Game & Watch Keychain!
Starting in 1998, Nintendo started licensing out their name and some of their old Game & Watch lcd handheld games to German toy manufacturer Stadlbauer. In turn, they made a line of tiny lcd game keychains recreating those games, with clock and alarm functions too! These Nintendo Mini Classic’s as they’re called have always fascinated us, a rerelease of an LCD game on a tiny keychain, made by another company, with 90s character renders on the packaging? Sounds right up our alley! After years of looking at them we had the realization that we could just buy one, so here it is!
For a bit of background, we’ve been obsessed with the Game & Watch handheld line for ages. Mr. Game And Watch in Smash Brawl, plus the DSIWare ports gave us this obsession with these quirky old lcd games. It was like a watch, but it played games. Hmmm… Naturally we had every Game & Watch gallery game we could get on the 3DS and played them tons. We’ve always wanted a real system, and at one point owned the recently released Zelda one. We even beat Links Awakening on that thing, funny enough.
But these are all imitations of the real deal, a product that seemed so illusive, so expensive that we could never actually own one. Plus, all the games we wanted were the priciest! Enter these keychains! While you could pay a hundred dollars for a real Mario’s Cement Factory, our tiny keychain version cost us only 30 with shipping. It arrived out of its original packaging, but with the paper backer and with its original plastic pull tab untouched. The batteries were very corroded, but after cleaning the contacts and parts of the board she started up with no issues!
he unit itself is teeny tiny, but the controls are comfortable, with the D-pad and buttons being about the same size as they are on a real Game Boy Pocket. The screen, being an LCD, is best viewed in direct light and there’s no backlight for playing at night. The rear contains copyright info dating to 1998, and the packaging had another for 2005, but the board inside was dated August of 2007. We understand these were manufactured for a good long while, possibly through to the 2010s, and the idea of this and a 3DS or PS Vita being sold at the same time is nutty.
There’s a kickstand on the back for standing it up on a bedside table, and a keychain holder at the top for attaching it to a keyring, as we’ve done with our car keys. We’ve been a carabiner lesbian* for years, so it was odd forgoing it in favor of our Game Infant but sort of fun also! The system plays only one game, naturally, but you have two difficulties listed as Game A and Game B. You set the time by holding down the recessed ACL button on the rear, then pressing left on the D-pad for hours and right for minutes. To set the alarm you hold the Time/Alarm button, then set it the same. You engage the alarm by pressing down on the D-pad, and when it rings you press the Time/Alarm button to turn it off. It’s piercing, much louder than a wrist watch, and since we’re a Neocities supporter now we can show you what it sounds like!
When you aren’t playing the game a little demo plays while the current time is displayed in the upper left, in the same place the score is displayed during gameplay. Annoyingly the digits are cammed too close to a background element so it’s hard to see the last digit of the time or score. The game demo AI is kind of stupid, it’ll fall to its death a ton and actually spawns on a platform that a lot of the time just isn’t there, and therefore dies over and over. It’s kind of endearing, the little baby idiot keychain boy I love him!
Comparing the gameplay of Mario’s Cement Factory on the keychain and the DSIWare port, they’re nearly identical. The only thing is that you can move much faster in the DSIWare version, there’s no cooldown to pressing any of the buttons. You can fly around the screen if you want, where on the keychain you can’t just match. You’ve gotta go with the rhythm of the game, not against it. We picked Mario’s CF over some of the other handhelds available on eBay because it’s one of the most fun Game & Watches, certainly one of the most replayable. There’s lots to manage and timing is important. One nice feature of the keychain is that you can pause the game by pressing the Game B button! You can also mute it using the Game A button, so you don’t have to listen to the shrill sound effects.
Stadlbauer made about a dozen keychains based on old Game & Watch systems, even a few dual screen ones, but the nuttiest are the ones based on other licenses. Star Trek? Smurfs?? Yu-Gi-Oh??? HARRY POTTER??!?!?! These are original games with the Nintendo logo slapped onto them because they were in the same line, they have nothing to do with Nintendo! The Harry Potter Nintendo keychain is a very cursed item. ** These make for great fashion accessories, and fun time sinks too! We were at a coffee shop today, playing this while we sipped our bean juice and listened to a podcast, lovely time. Pick one up if you want something to do with your hands at a bus stop that isn’t looking at your phone.
