Later, he had been able to pitch the idea to Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, when Yamauchi requested him to chauffeur him to a business meeting. Yokoi then thought of an idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature game machine for killing time. While traveling on a Shinkansen (bullet train), Yokoi saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. At the same time, the first arcade and home video game consoles had been developed in the United States, and Nintendo had quickly caught onto this wave in Japan.
Game designer Gunpei Yokoi had been head of Nintendo's Research & Development division in the 1970s, designing physical toys and games until the 1973 oil crisis, after which the market waned for these products. The patented design of a Multi Screen Game & Watch.
The units are based on a 4-bit CPU, from the Sharp SM5xx family, that include a small ROM and RAM area and an LCD screen driver circuit. The series sold a combined 43.4 million units worldwide, and was the earliest Nintendo video game product to gain major success. The models from 1981 onwards featured an alarm in addition. Created by game designer Gunpei Yokoi, the product derived its name from its featuring a single game as well as a clock on an LCD screen. The Game & Watch brand ( Japanese: ゲーム&ウオッチ Gēmu & Uotchi called Tricotronic in West Germany and Austria, abbreviated as G&W) is a series of handheld electronic games developed, manufactured, released and marketed by Nintendo from 1980 to 1991. G&W, Tricotronic (West Germany, Austria), Time-Out (North America) Game & Watch as he appears in Game & Watch Ball, the first title in the series