Yokoi in one of his corporate trips was a little thoughtful to see a man manipulating his calculator in an unusual way, he just played with it as if it were a console, from there came the idea of creating an entertainment device which was portable , the detail is that he had no idea where to start, one day he decided to tell his ideas to the president of Nintendo in those years, Hiroshi Yamauchi, who very cautiously contacted the SHARP company who, seeing the great idea of Yokoi, decided to sell him his Monochromatic LCD screens so you can start your big project.
However, for Yokoi this was a very advanced technology, so he decided to contact a new group of young engineers who if they were aware of all these updates, one of them is the great Satoru Okada who was the right hand in all At the moment for Yokoi in this project, Okada decided to use the technology of Intel microprocessors that were recently released to the market for these devices, in this way the idea of Yokoi with the Sharp screens plus the technical knowledge of Okada and other engineers gave birth to one of the the portable consoles that would be most remembered for many years, the Game and Watch.
The Game and Watch would be the beginning of the era of portable consoles for Nintendo, with a total of 56 models became a brief time in one of the most loved consoles and longed for all public, its first model was a small size , with two buttons to the sides that could control the movements within the game and additionally a set of buttons that served to configure the difficulty of the game or the time of the clock since it also had this function.
As time went on and the Game and Watch became popular, many models were released, but one of them would be the one that exploded in sales and innovated one of the main characteristics that are still preserved in the gamer world apart from being the main idea to create one of the most recent portable consoles Nintendo, the DS, this model was the Multi Screen, it contained two screens and each of them could perform a different action, the most relevant Game and Watch was Donkey Kong because it was a port of the famous Arcade game that was fashionable at that time, additionally Yokoi would implement in this model one of the most incredible innovations, the D-Pad which was used in infinities of later consoles until the news.
Thanks to masterminds such as Gunpei Yokoi, one of the most addictive portable consoles could be enjoyed, each one of its models has its charm and originality giving you hours of totally guaranteed fun, the last model that was sold in 1991 was the Mario the Juggler, after 11 years of the release of the first Game and Watch, this means that it was a product of excellent quality, if you had one of these consoles in your hands you can ever give the final verdict of what I transmit in this post.
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i feel like the 80s and 90s were the golden age. i mean games like doom was played by virtually every gamer in the world when we barely had internet. a lot of it was spread manually in disks.
i still do like the emphasis on graphical fidelity in today's gaming industry but back then devs were so creative with limited computing power.