Casino Space Invaders

If you think you’ve seen this watch on this website before, you’re half-right. It’s the silver version of the Curtis Space Invaders watch.

Casino, like Curtis, isn’t a particularly well-known watch brand and searching Google only returns a couple of melody watches (interestingly, two different styles with the same melodies; La Cucaracha and Rancho Grande) – the other difficult part about trying to find a watch with the brand name Casino is that it returns every Casino-themed product in the world ever, a bit like searching for the Monte Carlo game watch.

Other than looks, it’s identical to the Curtis.

It shows the time in AM/PM with seconds in the top right corner, and an animation of the game on the rest of the screen.

Press the mode button once and seconds change to the date. Press again and you’re into Game 1 where you have three lives and must shoot as many moving, shooting invaders (which appear one at a time) as you can without getting hit by one of their missiles. Sounds are pretty basic (just beeps) but at least there is sound — I never like playing games with the sound turned off, they are much less interesting. Press the mode button again and you get Game 2, which is the same as Game 1 but faster and harder. Push the mode button for the last time and you’re back to time mode.

One unique feature is the ability to pause the game, which is very handy and one that would be helpful on nearly every game watch.

There’s an alarm as well, no melody but hey, you’re already getting two games in this watch!

Pressing all four buttons at once lights all the segments in the LCD and also resets the watch, another great feature that means you can do a reset without having to pop the back off the watch.

The caseback is held on with four unique screws, they’re flat head screws and are wide but very short which I haven’t seen before and suspect you’d struggle to ever find a replacement if one ever went missing.

Overall it’s an ultra-rare and very unique watch with more of a nod to Galaxian than Space Invaders. The game itself isn’t difficult to pick up but high scores don’t come easy as the invader missiles seem to find a way through!

While there was a number of NOS gold Curtis versions that appeared for sale ~10 years ago I haven’t seen one for sale in years and never the silver version so thanks Steffen for trading this one with me — it’s a keeper!