Video Game Tech '89

things tech. And it's two thousand nineteen at least it is when I'm recording this episode, and I thought it might be fun, just for the heck of it to look back thirty years ago to the latest in video game technology, both to walk down memory lane, since I was very much around in nine, or also to just reflect on how far we've come since then. You know, I've come a very far away. I was a teenager

in nineteen eighty nine. And I should also point out I'm framing this episode in the context of North America and specifically the United States. I will mention other regions as well, but this is largely because of me looking back at thirty years ago in the US and what was the video game industry like at that point. Now, some very important stuff came out in nineteen eighty nine.

Some of it would set companies on a path of unprecedented success, and some would turn out to be massive misfires, and some companies would have a little bit of both, and there were a few big moves on the business side as well. But first let's give some context for nineteen eighty nine. So by nineteen eighty nine, the video game industry was in a booming renaissance. The first wave of home video game tech had really begun in the late nineteen seventies, and it ended, at least in North

America in a crashing halt in nineteen eighty three. Now, the reasons for the video game crash are numerous, and I've covered them in previous episodes, so we're not going to go into it here, but the industry seemed truly dead and literally buried. At least that was the literal case for many copies of the Atari twenty Game Et the Extraterrestrial and a few other titles that were just sitting around taking up space. Then they ended up sitting

around inside a landfill. Then a company known more for playing cards than video games made a go of of it in North America. That company was Nintendo, which had already made some arcade games, but was a brand new player in the home video game console market in the United States, and unfortunately, due to timing, they're coming in

just after the video game crash. Initially, retailers resisted shouldering the risk of carrying video game systems again, but Nintendo won them over, and as I'm sure you're all aware, that turned into a huge success. So by nine nine, the video game market was established again, and it also had several companies competing for customers. Now, back in the early nineteen eighties, those companies would include things like Atari

and Colco and Mattel Electronics, among others. Atari was still around nine nine, but it was no longer the dominant force. That designation belonged to squarely to Nintendo, and Nintendo debuted a killer product in nineteen eighty nine in the United States. The company launched the Game Boy both in Japan and in North America in nineteen nine. Japan got it several

months earlier. It was largely the brainchild of Gunpie Yakoi, and I apologize sincerely for butchering names, but he had previously led the company on a design for a line of portable gaming devices called the Game and Watch. These were dedicated to a single title each. They were a little handhold, simple game consoles that only had a single

title programmed hard coded onto the machine. They had a very primitive CPU, or really that just primitive microprocessors, and they had very very simple graphics compared to something like the Game Boy. Now, once technology had advanced to a point where more robust and a programmable handheld system would become feasible, the company got to work designing the game

Boy system uh the coin. A designer named Satro Okada worked to make this a reality, and Okada's original design was a bit more ambitious, but it also would have been much more expensive. So while he had initially planned for a much more feature robust version of the Game Boy, Nintendo executives decided that it was better to cut a few features and launch a system that wouldn't cost too much and that would help encourage people to adopt the system.

The handheld game console, the game Boy would revolutionize home gaming. Suddenly video games were true le portable. Most handheld games preceding the Game Boy were dedicated to a single title, like those game and watch games. Many of those handheld gaming systems were incredibly primitive. The game Boy brought a level of sophistication to portability that was a perfect fit, and in North America, this was paired with an amazing puzzle game that worked so well with the form factor

of the Game Boy that it became nearly ubiquitous. That game was, of course, Tetris, a game designed by a Russian programmer and released earlier in the nineteen eighties, and that story alone is fascinating, but I've covered it in previous episodes of tech Stuff. The original Nintendo Game Boy was an eight bit bit system. That means that it had the same processing power as a full Nintendo Entertainment System, and I'll go into more detail about eight bit versus

sixteen bit a little bit later in this episode. But like the Nintendo Entertainment System or any GAS, games for the Game Boy would appear are on cartridges, just much much smaller cartridges than what you would find on the NES. So a video game cartridge has the game hard coded onto the physical cartridge itself. It's like a circuit board, and that limits how much data you can store on the card. You're actually talking about physical circuitry. You can only get it so small. But it also tends to

mean that you have a super fast gaming system. It can load games very quickly compared to ones that are reading it off, say, an optical disk. The original game Boy had a direction pad and to control buttons labeled A and B. It also had a select button and a start button. Had a monochromatic liquid crystal display or l c D. Technically it could show up to four shades of gray, and it had a resolution of one sixty six by one pixels, so not super high resolution.

