Available from shady resellers everywhere!

Pictured: Adults, doing job.

Hey, guess what's sold out already? It's the-huh? Yeah, the Game & Watch thing-how did you know what I was...Usually this is the part where I explain to you-the adult who outgrew video games in their teens-what the hell I'm talking about. And I will anyway, because I kind of think you're just humoring me. Game & Watch was a series of LCD handheld games Nintendo made back in the 80's. Remember that game where you're a fire fighter and there's a trampoline and-yeah, me neither.

Despite being an old as well as a big huge nerd for this kind of thing, I've never actually played one. I did play some of those Tiger LCD games which I think are kind of the same deal and I'm pretty sure they were terrible. 

What? It was was 1988. It was this or the hoop with a stick.

Finally, a way to buy Super Mario Bros. again!

-No one anywhere ever

Maybe the Game & Watch games were good, who knows? The point is Nintendo released a new one, sort of. It's shaped like a Game & Watch, but has a color screen and plays the NES version of Super Mario Bros. It also has a version of the Game & Watch game Ball, but it's updated to include Mario. And that's cool, but I'm not sure who this is for. Like, it's not really a Game & Watch, it just looks like one and it plays a version of Super Mario Bros. that's not the Game & Watch version. So it's basically a throw back to a thing that never existed. 

And couldn't have existed. Not in 198-whatever when Game & Watch was big. The mini game consoles that were such a big deal a couple years ago were at least trying to replicate an experience but with some updates to make them less, you know, they way they were. This is really a whole new thing.

Thirty years later and this sight still fills me with anxiety. 

I think the only reason they still call themselves
The History Channel is that The Crackpot Throries 
and WWII Tanks Channel is too much of a mouthful.

It's like one of those out-of-place-objects. You know, like those artifacts that archeologists dig up and they seem anachronistic somehow. Like that mechanical calculator from an ancient Greek ship wreck or the Bagdad Batteries. They are objects that appear to be from a certain era, but couldn't be because the technology necessary to construct them didn't exist yet. The History Channel is something like 90% fake documentaries about unexplained artifacts. They usually chalk it up to aliens, because The History Channel is nonsense.

"Oh, hey, it's working!"

-Marketing people

Anyway where I'm going with this is why did this thing sell out? Who wants one? And why did I try to order one? Like, I don't want it. At all. But I think I was somehow taken in by the idea that I needed one because they'll be hard to find. What's wrong with me that I was willing to spend even a few minutes chasing after something I don't care about? Has a lifetime of being bombarded by advertisements worn down my resistance so that I can't tell my own wants from those that marketing people have planted?

I know I say business is gross a lot, like, all the time, but business is gross. The draw with the Game & Watch isn't just nostalgia as is usually the case with retro game stuff, and the thing that I usually fall for, but scarcity. What even is that? Is this some new pandemic hoarding mentality? Or am I just a congenital sucker?

"Who cares? Now, how many can I put you down for at a huge mark-up?"

-Resellers on Amazon