Game & Watch Gallery

About Game & Watch Gallery

Game & Watch Gallery (1997) is a Game Boy compilation of four Game & Watch classics, each playable in its original form or in a Modern version starring Mario characters.

Game & Watch Gallery in Depth

Four games from Nintendo's Game & Watch handhelds of 1980 to 1982 are included, each in a Classic mode that recreates the original look and play and a Modern mode with extra mechanics, enhanced graphics and music, and Mario characters, all at Normal or Hard difficulty. In Fire, players move a tarp to catch people leaping from a burning building and bounce them to safety; in the Modern version, characters bounce for different lengths of time. In Manhole, players fill gaps in the street so pedestrians can cross; modern characters walk at different speeds, and Yoshi can set a manhole cover in advance that drops when stepped on.

In Octopus, players grab treasure from a sunken chest while dodging an octopus's tentacles, and in the Modern version Mario slows down the more treasure he carries. In Oil Panic, players catch falling oil and empty it without hitting bystanders or overflowing the bucket, and the modern Mario carries two buckets that can be swapped around. Every 200 points earns a star, up to five per mode and difficulty for 80 in all, and stars unlock a gallery of animations of other Game & Watch titles. On a Super Game Boy or Game Boy Color the games gain limited colour. IGN compared it favourably to Tetris and Dr. Mario as a strong "twitch" game.

Making Game & Watch Gallery

Tose and Nintendo R&D1 designed it and Nintendo published it in 1997, in Japan on 1 February, the US on 5 May and Europe on 28 August. It received generally positive reviews: AllGame called each game "a simple yet dangerously addictive dose of pure unfettered and unvarnished fun", GamesRadar+ praised the updated versions but wished for more titles, and Eurogamer felt that without nostalgia it might be "little more than a curiosity". It was later released on the Nintendo Power cartridge service in Japan in 2000 and on the 3DS Virtual Console in 2011, where USgamer and Official Nintendo Magazine UK named it among the service's best.