Pocket-sized worlds, drawn in liquid crystal.
Before the Game Boy, Nintendo's Game & Watch turned every shirt pocket into a tiny arcade. NintendoGame.Watch is a fresh tribute to that decade-long experiment in lateral thinking — every series, every model, every quirk, gathered in one place.
A masterclass in doing more with less.
Gunpei Yokoi looked at a bored businessman fidgeting with a calculator and saw an entire product category. Game & Watch was built from cheap watch parts and LCD segments — and changed handheld gaming forever.
Two screens, curved mirrors, transparent LCDs, head-to-head play, colour overlays — Nintendo treated every series like a small experiment. Some sold by the million. Some are now museum pieces.
The LCD fluid in many units is failing forty years on. NintendoGame.Watch keeps each model documented, photographed, and findable — so the shapes and stories survive even when the screens fade.
The Multi Screen Donkey Kong of 1982 introduced the plus-shaped directional pad — invented because the clamshell had no room for four discrete buttons. Every controller since, from the NES to the Switch, is a refinement of that one decision.
Ten series, one idea, eleven years.
Each series tried something Nintendo had never built before — a new form factor, a new display trick, or a new way to play. From a single juggler in 1980 to Mario juggling under a moonlit stage in 1991. Tap any entry to drop into its catalogue.
Every Game & Watch, in one place.
Filter by series, hunt by name, or just scroll. Click any unit for the story, the model number, and the games it played.
The Game & Watch, in our words
NintendoGame.Watch is a love letter to a small, strange family of handhelds Nintendo built between 1980 and 1991 — a decade in which a games company that mostly made playing cards and toys quietly invented modern portable gaming.
The first unit, Ball, slipped out of Japan on the 9th of April 1980. It cost a few thousand yen, ran on watch batteries, and let you keep a juggler from dropping two stiff little balls. It sold a million copies. By the time the line ended in 1991, Nintendo had shipped fifty-nine different models across ten distinct hardware series, and posted somewhere north of forty-three million units sold worldwide.
The man behind the magic
Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 as a maintenance engineer. He went on to lead the R&D1 group responsible for the Game & Watch, the Game Boy, and Metroid. The story goes that he watched a bored salaryman on a Shinkansen passing time by tapping the buttons of a calculator, and wondered if you could put a tiny game in the same pocket-sized shell. The Game & Watch is what came out the other side.
Yokoi left Nintendo in 1996 and died in a road accident the following year. His fingerprints are still on every handheld Nintendo ships.
Acknowledgements
This site is built on the work of a lot of people, and it owes them thanks.
Nintendo and the late Gunpei Yokoi's R&D1 team made the machines in the first place. Everything here is a tribute to them; the Game & Watch name, games and characters remain their property.
The MAME project is the backbone of the hardware research. The Sharp SM5A / SM500 / SM510 / SM511 / SM512 CPU cores emulated here were ported and cross-checked against MAME's own src/devices/cpu/sm510 device source (BSD-3-Clause, copyright hap), and each device's on-screen geometry follows MAME's own layout. Facts throughout the Hardware tabs are drawn from that code and from Sharp's original SM-series data books. The game ROMs themselves were recovered from real silicon by hardware preservationists — above all Sean Riddle, whose chip decapping, die photography and ROM dumps (seanriddle.com) are where the Sharp ROMs these emulators run came from, and whose die-level pinouts independently confirmed much of the Hardware-tab detail and corrected our supply-rail labelling.
The Game & Watch artwork — the vector LCD layouts, unit art and printed backgrounds that make every device recognisable — is the work of the MAME artwork community, above all hydef, who authored and refined the SVG layouts across the whole line, and DarthMarino, who contributed the colour backgrounds and Crystal Screen button art. It was released and discussed on the MAMEWorld artwork thread; where a piece ships with a README naming its artist, that credit holds. Our thanks to everyone who contributed there.
Special thanks to nintendogameandwatch.com for the device photography — the reference shots of the physical units throughout this collection. It is the most thorough Game & Watch photo archive on the web, and this site would look far poorer without it.
The two colour 35th-anniversary units — the Mario and Zelda TFT handhelds — run a hand-built ARM digital twin that leans on the Game & Watch retro-go homebrew community and on ST's published notes for the STM32 on-the-fly decryption engine.
If your work is represented here and you would like it credited differently, do reach out and it will be put right.