But it was a very tiny screen as well, so it didn't matter so much. Games ran on a pretty good clip with a frame rate of nearly sixty frames per second, and there were control dials for volume and contrast. You can change the contrast so you could play the game in different levels of light and still see what was going on on the screen. In addition to the eight bit processor, it had eight kilobytes of RAM that's random access memory, and the basic handheld device had four

channels for sound, but it also only had a single speaker. However, you could get stereo sound by plugging in headphones into a headphone jack, and Nintendo bundled headphones with the game

Boys so you could do this. One innovation that the game Boy brought in was the ability to link together multiple game Boy devices, so you could link to game Boys together through their serial ports, or you could use special adapters and you could link more game Boy systems together, which we become really useful when the Pokemon games started

coming out. The game Boy relied on four double A batteries for power, which Nintendo claimed would provide thirty plus hours of game time before you drained all the juice from those batteries. More conservative estimates put that playtime closer to ten to fourteen hours, so about half of what Nintendo was claiming. But the battery life really did set it apart from the competitors that would follow the game

Boy just a little bit later. You could also purchase some additional peripherals, such as an AC adapter, and you could plug your game Boy into the wall so you didn't have to worry about using batteries at all. Of course, that also makes it much less portable. Or you could buy a rechargeable battery pack to cut down on those a A battery purchases, but then of course you would have to recharge the battery pack whenever you had drained it down. The game Boy would become one of the

top selling video game systems of all time. That being said, it is hard to say exactly how well the original game Boy did because Nintendo would lump together the group sales figures for the game Boy and the game Boy Color, which came out nearly a decade after the original game Boy. All of those get lumped into one category. The original retail price for the game Boy was eighty nine dollars

and cents. Nintendo's game Boy got a head start against other handheld devices that would launch a little later in nineteen beyond, and it was a hit pretty much right at the get go. In Japan, Nintendo's sold out of its initial production run right away. I g N reports that on the first day of sales in North America, forty thousand people bought a game Boy, not bad for its brand new debut in a brand new market. Nintendo did have competitors, though, and most of them were from Japan.

One of those competitors was ANYC Corporation, which is still very much round today and is involved in several high tech businesses, but not so much in video games anymore. The company wanted to get into this lucrative home video game business in the nineteen eighties, and to do that, NBC partnered with another Japanese company called Hudson Soft, which very much does not exist anymore today as it merged

with Konami in two thousand twelve. The result was a machine that in Japan was called the PC Engine, and it came out in Japan in nineteen seven. It would take two more years to make its way over to North America, and in August it would debut in the United States under a different name, the Turbo Graphics sixteen. The Turbo Graphics sixteen was the an early console in the market that would help bring in the sixteen bit era.

But that's with a few qualifiers. Systems like the Famicom better known as the Ninteno entertainment system in the US where eight bit systems not sixteen bit systems. Now, let's talk about that difference. Remember that a bit is a basic unit of information in computer language. It's a zero or it's a one, So it's akin to a physical switch,

either being switched off or switched on. An eight bet processor can perform operations on data up to eight bits in size, and if you were to write out all the different arrangements of eight bits, from having eight zeros in a row to eight ones in a row and

every variation in between. You would count those all up and you would find out you have two hundred fifty six variations of standing for the numbers of zero to two D. A sixteen bit processor can handle data of up to sixteen bits in size, and you might at first think, oh, it can hold twice as much or handle twice as much information, or information that's twice as large,

