THE HISTORY OF VIDEOGAMES PART 9 - September 1999
| It’s the modern way of life – especially in Japan
- to make things smaller. (Why? Who knows? Maybe they just want everything to be too tiny
for our Western fingers to operate, so that they can take over the world with armies of
titchy little robots or something.) And in 1981, it was the turn of videogames to be
miniaturised. Hulking great machines from the arcades like Donkey Kong and Popeye were
technologically boil-washed until the games (or extremely rudimentary versions of them,
anyway) fitted onto a tiny little device the size of a credit card and barely any thicker.
Nintendo were the masters of the craft, with their self-explanatorily titled Game And
Watch series capturing the hearts of gamers who could, for the first time ever, take a
videogame and put it in their pocket to annoy other bus passengers with. It was Game And Watch that cleared the path for the Game Boy, and it’s a fitting tribute that there are now several Game Boy cartridges containing collections of old G&W titles to play today, but purists have also reanimated the originals with a number of PC emulators, with all the old beeps and whistles lovingly sampled and reproduced on the most biggest, clunkiest, most expensive gaming hardware you can buy. There’s probably some pretty deep irony in there somewhere, but we’re not sure where. |
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