Thoughts on Game & Watch
This post was originally written sometime in early 2023 and hosted on Cohost.
What you’re looking at right now is every possible game state within Game & Watch: Octopus contained in a single image file. Looking at it is a weirdly surreal experience for me. I spend an unhealthy amount of my time thinking about and writing about games; going on and on about “depth” and “possibility spaces” or whatever it is I do. The struggle in writing about these things though is that as much as I want to speak in absolute terms, these are not concepts that can be easily measured, if they can be measured at all. Like what is the total number of non-redundant game states possible within God Hand? Who the hell knows? Defining the depth of a game mostly comes down to a relative gut feeling. Not here though. A single image is all we need to visualize every possible combination of game states.
Though of course this is a feature driven by the limited technology of the Game & Watch. It’s the exact same kind of segmented LCD display you’d find in a pocket calculator, only now instead of using combinations of segments to display numbers, we’re using them to display the different game states. This isn’t as limiting as you’d expect, there are extremely faithful Tetris bootlegs which use this same type of segmented display. The difference is that the segments in those bootlegs are very granular, with the screen being broken down into even squares which then allows every tetromino to be represented at every position and at every angle. Your typical Game & Watch title on the other hand has far fewer segments, with most objects being composed of a single segment which isn’t abstracted enough for it to serve more than one function, and this leads to the restrictive design that LCD games are known for.
Given that restriction, it’s remarkable how involved certain Game & Watch titles are. This is a case where the artwork of the game defines what it can be and do. If the artist can’t scrunch a gameplay element into this one compact space, that element’s gotta go. Despite the cramped nature of these games, we end up with some incredibly evocative imagery. They tend to favor grounded scenarios which allow players to discern goals and obstacles almost instantly, with the only heavily abstracted game being Squish. The characters and objects meanwhile are usually presented in silhouette, aside from the occasional bold facial expression.
These aesthetics are the real strength of this library if you ask me, they’re as minimalist as you can make them while still retaining such life and vibrancy. Notice how every position that the diver in Octopus can be in results in a completely different pose. The image may not animate by itself, but your actions create a real sense of motion to the character. This is where Octopus shines brighter than other Game & Watch titles in my eyes. It definitely doesn’t have the most interesting gameplay of the bunch, but I think it’s the strongest aesthetic package overall. It’s the little details that really work here: The fact that your remaining lives are represented with other characters rather than a non-diegetic HUD element. The way your little diver will frantically stuff gold into their bag as you mash away on the button, creating parity between you and the character as you both test the limits of your greed before the next Octopus tentacle snatches you up.
It may not sound like a lot (and it isn’t, really) but when games are this simple you have to take whatever you can get. Engaging with these games, I think you’ll find a surprising amount of charm and ambition; they feel like the gaming equivalent of Fleischer-era cartoons in more ways than one. There’s the obvious monochromatic similarities, but there’s also the matter of how they use their characters, with Mr. Game & Watch and even Mario himself serving as blank slate everymen who can be slotted into whatever anarchic scenario the artists dreamed up that day. It’s a parallel that becomes even funnier when you consider that just like how early Disney characters were eventually turned into static, unchanging corporate symbols, the exact same happened to Mario. Donald Duck read Mein Kampf in Der Fuehrer’s Face, and Mario fought in the Vietnam War in Mario’s Bombs Away. Nowadays, Disney and Nintendo would probably both prefer it if you forgot that these things ever happened.
Leaving aside that baggage, how do the game’s themselves actually fare? Well most early Game & Watch titles neatly fit into the stereotype of LCD games, with extremely rote execution tests that are as stripped back as they can be. In Ball you juggle a ball. In Vermin you kill vermin. In Egg you catch eggs. You get the idea. But later titles would introduce more obstacles and layers to the scoring system to complicate matters. For instance, Octopus isn’t just about dodging tentacles, it’s also nabbing gold and bringing it back home. You get one point for every piece of gold you steal, and 3 points when you bring back that gold to the ship. There’s also more than a few games which directly build off prior entries by adding more obstacles to avoid: Lifeboat is a more complex version of Parachute, Mario’s Bombs Away is a more complex version of Helmet etc. etc. While I find this gameplay utterly adorable, it’s important to mention that these extra complications don’t actually fix the problems with the earlier games. These are still ultimately rote execution tests, just rote execution tests with extra steps added.
That’s not to say those extra steps can’t enhance a game quite a bit. Green House is really the standout of the Game & Watch library in this regard. Its multi-screen setup allows different enemy types to appear on different screens, but crucially these enemies also behave differently. Worms are killed by your bug spray immediately, but the spiders are more resistant to it. Spraying a spider doesn’t kill it, it just knocks it backwards one space, turning the enemy into something of a ticking time bomb looming over you. Unless of course you wait until the last possible second to spray it, in which case the spider is killed and bonus points are earned. This gives Green House an honest to god positional element to its combat, the effects of your attacks vary depending on the enemy’s current position.
It’s no masterpiece or anything, but games like Green House show the potential that the LCD game format has for creating genuine risk vs reward situations. But even at their most basic, I can’t help but be enamored with these games. Not just for their tremendous historical value, but also for how clearly they prove that engaging aesthetics can elevate simple gameplay. As someone interested in minimalism in game design, I’d like to think there’s a lot of room still left to explore here.