but it's actually way way more than that. We're talking instead of two hundred fifty six variations, sixty five thousand, five hundred thirty six variations, and if you're paying attention, that's two hundred fifty six squared. This same mathematical relationship

holds true as you go up bit sizes. So a thirty two bit processor can handle data of up to thirty two bits and size, which has four billion, two million, nine hundred sixty seven thousand, two hundred nine variations, which is also sixty thousand, five hundred thirty six squared, and so on. So you see, as you increase the bit size that a processor can handle, it can handle an

enormous amount more information. Anyway, back to sixteen bits. What this means from a user experience standpoint is that the mass seen can process more data in the same amount of time as an eight bit machine, which for video games tends to most easily be perceived in the form of better graphics and sound. But here's where we get into some of those qualifiers. The Turbo Graphics sixteen actually

wasn't a true sixteen bit system. It had an eight bit CPU, just like the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it also had a sixteen bet video display controller and a sixteen bit video color encoder. Now this meant that the Turbo Graphics sixteen could spit out better graphics and way more colors than an AS could do. The NES was limited to sixty four preset colors, and it could only

display twenty five of those at one time on a screen. Typically, the Tobographics sixteen had a palette of five hundred twelve colors, which is technically nine bits in size, and it could show four eight two of those on screen at once, although that was divided into colors that would be in the background and colors that were in moving components on

the screen that we would call sprites. The resolution of the Turbo Graphics sixteen might make you wins today, as most games used a resolution of two hundred fifty six by two hundred thirty nine pixels, essentially the same resolution as the NES. Some games would boast a resolution of up to five twelve by two pixels, but they were rare. There were many variations of the PC Engine slash Turbo

Graphics sixteen. In fact, there were enough different versions of this game system to justify a full episode of tech Stuff. An EC released peripherals to augment the system, as well as updated versions of that system that incorporated those upgrades later on. So one of those was an external CD ROM drive. It originally was an additional peripheral you could buy. You could hook it up to your Turbo Graphics sixteen

and then you would have a CD ROM. Later versions of the Turbo Graphics sixteen would have it incorporated into the design of the overall console. Now I mentioned this in this episode because it was released four of the Turbo Graphics sixteen in North America in late nine nine, So you had the CD ROM system go on the market about a month or two after the actual system was on sale, and that means that it's something that

we should talk about in this episode. Now I'm going to mention a little bit more about the Turbo Graphics sixteen and its fate in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. The Japanese design for the PC Engine was incredibly efficient and made the PC Engine

one of the smallest consoles. Ever, it's very compact. The original machine ran on artridges called WHO cards, and they were about the dimension of a credit card, but thicker, and the CD ROM peripheral meant game designers could take advantage of the increased storage capacity of the compact disc to build longer, more intricate games, though they were still limited by the capabilities of the processor and the chips

and the Turbographics sixteen. It's not like those games can magically just be better, uh as far as graphics and sound word concern It also had only one game control report on the console, though you could purchase a peripheral called a Turbo Tap to allow you to plug into

up to five controllers onto that system. And the Turbo Graphics sixteen wasn't nearly as small the US version as the Japanese version of that same machine, So the form factor for the Turbo Graphics sixteen is different from the PC Engine, even though the guts are exactly the same,

and this was done on purpose. The general full pilosophy was that Americans would prefer something bigger and more futuristic looking and more that for Americans, you wanted to have a bigger console because the perceived uh quality, the perceived value of the console would be greater because it was bigger. In other words, if you're selling something that was smaller, even though it was smaller because it was very well engineered, people would think, well, that's not worth the money they're

asking because look at the size of the thing. They were thinking about the size of the form factor, not necessarily its performance. The PC engine did quite well in Japan, but the Turbographics sixteen really never matched that performance here

in North America. The console costs one dollars and nine cents in the US upon hitting store shelves, making it nearly twice as expensive as the ness, and if you wanted to add that CD ROM peripheral at the end of nineteen nine, you would have to shell out an additional three hundred nine dollars and cents. That was a heck of a steep price to pay, and very few people did it. I mean, you're talking about a peripheral. That's two hundred dollars more than the base console that

