The Watch That Refused to Break — How G-Shock Conquered the World

A hockey player lines up a shot. He swings. Except that isn't a puck. It's a watch. It flies across the ice, into the goalie's glove — and it's still running. That was a real television commercial, back in 1984. And most people simply didn't believe it. They assumed the ad was a trick, because of course it was. No watch survives that. So a news programme decided to find out for themselves. On air. Same shot. Same conditions. We'll come back to that, I promise. Because here's the part that surprises people. That ad was a rescue mission. The watch in it had already failed once. It went on sale in Japan a year earlier and sold so poorly that watch shops didn't really want it — and the reason is lovely. And the man who made it had spent two years breaking watches. More than two hundred of them. Up to a third-floor bathroom, open the window, drop it, walk downstairs, pick up the pieces. Then do it again. What finally solved it was sitting in a park, watching a kid bounce a rubber ball. So, three questions. Why didn't the shops want it? What did that bouncing ball teach him? And how does a watch nobody wanted end up on more than a hundred million wrists? This is the story of the G-Shock. And it starts, the way these stories usually do, with something breaking.

His name is Kikuo Ibe. He's a young engineer at Casio, and one morning on his way to work, his watch comes off his wrist and hits the pavement. It doesn't crack. It comes apart. Springs, screws, tiny pieces of metal, all over a Tokyo street. His father gave him that watch. So Ibe goes back to his desk and writes a proposal for a watch that cannot break. Inside Casio it gets a name: Project Team Tough. And three targets, which the company called the Triple 10. Survive a ten-metre drop. Ten bars of water pressure. Ten years of battery. In 1981, that sounds impossible. A watch is a delicate thing. You take it off to play sports. You take it off to wash the dishes. But here's the thing people forget. Casio wasn't an old Swiss watch house. Casio made calculators, and came into watches through quartz. Which means Ibe wasn't trying to protect springs and gears. A quartz module is tiny. Solid state. Ibe had a heart small enough to hide. He just had no idea where to hide it.

So he started dropping them out of that window. Over a hundred prototypes in the first year alone. Thicker case. Harder resin. More padding, more bracing, more armour. Every single one broke. And they all broke for the same reason — although nobody could see it yet. Every prototype was built on the same idea. That to survive a hit, a watch has to be strong enough to take it. By his own account, Ibe was close to giving up.

Then he sat down in a park. There was a kid nearby, bouncing a rubber ball. Ibe watched it. Hit the ground. Squash. Spring back. And the middle of that ball barely moves. The outside takes the whole impact. The centre just floats. So he stopped trying to armour the watch, and hung it instead. In a G-Shock, the module isn't bolted to the case. It's suspended — held at a few points, cushioned, sitting inside a hollow shell that's allowed to squash around it. The shock doesn't reach the watch. It gets used up on the way in. Forty years later, that's still the trick inside every single one.

April 1983. The first one goes on sale. The DW-5000C. Square. Black. Plastic-looking. And in 1983, a proper watch meant steel and thin. Japan wasn't interested. And here's the answer to that first question. Some of the resistance came from the shops themselves — and when you hear why, it makes perfect sense. A watch that never breaks is a watch that never comes back for repair. Durability wasn't a selling point. For part of the trade, it was bad news. Ibe said later he was sure the sales would simply dry up. That's the first time this watch nearly disappeared.

What saved it wasn't Japan. It was American TV. Which brings us back to the rink. 1984. Casio runs that commercial in the United States. The slapshot, the watch as a puck — and nobody believes a second of it. People assume Casio faked the whole thing, and honestly, why wouldn't they? It looks exactly like something an ad agency would make up. So a news programme did what no marketing budget could ever buy. They ran the test themselves, on air. Same shot. Same conditions. And the watch kept running. That's the moment everything turns. Because you can build the toughest watch on earth and it's worth nothing — until somebody with no reason to lie shows people it's true.

After that, the G-Shock found the people who needed it before it found the people who wanted it. Police. Firefighters. Rescue crews. Divers. Anyone whose watch was equipment rather than jewellery. And Casio did something rather charming. Instead of one tough watch, it started building one for each kind of trouble. Mud and dust in 1985 — later known as the Mudman. Then divers, pilots, cold. In 1993 came the Frogman, the first one certified as a proper ISO diver's watch. And in 1994, the one that defined the era. The DW-6600. Cheap, light, two hundred metres down. It ended up all over the US military. Including Navy SEALs, who show up wearing it in the Navy's own photographs. Which is worth pausing on. For decades, the watch on those wrists was an expensive mechanical tool. It was quietly replaced by a plastic one that cost less than a good pair of boots.

Then something happened that Ibe never planned for. In the nineties, people stopped buying G-Shocks for what they could survive. They started buying them for what they said. Skaters. Surfers. Hip-hop. That big, chunky case the Japanese shops had turned down in 1983? It turned out to be exactly the right shape for the nineties. In 1994 Casio launched Baby-G — the same floating idea, just smaller — and it became one of those things everybody's sister owned. And this is the part that's easy to miss. The engineering earned the trust. But it was culture that did the conquering. The watch became a way of saying something about yourself, whether or not you ever went near a hockey rink.

How big did this get? Casio says it shipped the hundred millionth G-Shock in August 2017. They held a ceremony at the Yamagata factory. That watch got a caseback engraved with one hundred million. By the fortieth anniversary in 2023, Casio put the total above a hundred and forty million, sold in more than a hundred and forty countries. Those are the company's own numbers. Here's one that isn't marketing. In 2023, Casio got a three-dimensional trademark on the shape of the case. Not the name. Not the logo. The shape. A silhouette you can recognise without anybody telling you what it is.

One last thing. The G-Shock is not indestructible. That word belongs to the adverts, not to physics. Hit one hard enough, in the right place, and it breaks like anything else. So what did Ibe actually invent? Not a stronger watch. A better question. Everybody before him asked how to make a watch tough enough to survive a hit. He asked how to stop the hit from ever arriving. And the answer was to let the important part float — and let everything around it get sacrificed. Which is a strange kind of monument to a watch that broke on a street in Tokyo. Not a watch that couldn't be broken. A watch that refused to be.