Space Invaders on your wrist: The glorious years of Casio Video Game Watches | Gaming

OIn the past few weeks I have cleaned up our attic, and while the general goal was to prevent its content from collapsing through the ceiling, I have a side mission. My valued possession when I was twelve was a Casio GD-8 Car Race Watch-a Digital watch with a built-in racing game on his tiny monochrome LCD display. Two large buttons at the front have them controlled to the left and right to avoid incoming vehicles, and their goal was to stay alive as long as possible. I lost the number of frequency with which it was confiscated by teachers at my school. I used to award it the toughest boy of the year and thus guaranteed protection against mobbers. As a socially incapable nerd, this was invaluable for my survival. I am pretty sure that I still have the clock somewhere and my determination to find it was reinforced by a current discovery: these things are now valuable.

Casio began to do digital watches in the mid -1970s, developing technology on the computer market to compete with the price. When the decade came to an end, the market was saturated and the company began to explore new ways to lure buyers. In 2015, Yuichi Masuda, a senior employee of senior employees and board members, said: “Casio returned to his original thinking when it started for the first time in the watch market. We started talking about a multifunction [approach]Time display plus other things, such as B. Telephone number memory and musical arms. “

At that time, Taitos Arcade Game Space Invaders was a phenomenon in Japan. And so Casio started the CA-90/CA-901 in 1981, a chunky calculator clock that contained a kind of space shoot-up, but more with numbers than extraterrestrial spaceships that move down the screen. “We wanted to create a new lifestyle to enjoy the game anytime,” said Masuda.

But wasn't Casio inspired by Nintendos Game & Watch series? After all, this iconic selection of handheld electronic games began in 1980 with juggling and the Fang Sim Ball, and his success led to a variety of titles, including the famous two-screen donkey Kong, which inspired the Nintendo DS. Shinji Saito, General Manager and Chief Producer of Casio's product planning department, does not say. “1980, a year before Casio, CA-90 started the MG-880, a game calculator with which users could enjoy digital invaders. Nintendos Game & Watch was also launched in 1980,” he says. “In the development of the CA-90, Casio used the development goods of its MG-880 game calculator, but the starting point for the idea was to create the development philosophy of Casio, a new culture with light, thin, short and low electricity technology. We were not Inspired by Nintendos Game & Watch. “

In fact, Casio developed a large number of innovative functions at that time, including databases, thermometers and pulse speeches. “The entire watch industry in the 80s was huge,” says Watch -Denthusiast Andy Bagley. “I have collected for years and even now I will still come across a model that I have never seen before. There were many hundred. I recently found that Casio made a number of touchscreen watches in the 80s – far ahead of their time!”

Anyway, the CA-90 was such a success that it inspired a timeless creativity in the Casio F&E department. Between 1980 and 1985, the company produced dozens of different music boxes-an incredible performance if the borders of LCD displays were taken into account at this point in time that could not generate computer graphics or animations and simply based on matrices of preset forms that were switched on and off. There were several different racing games, there were filming like HELI-Fighter and Zoomnzap, and there were very rudimentary platforms, including Jungle Star, where you play a Tarzan character that jumps out of the raging panthers and the hungry mouse, where they jump over inching cats.

Some were more eccentric. Aero Batics was a stunt -flying game, while Hustle Monira had to catch her with the support of a dinosaurs, catch the falling acorns (in contrast to the egg panic in which they caught … falling eggs). There were even rudimentary football and golf simpl. As with Nintendos Game & Watch titles, they were often only visual variations in very simple game design concepts. But then they felt like science fiction.

Of course, Casio was not the only tech company in the 1980s that produced music boxes. The US company Nelsonic has managed to preserve a Nintendo license and made watches with games based on Zelda, Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, while Seiko had his Alba-Spielwein in the 1980s, including the catchy Y822-4000 with a baseball SIM. The most aesthetic wildest came from the experienced electronic toy company Tiger, who spent the early 90s to be gigantically chunky LCD game watches based on film licenses and arcade games such as Double Dragon and Altered Beast. After all, technology and taste have passed on. After the top -class start of the Game Boy in 1989, Nintendo quickly driven the portable gaming market into the tightness. The era of the Game Watch was anything but over.

Now there is a flourishing collector scene. “You are in great demand and very expensive,” says Bagley. “A disadvantage is that they were not made so well in comparison to say the marlins with all-tals-steel, which means that there are not many survivors, so rarity is a problem. In perfect condition, the rarest, most of the collectible games are picked up many hundreds of up to £ 1,000.” For Bagley and other collectors, these clocks are nostalgic treasures that remember an era in which children class classes did not disturb with social media notifications, but rather hourly digital watch leaves, and when it was absolutely not too awaiting: “It was my personal reference manual for the latest available models. to read. “

The watch industry is interested in the classic video game scene. In 2022, Timex started a limited space-von invader watches with sounds from the game, and at the beginning of this year Casio produced a similarly limited collection of beautiful Pac-Man watches and sent old fans like me who scurried into the pre-order section of his website. If you were a slightly nerded child in the 1980s, these things were your smartphone, your Apple Watch, your grip in the playground seal seal. So I would like to find my car racing guard. It's not really about the potential monetary value-the only thing that really connects me with my 12-year-old myself. For everything that has been lost on the way, we still have games together.