it is augmenting. Now, what this meant for developers was that there were so few people who are buying the CD ROM peripheral, it didn't make sense to dedicate resources in a game development studio to build games for that peripheral, so it would become a very expensive add on to a video game console that was largely unsupported. So gamers tend to blame the failure of the Turbographics sixteen in the US on several factors, such as a lackluster video

game library. Nintendo was really busy working with deals uh on third party developers into what amounted to exclusivity deals, like the developers weren't really able to develop for other platforms, there was no real marketing support in the United States, and there was also the debut of another system I'll get to in just a moment that was technically superior to the Turbographics sixteen. By nine, NC decided that enough

was enough and discontinued production of the console. The company would go on to produce a thirty two bit successor called the PCFX, but that was only ever released in Japan in n One other thing to add, there is a Turbo Graphics sixteen mini consoles scheduled to come out in March twenty with fifty seven games those Some of those games are the English and Japanese versions of the same title, so you get a couple of duplicates, but they are you know, one of them has been regionalized

for the United States and probably has slightly different content than the original Japanese version. But if you were ever curious about the Turbo Graphics sixteen, you can actually pick up one of these Turbo Graphics sixteen minis and for about a hundred bucks to try it out. Now let's shift gears and talk about the Sega Genesis launch in North America. This is a console that had also already

premiered in Japan. This one came out nineteen under its original name, which was the Sega Mega Drive, but it was brand new over here in the United States nineteen nine. Over Here we called it the Genesis, and pretty much

everywhere else in the world it remained the Mega Drive. Also, this is where we get another qualifier for that Turbo Graphics sixteen see In Japan, the PC Engine, also known as the Turbo Graphics sixteen launched first, but in North America, the Genesis or the Mega Drive released on August fourteenth, nineteen eighty nine, and the Turbographics sixteen least on August twenty nine of that same year, so here in the States, the first sixteen bit game system really goes to the Genesis.

More on that in a second. Sega had previously attempted to compete with Nintendo and also a flailing Atari, with the Sega Master System a few years earlier, but that console didn't get a whole lot of lo from the gaming community at large in the United States. It did much better in places like Europe, and in Brazil it became a dominant video game console. There was an even earlier Sega video game console called the SG one thousand,

but that one never launched in North America at all. Now, the story goes that Sega originally intended the Mega Drive or Genesis to be another eight bit video game system like the Nintendo Entertainment System, but then Sega executives heard rumor that Nintendo was developing the next generation of video game hardware, and they didn't want to trade behind the dominant company in home video games. On a technical level, Again, they didn't want to have to try and catch up.

They definitely didn't want to release an eight bit system just a year or two before a sixteen bit system from Nintendo. So they set a big goal, and that was to be the first to market with a true sixteen bit video game system. Unlike the Turbographics sixteen, the CPU and the Sega Genesis is a real, honest to goodness sixteen bit CPU. So not only did it come out first in the States, it could also boast being more technologically advanced than the console that released right after

it came out. In addition to the more powerful CPU, the Genesis had seventy two kilobytes of RAM and sixty four kilobytes of video RAM. It had a color palette of five hundred twelve colors and was able to show up to sixty one on screen at once, so in that way, it was actually lagging by hind the Turbographics sixteen, which could show more colors on screen at a single moment. One feature that I don't think was widely known in the US was that the Sega Genesis was also backwards

compatible with the Sega Master System. That was, if you bought the peripheral called the power Base Converter, which makes it sound like a video game peripheral that Luke Skywalker would use. The original game bundled with the Sega Genesis was Altered Beasts, which is a pretty trippy game that

I used to play in the arcades. And unlike the NBC launch of the Turbographics sixteen, which seemed anemic from a marketing perspective in the US, Sega North America came out like guns a blazon to promote the Genesis, including commercials with celebrity appearances, and that helped push the Genesis into a solid second place behind Nintendo Entertainment System, even though the NES was still an eight bit system. The Turbo Graphics sixteen became and also ran in the United

States and didn't make much of a dent. Now. While the Genesis did not immediately overtake Nintendo's market share in North America, that would change with the introduction of a certain speedy, little blue guy called Sonic a couple of years later. That's when we saw Sega on top in the console wars for a short while, and it didn't hurt that. At the same time, the company dropped the price for the Sega Genesis console, so it shot ahead for at least a short while in the United States.

