Time killers: The strange history of wrist gaming

Sharing is caring!

Flying cars, robot servants, personal jetpacks: This was the life envisioned for us by the futurists, science fiction writers and gadget makers of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

And one of the most memorable of those fictional inventions was the famed Dick Tracy watch.

Introduced in 1946, the two-way wrist radio was almost as iconic as the comic strip police detective who used it. By 1964 the watch, used by Tracy to keep in contact with police HQ and get out of many a jam, became a two-way wrist TV.

It was the sort of gadget — tiny, powerful, seemingly innocuous in its presentation — that fired the imagination of a generation of children, among them Apple’s Tim Cook, who recently referenced the watch when unveiling Apple’s own take on the idea.

While the Apple Watch may be one of the most advanced takes on that famous idea, it’s far from the first smartwatch to deliver on a comic book future. The history of smartwatches, computerized watches that deliver more than the time, dates back to the ’70s, and gaming on those watches has just as long a history.

Throughout that somewhat muddled five-decade period, gaming has pushed the technology forward. It was gaming that helped turn calculators into handheld toys. It was gaming that inspired Casio to try to create a new sort of technophile lifestyle. And even today, it is gaming that is empowering a new generation of developers to push the boundaries of what a smartwatch can do.

Gaming for many smartwatches isn’t just a fun aside; it is the fuel that may finally help this technology break into the mainstream.

The nearly 40-year history of watch gaming shares a common root with all portable gaming: the calculator. It was from the calculator that Mattel built its first portable gaming machines, Nintendo was inspired to make the Game & Watch and Casio created its popular line of, at first, game calculators, but then game watches.

The first innovators of that often overlooked branch of portable gaming, the game watch, included a mix of little-known, tiny electronics and watch manufacturers from Germany, Russia and Hong Kong, but it was mostly influenced in the early years by Casio and then a duo of American manufacturers: General Consumer Electronics and Nelsonic.

And it’s possible that the rise of gaming on watches may have never happened had it not been for the success of a strange little low-tech smoking gadget created in 1946 for a supply-constrained postwar Japan.

Read the full story over on Polygon, where it first ran on Dec. 7, 2015.