Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.
Gunpei Yokoi, the same engineer who would eventually go on to father the
Game Boy and
Metroid, was riding home one evening on a bullet train when he spotted a bored businessman randomly pressing buttons on an LCD calculator to entertain himself. Believing that commuters would enjoy passing the time with handheld video games, Yokoi soon developed a set of portable gaming systems which also doubled as watches/alarms -- the Game & Watch.
This week, we'll take a look at several ads for the fourth Game & Watch series, the Multi Screen, whose clamshell case and vertically stacked screens would later serve as inspiration for the Nintendo DS's design.