Speaking of price, when the Genesis first went on the market, it would set you back one eighty nine dollars, making it just a hundred dollars more than a Nintendo Game Boy at that same time. Not long after both the Genesis and the Turbo Graphics sixteen hit the market, another system went gold in North America, and this was a system from an established American name in video games. It came on the former heavyweight champion of home gaming, Atari,

and it was poised to revolutionize handheld gaming. The system was the Atari Links, which actually didn't start out as an Atari handheld system at all. Instead, it began as a project at a company called Epics E P y X in eighty six or early seven. A couple of the designers, Dave Needle and R. J. Michael, had worked on the original Amiga computer system design. Like Nintendo, they wanted to bring handheld gaming into the next era, and their design was much more ambitious than the game Boy was.

And keep in mind this was being developed at the same time that the game Boy was being developed. This was called the Handy in epics. It was the code name for it. The less said about that, the better, I think. But it was a beefy handheld system. If you're familiar with the Amiga, then that statement probably doesn't come as much of the surprise because the Amiga was known as a computer with superior graphics and sound at the time of its production. The handheld console called the

Handy would follow a similar path. So the CPU and the Handy slash Links was an eight bit processor like that of the Turbographics sixteen and the No Entertainment System, but it also had two coprocessors nicknamed Suzie and Mikey, and these were custom built sixteen bit chips running at a clock speed of sixteen mega hurts. It also had a math coprocessor. These chips gave the future Links the

ability to create sophisticated, colorful gaming experiences. In fact, the device would be able to display up to four thousand, ninety six colors total, though it could only show sixteen simultaneous colors per scan line on the screen. The standard resolution was one hundred sixty pixels by one hundred two pixels, with a sort of faux high resolution mode capable of displaying a picture of up to four hundred eighty by

one hundred two pixels. The screen itself measured just three and a half inches on the diagonal, so again, at that small of a screen, the resolution was pretty darn good, and it could display up to a hundred eight on screen sprites at the same time and could support a

frame rate of up to seventy frames per second. It was a much bigger than the Game Boy when it came out, almost twice as wide as the Game Boy was tall, and like the Game Boy, it was a cartridge based system, and it also had a D pad for control and two pairs of buttons in the original build out for the device, so there was an A button and a B button, and then there was another A button and a B button yep, but had two

sets of A B buttons. One set was at the top right side aid which had the A and the B upside down from the viewers perspective, and one set at the bottom right side, And this was so that you could, with the push of a couple of other system buttons, flipped the device around so you can actually control the D pad with your right hand instead of your left hand, and you can use your left hand to control the buttons, so it was an ambidexterous device.

As a left hander, I appreciate that design decision. Now, like the game Boy, you could also link a bunch of these together if you had the right cables and had the standard volume dial, had a brightness dial, and had a few control buttons to go through game menus and stuff. It had a headphone jack and had a power jack, and it also had a speaker on the

right side of the device where the buttons were. There was a whole lot of unused space inside the links build out of the system, and that's because executives at Atari thought the public would want a larger form factor. We're again getting into that perceived value philosophy, the idea that if this console looks small, people are not gonna think it's worth paying a premium price for it, so

you've got to make it big and clunky. That turned out to be a mistake and one of the reasons for the links to redesign that would follow a short time later. All this power and versatility came with a cost, and that cost was battery life. The handy slash links required six double a batteries, so two more double as than the game Boy used, or you could get a special battery pack for it, or you could use an

