Space Invaders on your wrist: the glory years of Casio video game watches

Their tech may have been primitive, but for 80s schoolchildren of a certain kind they had a glamour to equal any modern iPhone Over the last couple of weeks I have been tidying our attic, and while the general aim has been to prevent its contents from collapsing through the ceiling, I have a side-mission. My most valued possession when I was twelve was a Casio GD-8 Car Race watch – a digital timepiece that included a built-in racing game on its tiny monochrome LCD display. Two big buttons on the front let you steer left and right to avoid incoming vehicles and your aim was to stay alive as long as possible. I lost count of the number of times it was confiscated by teachers at my school. I used to lend it to the hardest boys in the year, thereby guaranteeing me protection against bullies. As a socially inept nerd, this was invaluable to my survival. I’m pretty sure I still have the watch somewhere, and my determination to find it has been augmented by a recent discovery: these things are valuable now.Casio started making digital watches in the mid-1970s, using technology it had developed in the calculator market to compete on price, but as the decade drew to a close, the market became saturated and the company started to explore new ways to entice buyers. Speaking to Polygon in 2015, Yuichi Masuda, senior executive managing officer and Casio board member, explained, “Casio went back to its original thinking when it first entered the watch market; that is, ‘a watch is not a mere tool to tell the time.’ We started talking about a multifunction [approach], time display plus other things, such as telephone number memory and music alarms.” Continue reading...

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