Nintendo Color Screen: Game and Watch Table Top

The most spectacular games in the Nintendo Game & Watch series are the Panorama and Table Top games. Combining the excellent LCD based game-play that shines throughout the entire series with full color images, these were innovative as well as fun to play.

The Table Top games were shaped like mini arcade cabinets, with joystick and all. In the 80s, owning one of these must have been close to being in handheld nirvana.

The original name under which these games were sold in Japan was Color Screen(カラースクリーン), with strangely enough no reference to Game & Watch, although they are clearly part of that family. They were introduced in the rest of the world asGame & Watch Table Top.

Four Color Screen titles were produced in total. The first two, introduced in early 1983, were Donkey Kong JR (ドンキーコングJR) and Mario’s Cement Factory (マリオズセメントファクトリー), pictured in this leaflet.

Later that same year, the range was extended with games featuring Popeye and Snoopy.

Even though the Color Screen had a bright (color!) screen, it consumed very little energy. It cleverly used a combination of regular black liquid crystals with sunlight projected through a mirror to create the images. According to this leaflet, it was able to run for three years on two C batteries without ever being switched off. It did not even have an on/off switch.

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