How to Play Nintendo Game & Watch Games Through MAME

The Game & Watch was Nintendo's handheld precursor to the Game Boy, being a series of sixty individual handheld games. First created in 1980 from an idea had by the late Gunpei Yokoi, these simple games are still quiet fun and relaxing to play, at least on the original units. For those who lack the deep pockets needed to get into Game & Watch collecting, the next best thing is to delve into the world of emulation. Despite its (mostly wrongful) association with piracy, emulation has served as a means of preserving out of print games. Without it, many fantastic titles in the medium of video games would have been lost to time, like all those pre-1940 movies that'll never be seen again due to a lack of foresight.

This guide is intended to be a noob-friendly, quick and dirty guide on how to get Game & Watch games running on your PC. I've only recently started messing with MAME emulation so I'm by no means an expert on any of this. I have no idea if this process will differ depending on device or operating system, as I'm doing this on the Windows 10 operating system. Without further ado, let's figure this out!

-Device capable of running MAME

-MAME program (can be found here)

-ROM files

-Artwork files (can be found here)

This step is easy enough. Either click the link in the "supplies" section or go the MAME Dev site yourself and download the latest release of MAME. You don't need the driver information (as far as I know), so just download the file ending in ".exe". As I type this, the current version is .220.

Once you have that downloaded, put it into its own folder (you can name the folder whatever you want), and run the file in there. It should create all the files needed to run MAME. Once that's done, the .exe used to create the files can be deleted, and we can start to look for our game files!

Alright, this is the part where everyone's panties get twisted up and they suddenly want to become paralegals, spouting off nonsense about "copyright law", "piracy", "not giving the original creators the money they deserve", and how totally illegal it is to download games. Your mileage may vary on this, personally I think it's alright to download games if they aren't conveniently available anymore or if they aren't on a supported platform. There doesn't exist a case of someone being busted for downloading video game ROMs files, but only for uploading. I'm more likely to have this guide taken down under the blind justification of how "it promotes piracy" than you, the reader, are ever going to be for downloading old video games that may or may not be out of print. I've seen it a lot online, so I figured I'd put (some of) my thoughts out there. Regardless, let's continue forth.

Because it's apparently "super illegal" to cite where ROMs can be found, I'm not supposed to share my secrets, but it's totally okay to say how they can be Googled. My recommended keywords are "retro", "roms", and ".info", preferably as one phrase. It "may or may not" have the full MAME ROM set. You "may or may not" have to make a dud account to download the individual Game & Watch files. You may or may not have to download each game individually. Regardless of how you obtain them, they should stay unzipped after the download and copied into the "roms" directory (or wherever you're storing your games) of your MAME folder.

However, the game assets are complete legal to share, so I can explicitly give that information! Either follow the link in the "supplies" box or click here to download the artwork files to play these games. These are necessary to replicate the original artwork for each game, otherwise the games will only load with the black-and-white image data. Not every game's artwork is present, but most of them are. Once those files are downloaded, leave them zipped up and copy them into your artwork folder in your MAME folder.

At this point, we're ready to play them!

Finally, we can play these classics! Open up "mame64.exe". In the sidebar, click "Available" and it'll show you the games you have available. From here, you can open up a game and go wild! As shown in the picture above, I can now play the amazingly un-rereleased Super Mario Brothers Game & Watch not available through any holy official means. Some games might not have their original artwork present (for example, I couldn't find art for Crab Grab anywhere), and as I type this three games still haven't been preserved digitally. Otherwise, this is as close most people may every get to playing these authentically recreated games.

I made this guide because the one other guide I found was mostly a seventeen minute long guide on setting up Launchbox for use with MAME. While it's a good guide, for someone like me who's just interested in firing up Game & Watch games and not getting too involved with using MAME, most of it didn't do me much good. I thought a quick guide would be something a lot of people could use, especially for people like me who are wary of multi-system emulators and prefer sticking to compact single system emulators (using FCEUX or SNES9x as opposed to using RetroArch, for example).

I know a lot of users online get antsy about the potential moral and legal repercussions of using video game ROMs and emulators, but I'm more antsy about how so many people have bought into the buzzwords and negative reputation that emulation has been wrongly associated with. Many video game publishers are not providing the majority of their back catalogs for modern audiences, either due to costs of manufacture outweighing the potential earnings or due to convoluted copyright laws and licensing issues (as seen with the ever popular Donkey Kong arcade game, which saw it's first official rerelease on the Nintendo Switch... thirty-seven years after it hit arcades). There's no other way for many people to experience these games outside of shelling out money for the collector's market of gaming, and instead of making those older games available somehow, the solution chosen was to demonize those who download and recreate those vintage experiences. Those who wish to explore the work that preservationists have saved are demonized as being pirates despite alternatives that play by the rules not existing or being too far out of reach. It's not the same as ripping off the latest games, but is treated as such out of implication. I hope that these classic titles, and not just the Game & Watch line, are able to continue being available for the curious future generations who want a peek at what these classic games are all about.