Blast from the past: Casio’s first game watch

Yeah, those words I scrawled on the image above are exactly what I told my mother, oh, about 25 or so years ago, the age of video gaming discovery when Atari, Coleco and Nintendo dominated the market with their (then) outlandish-looking contraptions. I wasn’t pining for any of those, though. I was after a cool watch.

In this corner of the world, however, we also discovered, to our delight, that we can bring our video games to school with us, and not just leave them at home to gather dust. Well, there was, of course, the Game & Watch, but Nintendo didn’t really take into the account the plight of schoolchildren and their worst fear: confiscation.

Uh-huh, I lost about three Game & Watches—Octopus, Fire, and Helmet—to the grubby fingers of male primary school teachers. Curse them!

Fortunately for us, Casio stepped into the void and introduced the Casio Game-10, shown above in its most basic, uhmm, look. The game that came with it was pretty simple. You controlled a spaceship and you needed to shoot down enemy ships on the other side of the small LCD. It’s so simple that you can only move your ship left or right.

But the Casio Game-10 gave us, the schoolchildren of the 80s, exactly what we needed: A fix for our growing video game addiction and the perfect disguise that shields it from the prying eyes of school teachers.