Friday Flashback: The Power Glove Was Ahead of It’s Time

With E3 2009 finally over and all of this motion controller hullabaloo madness is now official it’s clear that each two of the  big three game companies are doing their best to create a better way to game that involves people moving about and doing weird things with their body. If we want to hearken back to the Wii just a scant few years ago remember how everyone thought this was ridiculous? Now it seems Nintendo was ahead of the game. Although they kind of always have been when it comes to this and we’ll get to that in a minute.

Whether or not these new motion control devices for Sony and Microsoft will be worth the investment remains to be seen but as many have witnessed with Wii games are wiimote intensive, they are not the games that have the depth and magnitude of Gears of War 2, Assassin’s Creed or GTA IV. It may be that developers who make games in that category just don’t want to worry about building in a motion controlled aspect or maybe these type of games just don’t warrant it, but a game where you don’t to use a controller doesn’t necessarily mean it will be a great game. Additionally since all of your current 360 and PS3 games are not compatible you won’t use this device anyway. That in turn begs the question would you buy it if the only games made for a motion controlled device are games that you wouldn’t play anyway?

While the we await the verdict on these new-fangled devices that will equalize gaming the way the Wii sort of did let’s look back to Nintendo’s initial pioneering foray into this idea — the Power Glove, known in some parts as the Gauntlet.

Developed in 1989 this was the shizzle of new fangled devices. An officially licensed product for the NES it was not actually developed by the company but rather for toy maker Mattel by the team of Grant Goddard and Sam Davis. Designed with the standard NES controller buttons on the forearm there were also program buttons (0-9) that correlated to various functions the player wanted to accomplish. Additionally you were supposed to be able perform some cool virtual hand moves that would let you control a character or actions on the screen. How did it work? Well there was a lot of technobabble that went into explaining how it was based on the patent of this other glove and the flux capacitor and dilithium crystals with a hyperdrive but whatever. It was the first motion controlled gaming device and Nintendo had it. Amazing right?

Twenty years ago, on paper it did sound amazing. Unfortunately the device was so hard to use, completely cumbersome, utterly useless for most games that it never really became the revolution that it’s 21st century descendant the wiimote achieved. In fact only two games were ever made for the Power Glove, Super Glove Ball and Bad Street Brawler.

Two more were left on the drawing board, and from the titles it’s uncertain whether another industry picked them up — Glove Pilot and Manipulator Glove Adventure. The glove itself, despite it’s failure as a peripheral did manage to get some screen time in the Fred Savage craptacular, The Wizard, an early entry into a succession of horrible movies about videogames.

Let’s hope “Project Natal” and Sony’s yet-to-be-named device do not suffer the same fate.

Friday Flashback: The Power Glove Was Ahead of It’s Time