Mario's Cement Factory

Mario's Cement Factory puts players in control of Mario, who works at a cement factory where he funnels cement into cement trucks. Mario must navigate two dangerous elevators and avoid falling or being crushed and losing a life. Mario must also continually empty cement into the trucks, or else the cement will overflow and crush one of the workers below, which also costs the player a life. In this game Mario cannot jump and there are no enemies. There are two game modes: A and B, with B being faster paced and more difficult.[2][3][4]

Mario's Cement Factory was developed by Nintendo R&D1, which at the time was led by Gunpei Yokoi,[5] and published by Nintendo. Like all Game & Watch releases, each unit is a standalone portable device that doubles as a clock and can only play the one game.[6] Hirokazu Tanaka composed the game sounds.[1]

Two versions of the game were released. One version is part of the more advanced Game & Watch Table Top series and debuted on April 28, 1983. It has a full color illuminated screen, and approximately 250,000 models were produced.[7] A smaller handheld version was also released in 1983 as part of the New Wide Screen series. It has a monochrome screen with a color overlay, and approximately 750,000 units were produced.[8][9]

The game was released the same year that Nintendo's Famicom system debuted in Japan, and two years after the first Mario title (the arcade game Donkey Kong).[10]

The game has been re-released in various forms. It was included in the 1995 Game Boy Gallery and in the 1997 Game & Watch Gallery both for Game Boy, with the former featuring updated graphics.[11][12] It was also re-released in the Nintendo Mini Classics line, which repackaged Game & Watch games in small Game Boy-like devices.[13][14] Both the New Wide Screen and an updated version were included in the 2002 Game & Watch Gallery 4 for the Game Boy Advance.[11] In 2009, the game was re-released for the Nintendo DSi's DSiWare download service (along with other Game & Watch games.)[15][16] The DSi version was released in Japan on August 18, 2009,[17] in North America on March 22, 2010, and in Europe on March 26, 2010.[15][18] The DSi version was also given as a reward on Nintendo's now-defunct Club Nintendo service.[19]

The Table Top version

Mario's Cement Factory has been called one of the best Game & Watch games, and praised for its relative complexity.[3][20] One critic called it fun,[21] another an "old favorite",[4] and another praised its replay value.[20] Staff for the magazine Video Games regarded it as a more difficult game than many games before it.[22]

It has also been called primitive by the standards of today,[3][23] and one review of the DSiWare release complained that the controls were too "picky and precise".[24]

The game has been called one of the stranger entries in the Mario series.[25][26][27] One outlet called it "kind of gruesome" since factory workers can be killed by overflowing cement.[26] Another said the game reflected Mario's working-class roots.[3] Mario's role as a cement factory worker has been mentioned in multiple articles that cover the array of professions Mario has undertaken.[28][6]

The original units have become collector's items and, like many Game & Watch titles, a complete-in-box unit can sell for over US$100.[25][21] The game was featured in a Gunpei Yokoi exhibit in Harajuku in 2010.[29]