g&w distributers:
when nintendo came out with game & watch in the early eighties, they didn't had any international branch - nintendo of america (noa) and nintendo of europe (noe) where founded later. this is the reason why nintendo had to rely on other companies to distribute there games worldwide. the german game & watch and nes distributer was bienegraeber&co (hamburg).
bienengraeber&co.:
harald bienegraeber founded this company which became soon a big success with exclusive distribution rights for bandai, gakken, nintendo, monchichi (later, the huge monchichi stock nearly made biengraeber go bankrupt) and captain future toys. heinrich winckelmann, managing director of "denken & machen" advertising agency, worked as a independent businessman for bienengraeber&co. he invented the tricOtronic name and was responsible for box-design, translation and advertising. game & watch was such an novelty that they decided to give this strange little thing a german name: tricotronic! the bandai and gakken games became topotronic and tacotronic.
box design:
in contrast to other foreign distributers like mego (us distributor until they went bankrupt in 1982), futuretronics (australia) and computer games limited (uk), bienengraeber only changed the design of the boxes - the games which were sold in germany where released in their original shape. that means no logos or german titles printed on the game. maybe there was less space on the game to print one of the long german names like "rettung im sprungtuch" :-) the first silver edition was called tricOtronic. bienengraeber didn't release flagman - don't know why...unfortunately heiner couldn't tell me anything about this too. the wide screen games got the addition "super". as you can see below, the picture of wide screen fire shows only a sticker, that covers the original text. i'm not sure about this, but i guess that this was easier/cheaper because of the great demand for the games. also unauthorized japanese game & watch versions appeared on the german market.
tricotronic titles:
on the bottom of this page you'll find a list of all tricotronic releases. there are also other game & watch titles, which were released by bienengraeber (like mario's cement factory, donkey kong jr. and the panorama ones) but i only listed the titles which have either a tricotronic title or tricotronic box.
tricotronic commercials:
i heard that bienengraeber planned to make a tv commercial with thomas gottschalk (the most famous tv entertainer in germany). i'm trying to get more info about this.
The picture below shows heiner winckelmann on the left and harald bienengraeber (distributer) in the middle.
