Flashback — The Atari Mindlink
So imagine if you will it’s the early 1980s . You and the brain trusts at Atari and enjoying all the relative success of this new form of entertainment your company has created called videogames. Now you’ve been tasked to come up with something that will blow people’s minds. So you you hunker down in that room with your team of video game wizards and you come out after several hours of proposing all sorts of fantastical ideas and you come up with this … A controller that allows you to use the muscles in your brain — yeah that’s right a brain controller. Feast your eyes ladies and gentlemen … on the Mindlink.
think jump, think punch
Back then Atari had made several games that required a paddle controller.
why use paddles when you can use your brain
This was the controller that Atari had for games like Pong and Breakout. And the Mind Link was created to work with games used a paddle controller. The idea behind the Mind Link was that the movements would be read by infrared sensors attached to your head and transferred as movement in the game. Early tests proved that the device, which looked like some kind of weird headband was causing headaches as players moved their eyebrows to try and control the game. They even developed two games for it — Bionic Breakthrough and Mind Maze. Unfortunately Atari realized this would never work after trying to tinker with it and make the device better so they just tanked the whole project. So the brainchild of designer Tom Palecki never made to the shelves. At least the made a really cool ad for it.
A peripheral ahead of its time
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