Piratron game

Piratron sounds like it should be a dodgy counterfeit brand but was, by all accounts, a genuine manufacturer at a time when you could never tell if your new Hong Kong watch was the real McCoy, or a good (or bad) copy!

The watches, manufactured by Functional B Electronics, covered a variety of genres – melody watches, translators, a radio watch and this, the Piratron Game watch.

This is the only example of this watch I’ve ever seen – on ebay or anywhere – but have seen the module inside a Meister Anker watch called Slot Machine.

The game is quite unique; you start with 1000 (dollars, euros, pounds, bitcoins, whatever) and choose, in increments of 100, how much you would like to bet.

Then you start the reels spinning – you hit the stop button three times to stop each of the three reels and hopefully make a partial or full match. Points vary and, not having an instruction book for this, am not totally sure which combinations pay off the best. Be warned though, three 0’s will see your total decrease significantly.

Betting the maximum each time means you make it over the 100,000 mark reasonably quickly (unexplained events aside) but at other times it can be annoyingly difficult to even get off the mark.

Any game watch that isn’t a poor copy of Space Invaders is a bonus though, so the Piratron Game is a winner in my book. It would be nice to keep going after 100,000 and see how high you could rise – but I guess the memory tops out at that point, so probably best to stop somewhere :). Definitely worth buying if you ever see it for sale and even without the manual it’s pretty simple to play.