AC adapter and plug it into the wall. If you were using the regular double A batteries, those batteries drained very quickly. Now, remember the game Boy might last more than twelve or fourteen hours on a set of double A batteries, and again into that was claiming up to thirty hours. The links would go through six double a's in about four hours of play. A redesign that links to that would come a little bit later, would actually improve that power consumption a little bit, making it more

of a five hour run time instead of four. Now, this was made doubly frustrating due to some games having a full run time of like an hour and a half, and there was no way to save your progress when

you're playing a game. So if you start a game and your intent is I'm gonna play this game, I'm gonna get to the end of this game, and it takes you an hour and a half to play through, it meant you needed to be sure that you had fresh batteries in your links when you started the game, or else you could end up losing an entire session just as things were getting good because the batteries would drain and the console would just turn off in the

middle of your game. Um, more likely you're going to plug it in, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the portable, so it right well. During the design and development process, Epics had run into some financial problems and lack the resources needed to go into full production on a new device, so the company approached a

couple of different possible partners. Stories mentioned companies like Nintendo and Sega, but that didn't go anywhere, and it would be Atari that would jump in and try to snatch

this opportunity to produce a really cool handheld gaming system. Now, at the time, Atari was trailing way behind in the video game market as an console manufacturer anyway, and the story goes that Atari agreed to produce the rebranded handy officially rebranded as The Links, possibly as far back as seven, but it would actually be two years before it finally

released The Links. Now, I've seen other sources that dispute this and suggest that Atari really only got involved as late as January nineteen nine, which makes more sense because that would say that the company didn't really sit on the design. Instead, that time was taken up redesigning the handy into the links. But it was definitely Attari that told the engineers to make the form factor larger again to give that perceived value UH added into the Console Boy.

The eighties, fun times, clunky times. I've got more to say about nine and video games, and I'll do that after we take this quick break back to the Atari Links. The original retail price for the Atari Links was one seventy nine dollars cents, so just ten dollars shy of being both a cool Benjamin more than the Game Boy, or the same price as a Sega Genesis. But look at what you got for all that extra money. You'd have a full color screen on a handheld portable device.

You have this innovative, ambidexterous design. But then again, the device was so large that it couldn't fit into the pockets of even the jinkiest of Jinko jeans. If you don't know what Jinkos are, you need to look them up. It's j N c O S. Do an image search and you can thank me later. Plus, with the batteries draining in a few hours of play and made this portable system even less portable. It was less of a

hassle to just play it well. Was plugged into a power source in a wall, so that took that whole portability factor out of the picture pretty much. While Atari launched the Links in time for the holiday shopping season, it was a hard sell compared to the Game Boy, Nintendo's handhold console was cheaper the man he had a better reputation in home video games than Atari did. At that point, there were about twenty games available for the

Game Boy, whereas the Links only had five. The price difference between the systems played a huge part in the decision making process, as did the battery life, and over time, the Links library would grow to include ports of some of the most popular arcade titles in Natari's library. Uh those were largely viewed as being decent games, but the same can't be said of many of the original titles that were developed specifically for the Links. Many of those

were seen as being substandard games. But the Game Boy also had a really good head start and it never led up. Plus, Sega would come out with its own full color handheld system like a little bit later and complement it with a pretty large library of games. So on top of that, Links never launched in Japan at all, and it only got limited production runs for European markets, so Atari had really limited where it could succeed with

the Links. To make matters worse, Atari executives decided to discontinue the Links after a couple of years in order to focus on other console systems that it was going to put out, and ultimately those other console systems failed

in the market. So some people say that's possible that if Attari had just stuck with the Links a little bit longer, it might have carved out a solid spot with a larger gaming audience, particularly after the system redesign that produced a slightly smaller game system with slightly better battery life. The Links proved that the tech was there to make a pretty sophisticated handheld gaming system, something definitely

beyond what the game Boy was doing. But it also helped establish that Nintendo's philosophy regarding technical sophistication could hold true. See for many years, Nintendo has focused more on the gamer experience as a whole rather than on technical specifications and technical superiority, and you can definitely see this in modern consoles like the Nintendo Switch versus the Xbox One

