Nintendo puts a game and a clock in one pocket device

What happened

The idea is usually traced to an engineer watching a bored commuter fiddle with a pocket calculator. Gunpei Yokoi's design used the same cheap components, replacing digits with fixed liquid-crystal shapes that switched on and off to suggest movement. Each unit held one game, ran for months on watch batteries and doubled as a clock and alarm, which made it easy to justify carrying. Simple as they were, the better entries had genuine escalating tension, and the range grew to dozens of titles across silver, gold, wide-screen and tabletop formats.

Two engineering decisions echoed for decades. Folding a model shut to protect two stacked screens produced a hinged case whose descendants include the company's later dual-screen handhelds, and the flat four-direction pad developed for one unit replaced the awkward joystick on Nintendo's home controllers. Sales ran into the tens of millions worldwide, giving a firm still known for playing cards and arcade cabinets both the money and the confidence to design a cartridge console for living rooms.

The world at the time

Dedicated handheld toys with light-emitting displays had already sold well in the United States, but they were bulky and drained batteries quickly. Liquid-crystal panels were arriving in watches and calculators at low cost. Arcades dominated public attention, and the notion that a screen small enough for a shirt pocket could deliver a real game was untested.

What it changed

Revenue from the line underwrote the Family Computer and the company's expansion abroad. The clamshell shape, low power draw and one-hand control scheme became a house style, resurfacing in the Game Boy and later in the dual-screen systems. Collectors and official reissues have kept the units in circulation, and the games themselves reappear as bonus content.