Remember that little silhouetted guy who appeared out of nowhere in Super Smash Bros. Melee, communicated in calculator beeps and confused the hell out of everybody? Yep, the very Mr. Game & Watch, the mascot of the eponymous series of early Nintendo handhelds. Well, he had a brother, who nobody out of the Iron Curtain has hardly ever seen.
The Elektronika IM series was just another of the numerous Soviet clones — this time it's the seminal Nintendo portables that were copied — as rumor has it, after some bigwig in the MIPnote had seen some during his visit to Japannote . The early games were almost literal copies and reconstructed the look-and-feel and gameplay of the Japanese originals very closely, but the later games started having more diversion of graphics.
What's interesting is that the clamshell design of the later Game & Watch handhelds, the forerunner of Nintendo DS, didn't take off in the Soviet Union — all games in the series featured the same single-leaf case, despite, reportedly, being license-built copies, so it won't really be a problem to acquire the later iteration of the platform, unless the Japanese side walked away from the deal. Also, in the typically confusing Soviet fashion, the same IM index (which means "Игра Микропроцессорная", or Microprocessor Game) was used for several other toys and games that weren't Game & Watch-inspired in the slightest — IM-11, for example, was a clone of the Big Trak toy tank. On the other hand, the IE and I indexes were often used for the G&W clones.
The devices had their own Urban Legend of Zelda, that the handheld would show you a cartoon after you score 999 points. (The rumor was usually only limited to IM-02 versions, which are the most well-known and had characters from a popular cartoon franchise to boot) This sounds ridiculous nowadays, since Game & Watch's (and Electronika's by extension) hardware and graphics are way too low to make any of that possible, but many kids of that era really believed it, due to lack of knowledge on how these handheld games worked.
Specifications:
- CPU: 4-bit KB1013VK/KB1515HM3 Harvard architecture microcontrollers. These had very limited arithmetics and could only sum.
- RAM: 65 x 4-bit words on-chip
- ROM: 1830 words on-chip
Some of the G&W-based games include:
- IM-02. Just You Wait! (Ну, Погоди!) - The most popular one, based on Egg. Features Wolf from the eponymous cartoon series. Several other, less popular versions were made. Curiously, one of them is a Mickey Mouse version of the original game, known as 24-01. Game on the Screen, with very little changes from the Western release.
- IM-03. Mysteries of the Ocean (Тайны океана) - Based on Octopus.
- IM-04. Merry Cook (Весёлый повар) - Based on Chef.
- IM-09. Space Bridge (Космический мост) - Based on Fire. The setting is changed to an unknown planet, and instead of saving people from the buring building, you help astronauts reach the schnabel wagon without making them fall into one of the lava flows.
- IM-12. Winnie The Pooh (Винни Пух) - Based on Panorama Screen version of Donkey Kong Jr. Features the Soviet version of Winnie the Pooh.
- IM-20. Air Shooting Range (Воздушный тир) - Based on Spitball Sparky.
- IM-20.note Supercubes (Суперкубики) - Not based on any Game & Watch game, instead being a clone of Tetris.
- IM-23 Autotesting (Автослалом) - Not based on any game in particular. You take the control of a racing car trying to dodge upcoming barriers.
