Remember handhelds with a transparent screen?
2.7.2023
Translation: Eva Francis
When I was a kid, I thought Climber’s transparent screen was pretty darn cool. Today, I’m a fan of the game itself. It’s the best Game&Watch title I’ve come across.
If you grew up in the eighties like I did, you’re bound to know all those LCD games from Nintendo and Co. I owned two of them – Donkey Kong Jr. and Mickey Mouse – but knew of many more through school friends.
Most of these Game&Watch series games were released in the first half of the 80s. A little later, in 1986, games with a transparent screen appeared. I was ten years old at the time. I didn’t own one myself, but got the chance to marvel at Climber at a friend’s house. It looked classy and futuristic – although I’d never have used words like «classy» or «futuristic» back then.
Game&Watch devices are divided according to screen type. There are, for instance, Wide Screen, Multi Screen and New Wide Screen series. The transparent ones form the Crystal Screen series and only include three games: Super Mario Bros., Climber and Balloon Fight.
Elements of Super Mario and Doodle Jump
The game itself didn’t fascinate me at the time and I didn’t play it for long. Apart from the transparent screen, it was just another LCD game in my mind – and I wasn’t into those games after having played Super Mario Bros. on the NES.
I see things differently today. I bought Climber two years ago and have played it many times. It’s an astonishingly good game considering the simple technology it’s based on.
In Climber, you play a character that jumps up walls. You can also break down walls from below to create a passage, kind of like in Super Mario. The Blockmen, which walk and turn into block platforms when they reach a gap, are your enemies. If you fall or touch another character, you lose a life.
Unlike the usual LCD games
What’s special about it? Nothing from today’s point of view, but the LCD games of the 80s usually work differently. They don’t work with pixels. Instead, the game characters are engraved on the LCD as liquid crystal shapes. This allows drawing figures that are beautiful but static. As a result, most games take place in a single, predefined scene that’s painted onto the background of the monochrome screen.
Climber also works with drawn liquid crystal shapes instead of pixels. However, the game isn’t set in a static scene, but scrolls upwards. Therefore, apart from a few inconspicuous little clouds, it has no background image. The transparent screen wouldn’t work with lush scenery. Why? It lacks the reflective layer behind it, so it would be too dark.
There are no smooth movements in LCD games with drawn shapes. And the same applies to the scrolling mechanism in Climber – you move up floor by floor in quite jerky movements. A level consists of 25 floors, whereby only three can be seen at once. This means the space is eight times as large as the visible area.
If you’re hit, you don’t fall all the way to the bottom – only seven floors. There are checkpoints, which is unusual for LCD games. If you leave the screen to the right or left, you’ll reappear on the opposite side. Again, that’s something I’ve not seen in other LCD games. Another special feature is that the game only starts when you move. Before that, your character will blink and you can’t die, even if you’re hit by an enemy. Speaking of dying, the last jump to the feet of a bird is a bonus. If you die there, you don’t lose a life.
Doesn’t get boring
As you see, there’s a lot more to Climber than to other LCD games. Most others get boring very quickly. They don’t have levels. Instead, the game just runs faster the longer you play – or more enemies and things that you have to collect appear.
Climber has levels, and the difficulty doesn’t just increase with speed and enemies. Over time, moving walls and thorns appear which you try to avoid. Besides, the levels are different every time, since they include a random component. And the floors are constantly changing anyway.
Having said that, speed and enemies also increase constantly – and quite effectively so. I rarely make it past the eighth floor. Theoretically, the game runs indefinitely, but hardly anyone has ever done more than twenty levels.
Zenith of a technology that was already old back then
With the scrolling mechanism, the floors and the changing scenery, Climber could also be an arcade or console game. In fact, it is. A similar game, Ice Climber, appeared as an arcade game in 1984 and on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985.
In the two other games with transparent screens, you also jump or fly through a scrolling world. Nintendo must have realised back then that games with static scenes wouldn’t attract people’s attention any more. So they introduced scrolling to LCD games, even though this technology isn’t really flexible enough.
In 1988, Climber was also released as an LCD game in the classic design, i.e. without a transparent screen. But the era of LCD games was practically over by then. A year later, the pixel-based Game Boy saw the light of day.
David Lee
Senior Editor
David.Lee@digitecgalaxus.chMy interest in IT and writing landed me in tech journalism early on (2000). I want to know how we can use technology without being used. Outside of the office, I’m a keen musician who makes up for lacking talent with excessive enthusiasm.