or the Sony PlayStation four. The Switch can't measure up to the text specs of either of those other consoles, but it does have innovative mechanics and a foreign factor that allows players to experience games in a different way than they would with those other consoles. All right, October, that was a heck of a month for video gamers. The Atari Links was just one piece of gaming technology

to debut that month. Another is one of those iconic video game peripherals in the nineteen eighties, one that I actually had a chance to play with because a buddy of mine owned one, and it's one that I would argue was much better in concept than execution, and that be the Nintendo Power Glove. And I really should do a whole episode on this because the history is fascinating, but I'll have to give a super shortened version of it for this episode. And the history does not begin

with Nintendo. In fact, Nintendo was not involved in producing the Power Glove apart from granting its licensing. It was the toy company Mattel that was responsible for bringing the Power Glove to market, But even Mattel doesn't factor into this story until much later in its In its progression, the story of the power glove really begins in the

late nineteen seventies. There was a guy named Thomas Zimmerman who was daydreaming about a computer interface that would allow a user to interact with a program through just your controls. And he was largely inspired to do this because as a kid, he always liked to imagine himself conducting an orchestra when he was listening to music. So, you do like this air conducting, Well, what if you could do

that real? You would have to have a software program that can create orchestral sounds, and you would have to have some sort of interface to interpret hand movements and gestures in order to control the program. So Zimmerman was mulling this over for a few years, and eventually he met up with another guy, famous guy named Jaron Lanier, and he met with him in the nineteen eighties. The two of them would work a little bit with Atari, and Lanier is the guy who coined the phrase virtual reality.

There's been an important figure in the world of tech and futurism for ages. The two of them eventually created a company called Visual Programming Language. Zimmerman had created a prototype glove and even patented it, and it used an LED tube and a detector and it would use these

to detect finger motions. To sense motions of the different fingers inside the glove, Zimmerman created a program that allowed users to spell out letters using finger spelling, and then the letters that they were spelling with their fingers would appear on computer screen. Well Atari offered to purchase the intellectual property for Zimmerman's glove device for ten thousand dollars,

but Zimmerman wisely turned down that offer. With Lanier, Zimmerman created numerous demos for the device, now called the Data Glove, and Zimmerman kept working on the design of the glove itself. He switched to ultrasonic sensors to detect glove positions and multiple dimensions that allowed for a three D representation of a hand in a virtual space. NASA soon became a customer, as the agency was exploring the possibilities of using VR

for all sorts of stuff with their various projects. Now the Data Glove was a hit for very specific use cases with large companies and organizations. Because it cost ten thousand dollars to buy one, just one. Remember, Atari was going to give ten thousand dollars for the rights to the technology. Turned out that Zimmerman and Lanier were able to sell the data glove to agencies and companies for ten thousand dollars a pop. So this minute was not

exactly ready for the home market. But Lanier thought there could be potential for leveraging that type of technology for a consumer product with some real heavy tweaking, and then he reached out to a company called Abraham's Gentile Entertainment or a GE to look for consumer applications of the underlying technology. And it was a GE that was able to convince Mattel to take this idea and create a video game system peripheral from it, essentially a video game

controller in glove form. Now, at the pitch meeting for Mattel, the team brought in a data glove and a computer system that allowed them to hook up the computer system to a Nintendo entertainment system. So it was a very Yankee way to create the data glove as a control system for the Nintendo. They had the CEO of Mattel, a woman named Jill Barad, try this glove on and then she played a game of Nintendo Punch Out. So

she goes up against glass Joe. That's the first opponent you face in this video game, and according to the story, Barad knocked out Joe cold, which surprised her because she wasn't really a video games kind of person. But she was immediately convinced that this was a killer product. But this was also a super high tech version of that product. This was a ten thousand dollar piece of equipment hooked up to a computer system that also costs several thousand dollars.

