The Good, The Bad, And The Fugly: Three Ideas Ahead of Their Time

In the forty years since the debut of Computer Space, the world’s first commercially sold video game, we’ve gone from a few flashing lights on machines that weigh as much as a small car to 3D gaming you can easily slip into a pocket. It’s like discovering the printing press one year and mass producing glossy porno mags a few decades later.

Speedy innovation comes at a price, and for the gaming industry that price is a high hit or miss ratio for new ideas. More often than not, that ratio slants towards the crappy side of things. Controllers are a good example of this: the D-pad is a timeless classic of button manipulation; the Power Glove, NES U-Force, and LaserScope not so much. Those three were mostly just terrible ideas, poor in both planning and execution, but gaming history is also full of some inherently good ideas that happened to come along at bad times. What follows is a look at three such innovations.

The Good: Atari Joyboard

A lot of factors have gone into to Nintendo’s sudden – and to some, inexplicable – rise to the top of the console heap. One of the biggest, perhaps the biggest, was Wii Fit, an idea that magically managed to convince the sort of consumer who equates gamers to child molesters to go out and spend upwards of three hundred dollars on a console.

In my opinion that’s all down to the balance board. It’s sufficiently sleek, abstract, and futuristic looking enough to convince people that what they’re buying wasn’t a children’s toy, but rather a high-tech device. And so, when your mom spends all afternoon glued to the TV she isn’t “wasting the day”, she’s interacting with the world of tomorrow.

In 1982 Atari released the Joyboard, a rather unfortunate name that brings to mind either a horrifically kinky attachment to your Atari console or the sort of thing you’d expect to find in the home of a mass murderer. There’s no better way of describing the poorly named device than to say it was Wii Fit Balance Board, just two decades earlier. Of course, Nintendo’s effort is far more technologically advanced than the Joyboard, which is basically a bit of plastic on top of four directional buttons, but it shouldn’t take more than a few blows to the head to convince even the most brain-dead fanboy of the obvious similarities. One major difference though, is that while the Wii Fit Balance Board is one of the most successful peripherals of all time, the Joyboard was a frustrating piece of buggy ****.

Mogul Maniac (continuing Atari’s proud tradition of making games sound way cooler than they actually are) was the only game ever officially released for the useless product. The title was a simulated slalom skiing course whose mechanics were perfectly suited to highlight the Joyboard’s biggest problem: that it was overly sensitive and prone to locking into a single direction. For a slalom skiing game, this meant that you’d make a few successful turns before before flying off the screen as if the psychotic device had decided it wanted to maul the non-existent 8 bit spectators.

It was rumored that the developers of the game, Amiga, found the going so frustrating that they devised a zen-like relaxation game in which the purpose was to sit as still as possible and not activate any of the boards pads. The exercise was said to be quite effective at calming the murderous rages of the development team. I bet some money there was also an alternate version that involved alcohol and naked people, which would at least begin to explain how anyone could think up a name as stupid as Joyboard.

The Bad: NES Power Pad

There are few more universally recognizable games than Dance Dance Revolution, the jumpy pointy arrow thing that has made Konami an obscene amount of money. On the home console front, it was the inclusion of the Dance Pad that made DDR such a huge seller, and popularized it in the sort of homes where young people like to gather and drink (a key demographic for any industry). It’s a pretty simple idea as well, effectively twister with buttons thrown on, and it’s a wonder that nobody came up with it earlier.

Only, somebody else did come up with a similar idea: Japanese toy giant, Bandai, with the Family Trainer, an idea they later sold to Nintendo. The Big N marketed it as the Power Pad and sold it as a peripheral for the NES. The device came bundled with the game World Class Track Meet, since running in time with an on screen character was a pretty obvious comparison to make. This gameplay mechanic became something of an overall theme that the Power Pad did little to deviate from in its short lifetime. Additional games included; Jogging Race, the imaginatively titled Running Stadium and six or seven other games based around the idea of running in place, like taking the role of a police officer chasing petty shoplifters and curb stomping them to death once you catch up.

