Duke pressed his thumbs against the plastic casing, laying back on a leather armchair.
Sinking into the plush a little lazily in his Owlwood's living room.
The small silver device in his hands beeped.
On the tiny screen, a stick figure tossed balls into the air and you had to move the hands to catch them. Basically a videogame version of Ball juggling.
The game was called 'Ball', made by a Japanese playing card company, called Nintendo.
Duke moved the buttons, to catch the falling balls. But after a while he missed.
He frowned in annoyance.
A Handheld made for kids was beating him on a Sunday afternoon.
The device was a marvel of miniaturization.
In 1981, it carried a screen, a chip, and a power source into something that fit in a suit pocket.
Duke couldn't help but feel slightly sad as he remembered his NDS and PSP from his past life.
In the NDS, he used to play mostly pokemon and Yugioh. While in the PSP... everything.
He pressed reset on the Game&Watch, starting another round.
Across the coffee table, Nolan Bushnell sat with a glass of iced water watching Duke's thumbs work the machine.
"You're spending a lot of time with that thing," Nolan noted.
He took a slow sip. "For a company that makes playing cards and novelty toys, they squeezed a functional board into a very tight space. Our engineers asked for one to take a look at the circuit pathways."
Duke paused the game and set the unit on the table.
"It's great hardware," Duke said.
"Nintendo is paying close attention to battery life and component costs. They're figuring out how to deliver entertainment without a television set or a arcade cabinet."
This was not their first encounter with Nintendo either.
Despite being a 'Card Company', they were very interested in breaking on the Game Industry.
Nintendo had already entered the home videogame market by 1977 with the Color TV-Games, a lineup of five dedicated consoles released exclusively in Japan between 1977 and 1980.
Of course, it came with a caveat, the games were mostly just copies of Atari's games.
The first console, the Color TV-Game 6 released in 1977 was Nintendo's very first video game system, and it came with six variations of Pong.
The second one, the Color TV-Game 15 released shortly after the TV-Game 6, came with 15 distinct variations of... paddle games.
Another came with a racing game that looked similar to an old Atari game but could be considered just to be 'heavily inspired' by it.
But the 4th came with 'BlockBreaker', a straight up copy of Duke's 'Breakout' game.
Nolan nodded, as he pulled a manila folder from his briefcase. The home video game industry was moving fast.
Just a few years ago, the market was happy with basic table tennis.
Now, with the programmable chips, finally the first signs of great complex games were already here.
Amid all of this, the Atari 2600 was the undisputed king.
Nolan opened the folder, showing a page with the latest domestic sales reports.
Just last year, they sold over 3 million units across the United States, with demand so great that most retail chains couldn't even keep inventory on shelves.
Surprisingly, demand had spiked as of late more than when the Atari 2600 was first released.
"We have 42 official titles in the catalog," Nolan said, tapping the top page. "Production lines in Little Rock are running round the clock."
The dominance was clear to everyone.
Even competitors like Coleco and Midway that tried building their own hardware, were now pivoting to work on the Atari 2600 after their consoles sales plummeted.
They saw the large Atari customer base and realized the real money was in software.
So now they were just pivoting into becoming third-party developers. Licensing their hits for Atari's platform.
"Having Coleco and Midway port their games to our console is a win," Duke agreed. He looked over the sales graphs happy.
He decided to call CNN editor in Chief to badmouth Jimmy Carter a little more this week.
If it wasn't for Carter's monopoly investigation, this kind of third party developers matter could have been done by now.
"Saves us development costs and drives hardware adoption. But those are the positives, Nolan. So what are the bad news?"
Nolan sighed and pulled out some magazines from his suitcase, Computer and Video Games, Byte Magazine and Compute! Magazine.
The engineering landscape in Japan was shifting, with Japanese firms experimenting with consoles and arcade designs even more.
The Game and Watch was living proof, their units were already selling millions inside Japan. Of course in America they had not even arrived.
Duke had planned already that the moment Nintendo tries to break into the American Market, to supress them into the ground through private investments, media and lobbying.
"It's not just the Handheld we need to worry about," Nolan explained.
"Epoch is developing a system called the Cassette Vision. We got eyes on a prototype and its a cartridge-based console like ours."
"But the architecture is more... advanced and streamlined. They're pushing the limits of what 8-bit processors can do."
Duke nodded. The home electronics sector was unforgiving. A company could invent a product category one year and find themselves obsolete the next.
Atari had already built the foundation, but resting on early success would only invite disaster.
They couldn't afford to get out-innovated on their own field.
Duke picked up a pen and twirled it between his fingers.
"Let's talk about the biggest bad news of the report," Duke prompted. "The unauthorized software."
Nolan brows furrowed as he passed a hand through his face to stop his stress.
Nolan pulled out Polaroid photographs captured by private detectives of boxes crammed with generic, cheaply printed cartridges with no Atari branding.
The artwork was either very nice or very simple, no in-between.
The rogue cartridge market in 1981 was exploding, mostly because the 2600 didn't have a robust lockout chip, so a group of capable programmer could reverse-engineer the hardware without much of a problem.
Small operations were coding crude games in garages and burning them onto cheap ROM chips. Flooding the market with low quality games.
"These unauthorized manufacturers are undercutting us," Nolan said. He pointed to a price tag in one photo.
"They're dumping unlicensed games into the market for 5 or 10 dollars. Meanwhile, our official cartridges cost between 25 and 50. So most young or inexperienced consumers are buying the cheap knockoffs."
Young or Inexperienced was codework for kids and adults who may think the game was an official Atari game with a discount, or to just take the risk and but 5 knockoffs for the price of one original game.
The financial loss may be bad, but the brand damage was worse.
Specially since these rogue games were often poorly coded, filled with glitches.
And when a frustrated parent bought a defective 5$ game, they didn't blame the unknown publisher. They blamed Atari.
"The official Atari seal is losing its meaning," Nolan lamented. "If we can't control what gets plugged into our console, we can't guarantee quality."
"Even retail buyers are getting confused since the law isnt clear. Toys R Us and Sears are apparently considering selling some high quality knockoffs for cheap on their stores, but they backed off after a few calls."
Duke listened carefully, his mind mapping the problems.
The video game crash of 1983 was on his mind every time the Industry was on his mind.
The Video Game Crash of 1983 was a financial collapse of the North American video game industry.
Between 1983 and 1985, home video game revenues plummeted by almost 97%, dropping from a peak of roughly $3 billion down to just $100 million.
How did the crash start? ET was released and it became the most popular movie of the year.
Since it was so popular, Warner(who owned Atari in his past life) ordered for ET to get a videogame tie-in, but the game was only in development for 5-6 weeks...
The game was launched to big acclaim, until people realize it was shit.
So everyone just boycotted them.
The shovelware game quality and constant horrible games just doomed the industry.
By the end of the crash, Nintendo dominated, Atari took its steps into an early grave and ET ended up buried in New Mexico.
Was Warner bad in having ET have such a small time for development? Yes.
But they also needed it to be done by the Chrismas season shooping spree... as a full blooded Capitalist Duke could understand the move at least.
A lot of Duke's moves, were just in preparation to avoid this moment that would cripple the industry.
Quality controls, despite the legal pressure they were facing against it. And his console needed a curated ecosystem with not that much shitty games.
___
Game&Watch are pretty interesting pieces of history