So they were gonna have to figure out a way of taking this concept and turning it into a video game console peripheral with the materials cost of just maybe sixteen to twenty six dollars, because any more than that and Mattel would not see a decent enough profit when selling it at its full retail price. So they had to figure out, how can we take this idea and make it affordable, and we can't do it the way that it was done for the data glove. Mattel licensed

the patent and their engineers got to work. It wasn't Lanier and Zimmerman who were working on it. This was Mattel's people, and they had a very short time frame to turn this around because broad really wanted the device ready for the nineteen eighty nine holiday season, and it was when Mattel had made the decision to move on this. They essentially had about nine months to develop the technology and make it work and get it raid for market,

and that's super crunch time. The data glove relied on fiber optic lines, but those would not hold up to the type of use that video game kid would put this glove through, so they had to find a different way to achieve the same outcome. The team found a work around by using milar sheets and Flexible inc. To create bend sensors for the fingers, and it did this

by measuring changes in electrical resistance. As the material would bend, its electrical resistance would change, and so that's what would indicate to the micro controller on the glove that a finger was being moved it was moving into a bending position. The team also had to figure out how they should size the glove to fit the largest number of potential customers. If they made it too small or too big, then

they could ruin their market. They also decided not to make a left handed version since the sinister people among us, including myself, only make up about ten of the population anyway, so why should we get any of the cool stuff? Though in retrospect, I guess it's okay with the Nintendo Power gloves. By the way, there was once a left handed Nintendo Power glove shown in marketing material because the poster for The Wizard the movie The Wizard had Fred

Savage wearing a Nintendo Power Glove on his left hand. Anyway, like the Attari links, the engineers found that they needed to find a form factor that gave the device this perceived value because their original design, which was lighter and less bulky, apparently didn't look like it was worth that premium price. A Mattel executive said, nope, no one's gonna

pay eighty or ninety bucks for this thing. So by the time they got to the final form factor and they began giving early demos, there was already a lot of excitement behind the scenes. Other retail companies were starting to get excited and starting to put in orders. And this was way before launch, so it already looked like

it was going to be a huge hit. And this was before any customers got their chance to get their hands in one, and the power Glove also really would benefit from the popularity of the nes and also that movie The Wizard helped, you know, popularize the idea of the power glove, so Mattel would end up selling these things like crazy. Now. Unfortunately, when it came to actually using the power Glove to control a video game, the

performance of the glove really didn't match the marketing. The motion controls typically had latency issues, specifically when the glove had not been calibrated properly, and as it turns out, it was not easy to calibrate, particularly not for kids who just wanted to slide on that cool glove and play some games. So it's hard to figure out where the center of the screen was in relation to the

physical space in front of you. So it was hard for you to figure out where should I put my hand in order to do something like grab something on screen or block an incoming attack, or whatever it might be. It was hard to know where you needed to easically position your hand in relation to the screen you're looking at. You were looking at a two D representation in a three D control environment, so the tech just wasn't terribly

easy to use, and it created a frustrating experience. The Power Glove got a reputation for being a cool idea that just didn't work very well, and that wasn't helped by the fact that there was a shortage of games that had been designed for the Power Glove, and not even that many that have been optimized for the Power Glove.

So trying to play a game that was designed for a traditional Nintendo controller with a non traditional Power Glove controller made it frustrating, and Mattel would discontinue production in nineteen nine, just a year after they introduced it. So there you go. Those were the major video game products to launch in nineteen nine. Thirty years ago in the United States, the landscape was very different from what it is today. Now we see Sony dominating in the current

generation with the PS four. Nintendo still depends heavily on loyal fans of its consoles plus innovative design choices. Microsoft, which did pretty well with the Xbox three sixty era, has been lagging a bit in the age of the Xbox One, but before long we're going to get a

new generation of video game consoles. Meanwhile, we're seeing PC games doing quite well, particularly on Steam, and Steam itself is being challenged by other platforms like Epic and I guess in another thirty years I'll have to do a retrospective of what the state of video games was like in But between now and then, I think I have a few more shows I can do, so if you have any suggestions on what those shows could be about,

you can send me a message. The email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of all of our pasts. You'll find links to where we are on social media. You'll find a link to our online store, where every purchasing make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Hext Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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