Time to kill

London-based watchmaker Mr. Jones Watches has released a timepiece inspired by Super Mario - and it comes with the added bonus of showing whether it's daytime or nighttime. That might be useful if you, like us, are currently spending every waking hour of your day indoors playing Splatoon with the curtains tightly closed.

The "Miyamoto" watch retails for £175 / $200 / €198 and ships in July. Here's the gloriously bonkers PR the manufacturer has concocted:

The landscape on this watch pays homage to the graphics of the Super Mario World video games designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. With this watch we're exploring a link between the imagined world of the video game and the mental construct of time telling: both are artful, human inventions that operate with their own internal logic and rules; yet both appear to be entirely coherent and in a curious way 'natural'.

The control of Mario in the game world makes him feel like an extension of our body - we move him, as we move our own limbs, without conscious thought. Similarly we internalize hours, minutes and seconds to the extent that we cannot see them as human invention.

Ultimately time, as we measure it, is as 'unreal' as a world of powerups and long-tongued dinosaurs!

Along with the image of the Sun and Moon, the hour disk features a revolving image with scenes of the Mario landscape that gradually changes over the course of the day. The minutes and seconds are displayed in the center dial and these run in the conventional way, so each marker on this dial corresponds to five minutes or seconds.

"Sun and Moon" watches were first produced in England in the late 1600s during a period of experimentation with ways to represent the time. We really like this representation of time as it is both elegant and logical.

Will you be investing in one of these unique timepieces? Or are you happier with your vintage LCD wristwatch?

[source gonintendo.com, via mrjoneswatches.com]