The Bizarre Animation of MR. GAME & WATCH

Hello, and welcome to New Frame Plus,

a series about video game animation.

By overwhelming demand, you folks have voted

for the next Smash Bros character we talk about to be...

Mr Game & Watch.

And I can see why!

He’s weird.

Look at him.
He's flat.

He’s basically just a silhouette.

His moves all have like three frames of animation...

No one else is like this.

How does this even WORK in a game like Smash,
where pretty much every other character is

fully 3D and operating at a
silky smooth 60 frames per second?

Let’s get into it, shall we?

Mr Game & Watch isn’t so much a
character as an amalgamation.

A stand-in representing a whole series
of games from the 80s.

Yes, before there was GameBoy,
even before there was NES…

there was Game & Watch.

Game & Watch was this whole line of of handheld
games that Nintendo produced

between 1980 and 1991.

Each one of these devices
usually contained a single, very simple game

played on a liquid crystal display,

similar to that old CASIO watch
you used to wear in middle school

(you... Cool Person).

But here’s the thing about LCDs:

you can’t really move the crystals
in those displays around.

They can only be turned ON or OFF.

And that makes it pretty hard to animate…

...uh, anything.

But! Say you were to place those crystals
in several different locations on the screen,

and then had them switch ON or OFF
in response to the player’s button presses…

if you did that, it would almost
SORT OF create the impression

of a character or object moving across the screen!

THIS is the origin for Mr Game & Watch’s
weird movement style.

And they way it’s been implemented in Smash
is actually pretty clever!

So in animation, we have this thing called
“Key Poses”

(also sometimes referred to as “Extremes”,
that's the more traditional animation term,

but in many cases they’re kind of interchangeable).

Anyway, Key Poses are the
critical poses in an animation

which most clearly communicate
the “story” of the action.

They’re the extreme points
which define the path of motion.

Remember in that previous episode about Link’s attacks

where I highlighted these Windup,
Attack and Follow-Through poses?

I would call all of these Key Poses (or Extremes)
for Link’s basic attack.

Even without all the frames in between,
these frames tell the story of what’s happening.

If you look at old school 8- or 16-bit sprite animation,

those game characters operated
almost exclusively through key poses.

From Mario’s jump...

...to Simon’s whip...

...to Mega Man’s run,

all of these animations are built using
just a handful of key poses,

the fewest poses possible to
adequately portray the action.

If you look at Mr. Game & Watch in Smash,
you’ll see that he also operates on Key Poses...

...kind of.

All his moves and attacks are, of course,
derived from his whole library of handheld games,

but when you look at the character
movement in those old games,

because of that old display technology,

there’s something... disjointed about it.

There are so few poses available and the characters
cover so much distance at a time...

there's very little connective tissue between
each new pose and position on screen,

so those characters tend to feel a little
erratic in their movement as a result,

and none of their actions feel
like they have any force behind them.

This presents an interesting problem for Smash:

how do you replicate that weird, choppy,
slightly-disorienting quality of movement?

The first thing the animators have done here
is use as few frames of animation as possible.

Mr. Game & Watch’s attacks are all constructed
using maybe three poses, sometimes just two!

All his moves are built on key poses, just like
those 8- and 16-bit characters I described before,

but it doesn’t feel like there are quite
ENOUGH key poses in there to completely

sell the physicality of the actions he’s performing.

Old Game & Watch titles just could not
take advantage of most of the animation principles

that we'd use to convey force or impact,

and Smash’s animators have actually
preserved some of that effect

in not only the posing of Mr. Game & Watch’s moves,

but also the very even, flat timing of them!

You won’t see him actually SWING a chair.

He just holds the chair this way...

...and then he holds it THAT way.

And, for Mr. Game & Watch, that constitutes an attack.

This is a character that REALLY relies on
Smash’s dust clouds and hit pauses and

effects explosions to get
any sense of impact to his moves.

For any other character,
that would be an animation problem.

But for Mr. Game & Watch, it is exactly that problem

that makes his moveset feel faithful
to the source material.

But one of my favorite things about Mr. Game & Watch’s
animation - and it’s the thing that I think

really makes this whole animation aesthetic work -
is the way the animators have managed to

recreate the erratic, disorienting
quality of his movement.

You can REALLY see this in his run.

Just for comparison, let’s look at
Mega Man’s old run again...

It’s built from just three poses, but you
can see how each one of those Key Poses

leads from one to the next.

Step-and-step-and-step-and-step...

You can see him putting one foot in front
of the other,

you can see the nice up-and-down bob
on his body with each stride...

Just three poses, but still enough
to clearly communicate a run.

But with Mr. Game & Watch, and I LOVE this,

these poses barely communicate
the action of running AT ALL.

NONE of these poses connect to each other
in a logical way.

It’s like they took a bunch of individual
run cycle poses,

and then they completely randomized
what order they play in

so you’re left with an erratic jumble of poses
that make no sense together.

That is really clever!

It’s not exactly how characters moved
in the old Game & Watch days,

but it does sell the FEELING
of how they moved in those games.

This brings us to the next question: how has
Mr. Game & Watch’s animation

been adapted to work in Smash?

Well, there is one VERY BIG change,
and you’ve probably already picked up on it.

In those old Game & Watch titles,
like I mentioned before,

the crystals in those old LCD displays couldn't move.

So the characters couldn’t really “move” either.

They could only disappear and reappear
in a new position simultaneously.

But that is not how Mr. Game & Watch
moves in Smash. At all.

Sure, there might be a nice, stuttery pop to
the way he switches between poses,

but his movement around the battlefield?

The tracking of his POSITION... is silky smooth.

See, limiting the visual information that
Mr. Game & Watch’s posing conveys is one thing,

you can get away with that.

But his position on screen at any given moment?

No no.

Positional data is CRUCIAL to Smash Bros gameplay.

If Mr. Game & Watch popped around the screen in
Smash the same way he did in his handheld games,

effectively teleporting around the stage nonstop,

he would be a nightmare to fight.

And to CONTROL, for that matter.

So, even though it defies
the character’s source material,

for the sake of gameplay,
Smash’s animators made the concession

of having Mr. Game & Watch’s position on screen
update at a smooth 60 frames per second,

just like any other character on the roster.

And thank goodness for that.

This gets back to that same thing I was saying
in the Mario episode:

animating a Smash character is all about
finding the balance between

representing that character’s origins AND
making them functionally work as a Smash fighter.

At the end of the day, that’s the big
animation challenge for ALL of these characters.

And that had to be HARD with this guy, right?

Like, so much of what makes those old games
distinct is their extremely limited animation.

You really CAN’T have Mr. Game & Watch
move around like any other character
and still FEEL like himself.

And I love that they found an elegant solution to that:

preserving the stiff, stuttery posing style
of the source material,

while also being willing to make
big concessions for sake of visual clarity.

His movement is still erratic and weird and
it FEELS like it shouldn’t work,

but it totally does, because all the
visual information you really NEED is in there.

Cool as heck, right?

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this!

And let me know down in the comments if there
are other characters you’d like me to dig into.

If you want to hear more about Smash animation,

here’s a playlist of all the characters I’ve covered so far.

Have a good one, and I’ll see you next time!