Nintendo released the Game and Watch in the year 1980, with the first model arriving on April 28. The idea came from Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi, who observed a bored businessman on a train passing time by pressing the buttons of a calculator. Yokoi saw an opportunity to create something small, inexpensive, and portable enough to carry anywhere.
Nintendo built the devices around the same affordable LCD screens used in calculators, which kept manufacturing costs low and allowed the units to be sold at a price most people could afford. Every model also included a working clock, giving owners a practical reason to carry it even when they were not playing.
The Game and Watch went on to sell more than 43 million units worldwide. That success sent a clear signal that people were interested in gaming away from home and helped lay the foundation for everything Nintendo would do with portable hardware afterward, most significantly the Game Boy.
Between 1980 and 1991, Nintendo released 59 standard Game and Watch titles, plus additional special editions tied to anniversaries and other occasions. Each standard unit typically held a single game, which meant players who wanted variety had to buy multiple devices.
The best-selling Game and Watch title was Donkey Kong, which moved roughly 8 million units. Released in 1982, it also introduced the directional pad, or D-pad, to the world. That control design became foundational to video game hardware and was subsequently adopted on the NES and generations of controllers that followed.
Other titles that resonated with players included Chef, Turtle Bridge, Fire Attack, and Safebuster. Several of these crossed the million-unit mark in sales, though exact figures were not released for every game in the lineup.
The Game and Watch mattered to the industry for several reasons. It demonstrated clearly that demand for portable gaming existed, and it was among the earliest devices to successfully combine entertainment with a built-in utility, since the clock and alarm were present on every unit.
The screens were not backlit, so playing in low light required an external source such as a lamp, a flashlight, or a nearby streetlight. Nintendo eventually introduced models with built-in lighting, though that addition came with a cost to battery life.
Some units contained small rewards built into the programming. Certain scores or situations triggered different animations, giving players little moments of surprise as incentive to keep going.
Mario appeared in several Game and Watch titles before the character became the center of his own franchise. He showed up in games including Donkey Kong and Mario’s Bombs Away, though his visual design was still a long way from the version that became familiar in later years.
Certain Game and Watch units have become prized by collectors. Rare editions and special promotional releases can command thousands of dollars depending on condition and scarcity. Nintendo also produced themed Game and Watch versions built around properties like Super Mario Bros.
Across the full run of the series, total sales exceeded 43 million units, placing it among the most commercially successful things Nintendo produced during the 1980s. The line helped establish the company as a serious force in the industry and demonstrated that portable gaming could sustain a market.
The thinking that went into the Game and Watch carried forward directly into Nintendo’s later handheld work. By the time the Game Boy launched in 1989, the company had nearly a decade of experience designing compact, battery-powered gaming devices. The Game and Watch was the first chapter of a story that Nintendo is still writing.