Game and Watch (universe)

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The Game & Watch universe refers to the Smash Bros. series' collection of characters, stages, and properties concerning and modeled off of Nintendo's old Game & Watch series of dedicated handheld gaming devices, released from 1980 to 1991. For predating even 1981's Donkey Kong, the Game & Watch series is sometimes labeled the grandfather of gaming. Of the various game franchises that have been heavily represented thus far in the Smash Bros. series, this can be considered the most "out there" universe of them all, featuring a unique and distinctive flat "mascot" character referred to as Mr. Game & Watch as a playable character in Melee.

Franchise description

Prior to his work in Nintendo in video games, where he would eventually create the first games in the Metroid and Kid Icarus series, Gunpei Yokoi was traveling on a Shinkansen Bullet Train when he saw a businessman pressing buttons on a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) calculator in an attempt to kill time. It occured to Yokoi that there could be an audience for a handheld machine meant specifically for game-based entertainment, so as head for Nintendo's R&D1 he created the first games in what would be a long-running line of Game & Watch handheld dedicated consoles (dedicated in that each individual unit had one game built into it). The games in the franchise were released as "subseries" based on the consistent design of each Game & Watch; the first set of G&W games released in 1980 was called the "Silver" series. The Game & Watch made handhelds vastly popular and prompted other companies such as Tiger Electronics to produce similar devices of their own.

After the first Game & Watch games helped carve more of the path towards gaming as a mainstream commodity, a path formerly started by such products as Pong and Tetris and would later be continued by Nintendo in releases such as Donkey Kong and then Super Mario Bros. for the NES, new subseries of Game & Watch games were developed and released in the years afterward, and they would eventually be superseded by the Nintendo Game Boy, which was the first handheld to be able to play more than one game. The sequel subseries to Silver, Gold, was made in 1981, and further new subseries of Game & Watch products that were released in the years afterward were the Widescreen (1981-1982), Multiscreen (1982-1989), Tabletop (1983), Panorama (1983-1984), New Widescreen (1982-1991), Super Color (1984), Micro Vs. System (1984), Crystal Screen (1986), and much later in 1998, the Mini Classics series. Throughout the Game & Watch's entire history, approximately 59 distinctive titles were released. The name of each subseries generally denotes the physical build and layout of the game devices in that subseries, such as games in the Multiscreen subseries being "clamshell"-designed handheld devices with two separate screens displayed simultaneously, one above the other. The Yokoi-designed multi-screen layout of Game & Watch gaming devices is extremely similar to the design of the modern-day handheld gaming device, the Nintendo DS.

The games themselves were generally simple in design, especially so for the earliest of the games, such as Manhole, which comes packaged with the e-Reader for Game Boy Advance. They often had buttons titled "Game A" and "Game B", where selecting one game mode over the other would affect difficulty. As the rest of the gaming industry expanded and developed, the Game & Watch series became somewhat less antiquated; it would soon play fully ported versions of Donkey Kong, Balloon Fight, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda. Game & Watch games were not limited to known Nintendo characters either; there were also games based on Disney's Mickey Mouse, and several of the games featured an unnamed fully black-colored character in particular.

After the Game & Watch series was superseded by the Game Boy and its many future successors, the Game & Watch name took its place as an artifact from gaming's early history. When HAL Laboratory was designing Super Smash Bros. Melee in 2001, it decided to renew historical appreciation for the franchise by featuring properties from Game & Watch in Melee as a playable franchise alongside such major game franchises as Mario and Zelda. To this end they gave the unnamed character from several of the games the identity Mr. Game & Watch and made him to be the playable "mascot" of the Game & Watch series. Game & Watch has since become a better known subject among the gaming community, enough that properties from it make occasional cameo appearances elsewhere, such as a false clone of Mr. Game and Watch appearing as an NPC in Wario Land 4 for Game Boy Advance.

In Super Smash Bros. Melee

Game & Watch is a franchise first introduced in the Smash series in Melee, featuring one character and one stage.

Character

• Mr. Game & Watch: A small, flat, black, and voiceless personality who made several appearances among several of the games in the Game & Watch series, Mr. Game and Watch was given his identity for his appearance as a Melee fighter. A character like no other in the Smash series, Mr."G&W" is almost totally flat, and nearly every movement he makes is distinctively frame-by-frame and is accompanied by a "beep-and-boop" sound. As a Melee fighter, he is also unique in his B-Forward move, Judgement, which creates a random effect that can be powerful, but may actually hurt him at times, and his B-Down Bucket collects projectiles thrown at him; when three projectiles are gathered, their accumulated damage and knockback is dealt the next time he whips out his bucket and there is an opponent in his way. However, overall he lacks outstanding power and has light constitution, making him not a hard opponent to deal with, so he is among the bottom tier in the competitive metagame.

Stage

Melee features one stage based, quite literally, on the Game & Watch platform.

• Superflat World: Flat Zone: This stage takes place in the screen of a giant old-style Game & Watch platform, where the characters appear 3D but can seem to reside in a flat space. Visual elements of its layout are combined from elements of the Game & Watch entries named Manhole, Helmet, and Oil Panic. It has several platforms and one small house rooftop to the right, and various hazards such as spilled oil on the ground and falling tools from the sky complicate the action. This could be the smallest and most cramped stage in the game, with the left, right, and upper KO boundaries all rather close to the edges of the visible screen. This makes for a stage not often allowed in Tournament legal. However, it is always fought as the last stage in All-Star Mode (where the opponents are 25 Mr. Game & Watches), and it is the stage where Mr. Game & Watch's Target Test challenge takes place as well.

Music

• 26: Flat Zone: An original composition comprised of atmospheric techno-sounds mixed with the beep-boop nature of the oldest Game & Watch games. It appears in Superflat World: Flat Zone.
• 49: Mr. Game & Watch's Victory: The victory fanfare of Mr. Game & Watch is an original composition with the same influence as track 22, "Flat Zone".

Full Trophy List

• Mr.Game & Watch's three game trophies
• Game & Watch

In Super Smash Bros. Brawl

As of now, no Game & Watch-specific content has been revealed for this game. It is the only known Universe in all three Smash titles of which no information has been revealed in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

However, there is a theory of the inclusion of the Game and Watch series in Brawl that involves the numbering of each icon on the official website for Brawl, Smash Bros. DOJO!!. When the icons are saved as images, they have predetermined names. Each name has a number. Due to the numbering of the icons, the franchises that were introduced in Super Smash Bros. Melee are numbered between those in the original Super Smash Bros. and Brawl. However, there were only three franchises introduced in Melee -- Fire Emblem, Game and Watch, and Ice Climber. The 12th icon is Fire Emblem, and the 14th icon is Ice Climber. Due to this ordering, icon 13 has to be a franchise that was introduced to Super Smash Bros. in Melee. Because Fire Emblem and Ice Climber are already icons 12 and 14, the Game and Watch series is the only franchise that can be icon 13, meaning that there will be some Game and Watch content in Brawl.