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Boy toys The bizarre past of the video game by MICHAEL CITROME Video games today, for all their polygons-per-second and cinema scenes worthy of a Hollywood movie, lack much of the insane wacky energy that characterized their predecessors of the '80s. You have to admire the designers of these things, and wonder just what they were thinking. Here are a few items that were bizarre then, but now in 1999 just seem absurd:
Robot buddies
Only two games ever appeared that worked with R.O.B., Gyromite and Stack-Up. Both are quite rare. Stack-Up came with a set of multicoloured blocks, and a complete set is extremely rare, worth well over $100. Of course, the Mattel Power Glove is the O.G. of weirdo NES peripherals. Not only did it figure as a major plot device in the film The Wizard, but also still has a dedicated following amongst VR hackers. Proto virtual reality
The technology itself was pretty ingenious. A translucent panel at the top sent light through a LCD display. You didn't actually see the LCD, but instead you saw coloured graphics that were switched on and off by being covered by the LCD. This system managed to create a pretty immersive 3D effect. The controls were placed on the top of the unit, so you could walk around your elementary school playground with this sci-fi hardware stuck to your face, emitting beeping sounds and walking into things. Neat stuff indeed. Similar technology was used in the "Panorama Screen" Nintendo Game & Watch handhelds. Panorama was basically a scam. It placed a LCD panel over some colour images and projected it onto a little mirror. It was primitive, but hey, it was colour, and in the palm of your hand. It wasn't until the Sega GameGear in 1990 that we saw another colour handheld. Hearing voices For sheer badass weirdness, few items come close to the Intellivision Voice Synthesizer. To call it absurd is an understatement. Here is a box that plugs into the side of your Intellivision, nearly doubling its length in the process, and what does it do? The phrase "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" comes to mind. The voice synth turns your otherwise pedestrian Intellivision into a babbling Orwellian monster. Thrill to its mind-bending approximation of a Southern twang in B-17 Bomber. Fear its ominous warnings in Space Spartans. Can there be no end? |
The Nintendo R.O.B. Robot Operating Buddy, was a 10-inch tall robot that came as part of the NES Deluxe Set when it debuted in '85. At the time, many people thought that R.O.B. would actually play the games with you, so lonely kids could have a partner at Super Mario Bros. Alas, R.O.B. couldn't do any of that. The robot was designed with light sensors in its eyes that would respond to flashes on the TV screen, the same mechanism as the Zapper light gun. When the screen flashed certain patterns, R.O.B. would turn, and open and close its arms to pick up spinning tops attached to its base.
When Virtual Reality was a huge craze a few years ago, everyone thought it was something radical and new. Apparently, few people remembered the Tomytronic 3D handheld games from the early '80s. These games (there were a few in the series) looked like a pair of binoculars looted from the set of Battlestar Galactica--chunky '70s leftover design combined with cheesy metallic decals.