It is such a rare commemorative Game & Watch model that it was thought to be a forgery.

The Game & Watch have had a great relevance both in the history of Nintendo in particular and in the video game industry in general. This line of portable consoles had an LCD screen and had a clock and alarm. In his catalogue are titles of some of the most famous franchises in video games like Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda or Mario Bros. More than 43 million were sold worldwide, and it was Nintendo’s first major success in video game history.

The console has served today to commemorate the 35th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda as Nintendo previously did with the 35th anniversary of Super Mario. The original models were produced between 1980 and 1991, and today they are highly prized pieces for collectors. While all Game & Watch models are well known, and most are in the hands of collectors, a model so rare was recently put up for auction that it left most doubts about its authenticity.

The auction took place on Yahoo! Japan, a Japanese auction portal similar to eBay, and in it appeared a commemorative model of Game & Watch for the 20 million units sold in which Gunpei Yokoi appears, the ideologue of the model and who later would also be known for creating the Game Boy, along with two other hitherto unknown men. It is a variant of Donkey Kong, and when unfamiliar faces appeared on the plate, it was assumed that it was false.

Florent Gorges have solved the mystery, the author of ” The Story of Nintendo “, has identified K. Momose and T. Ishida, who accompany Yokoi in the image, as indispensable partners in the production of the Game & Watch; more specifically, we know that Momose was the director of the factory that produced the characteristic aluminium plates that the model mounted. Makoto Kano makes the cartoon, and the model was completed in 1982.

The most curious thing is that we already had a commemorative edition for the 20 million units sold based on Green House, so it is even more complicated to know how many units were made of this other version. However, everything indicates that it could be done as a sample of the excellent relationship between the companies that carried out the model’s production. The auction has ended at more than a million yen, which is equivalent to about 8,000 euros to change, a figure that although it seems high, it is not so much for a product with such historical weight and so extremely rare that until now it was utterly unknown. After more than 40 years since the first Game and Watch launch, the question now is how many more models will have existed without our knowledge of them.

Source: ArsTechnica