Game & Watch Gallery 2 (1997) for Game Boy Color
8mon 2d ago by atomicpoet.org/users/atomicpoet in videogames@piefed.social from atomicpoet.org
Game & Watch Gallery 2 (1997) for Game Boy Color
I give Nintendo a lot of grief—and they often deserve it. Their recent Pokémon trademark antics are a perfect example of how they operate like a hungry lawyer factory.
But here’s where they do deserve credit: respecting their legacy. Game & Watch Gallery 2 is proof of that. For countless players, these compilations were the first real introduction to Nintendo’s Game & Watch handhelds from the 1980s—devices that predated the NES and paved the way for portable gaming.
The package is simple but effective. Each game has two flavors: Classic Mode, a faithful black-and-white reproduction of the original LCD experience, and Modern Mode, which reimagines those games with Mario-era characters, color, sound, and new mechanics. You start with five games (Parachute, Helmet, Chef, Vermin, and Donkey Kong), with Ball as an unlockable bonus if you earn enough stars.
It’s funny, what was once called “Modern Mode” is itself ancient history now. The Game Boy Color came out in 1998 outside Japan—that’s over 25 years ago. The math is wild: the gap between the original Game & Watch handhelds (1980–81) and Game & Watch Gallery 2 was only about 16–17 years. We’re now nearly three decades past Game Boy Color. So the “modern” in this collection has aged into retro in its own right.
A neat little time capsule—proof that even Nintendo, for all its corporate sins, sometimes remembers where it came from.