There was one other game of note – if only for reasons that admittedly have little to do with actual gameplay and more to do with hilarity – a Japan only release called Come Come! Fallen Corpses: Baby Fallen Corpse’s Amedia Great Adventure. A mind numbingly intriguing title, all the more so when you remember that this was a game sold for a product once called the Family Trainer. Wikipedia yielded no more than to tell me that it has something to do with ghostly possession, and I dread to think what sort of a family gathers around the TV for that.

The Power Pad flopped in its day, mostly because it sucked and was about as responsive to your movements as a corpse is to your sweet seductions, but also because, as we now know, Nintendo somewhat neglected the NES around the turn of the decade in favor of developing the SNES. Had they focused more on the Power Pad and perfected the hardware, perhaps Nintendo might have stumbled onto rhythm games before Konami, thus adding a rather hefty feather to an already impressive cap. Bit of a bad move there.

Interestingly enough, the Power Pad was later resurrected on Wii and coupled with the game, Active Life: Outdoor Challenge. It was a game strikingly similar to Wii Fit, making that another example we’ve seen of the million dollar idea that is fitness gaming going unnoticed.

The Fugly: SEGA Activator

This is the Titanic of great gaming ideas with crap execution. When Assaf Gurner came up with a novelty musical instrument called the Light Harp, someone important at SEGA must have soiled their trousers in excitement. I specifically refer to defecation, as said act is quite a good indicator of copious cocaine use, and nothing but the ingestion of astronomical amounts of nose candy could possibly account for why anyone would think the SEGA Activator was a good idea.

The intention was to tap into the future and offer futuristic full body control, à la Kinect, in 1993. Noble enough intentions, sure, but the Light Harp was hardly the device to achieve such a feat, being not so much revolutionary as gimmicky. Here’s a video of the instrument’s inventor showing off his mad wavy arm skills.

The player would stand inside a octagonal ring of inter-connecting infrared motion sensors, and by breaking the invisible beams with their hand or feet could interact with the game world. It wasn’t exactly motion gaming, you might literally be moving in the strictest sense of the word, but your actions barely correlate to what was happening on screen.

To be fair, I can sort of see someone thinking this idea might work for a side scrolling beat em-up with simple controls: punch, kick, goose step to walk. I can, but not without considerable strain to the cynic within me, that being a somewhat novel idea. But rather than try and salvage whatever little possibility for motion gaming that existed in the Light Harp, SEGA instead took the idea of a motion controller a little too dearly to heart and simply mapped the existing Genesis controls to the infrared beams because this somehow made sense.

There’s a very good reason why controllers are so popular, and much of it has to do with the ease with which they allow us to control our games. Small actions equal happy gamers. For all the excitement over the Wii, a lot of us got bored quickly by an experience akin to an especially lengthy bout of hand hockey. The SEGA Activator was infinitely worse in that regard, routinely tiring players out and prompting contempt from witnesses who see you as too unfit to even play a video game.

Assuming that you could actually get the damn thing to work, that is. When it came to setting up your new SEGA Activator, it was probably best to do so in an abandoned Nuclear Bunker since just about any object within a 500 meter radius of you and the device would confuse the thing horribly and send off searing blasts of radiation in all directions. And this was something you had to go through every single time you wanted to use your Activator, as it constantly had to recalibrate on every start up.

The technology for motion gaming just simply wasn’t ready in the early ‘90s. That SEGA attempted to just make do anyway resulted in one of the shoddiest gaming peripherals in the forty year history of commercial gaming. Everything you need to know about the SEGA Activator can be summed up in one moment on the training video that shipped with the device. In it, the voice over guy advises us at the end to ‘cut the SEGA Activator some slack’ and try your best to ignore the numerous problems. How glowing a reference that the very company selling you the product is all but spelling it out for you that said product is going to suck.

I’ll leave you with the hilariously hammy training video.