Labo is the heir to a quirky tradition of unusual devices, some of which were hits, and some weren’t
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Nintendo Labo launches on Friday, April 20, and the make-it-yourself, toy-slash-game kit brings with it a wealth of possibilities, many of which we haven’t seen and may not have considered yet.
Labo, which melds cardboard D-I-Y contraptions with a versatile game-design interface, may seem to be an unusual angle for what is, effectively, video game console peripheral. But longtime Nintendo fans know it fits squarely within the company’s character — a toy-maker’s approach to video games, if you will. Nintendo has always supplemented its consoles and handhelds with more than just alternative gamepads and joysticks or carrying cases. Some of this stuff has been pretty straightforward.
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And this post is about the stuff that wasn’t.
Nintendo’s systems lent themselves to, erm, some really weird gadgets, peripherals and doodads over the years, much more than any other competitor’s console (though Sega came close). These things aren’t necessarily “weird” because they flopped, although some did. They’re weird in that it had a very specific purpose, and possibly wasn’t what we were expecting a Nintendo console or a handheld to do.
Here’s a look back at some weird Nintendo hardware as we get ready to welcome Labo.
This conversation has to begin with the Robotic Operating Buddy, a pack-in for the deluxe set of the Nintendo Entertainment System when it launched in North America more than 30 years ago. (It also was available in Japan for the Famicom, where it was known as the Family Computer Robot). It had a grand total of two (2) games built for it, one of which, Gyromite, was included with the set.
In Gyromite, R. O. B. had a novel, if almost Rube Goldberg-esque way of “playing” with its users. He, or, uh, it, or — well anyway, R. O. B., under the direction of the player would retrieve a gyroscope from a motor spinning it up and lay it on one of two oversized buttons. Those pressed the A or the B button on an NES gamepad resting in a housing.
Gyromite was a puzzle platformer that quickly got dull. My friends and I would sometimes work the oversized buttons ourselves, sometimes as a trick-shot way to play something like Balloon Fight or Super Mario Bros. The gyroscopes were neat all on their own; I could spin those things all day, or set one lose in a crowd of G. I. Joe action figures.
Word is that Nintendo developed R. O. B. to ease retailers’ minds about the viability of a video games console following the Great Crash of the mid-1980s. It sounds strange but back then retailers wanted something that was more than just a games console, given how Atari, ColecoVision and Intellivision had just cratered one after the other. If R. O. B. was simply a foot-in-the-door approach to get cautious retail buyers to come along, it did its job in spades. The NES resurrected console gaming in North America and became a cultural landmark.
No list of weird Nintendo accessories is complete without the Power Glove. Reams of copy have been dedicated to this early foray into motion controls, so I’m probably not going to tell you anything new about it. Suffice to say, probably no one at the time was thinking “Hey, I’d really like to play a video game with complicated hand gestures like I’m communicating with the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
My friend Craig had one. There were games built specifically for the Power Glove but I never recall playing them. Instead we tried it with 3D World Runner and Kid Icarus. Yeah, we ended up turned into an eggplant pretty much all the time. You’d figure that something like Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! would have been a natural fit for the Power Glove. I mostly remember my triceps burning after holding my arm straight out for three rounds against Bald Bull.
The Power Glove had a short lifespan, discontinued about a year after it was introduced in 1989. It shows up now and then in cosplay and it featured prominently in the 1989 Fred Savage tweenage exploitation vehicle The Wizard. It was later the subject of a 2013 documentary.
This isn’t weird in that it’s not understandable — nine buttons spread over a mat allowed players to stomp their way through exergaming or dance titles, nothing too hard to get about that. But the Power Pad is weird in that it created one of the rarest and most valuable video game collectibles ever: Stadium Events.
Bandai developed the pad for Stadium Events, which featured olympic style track and field competitions. Nintendo, however, quickly acquired the rights to the device in North America and renamed it the Power Pad, intending to give it a dedicated series of games. That meant Stadium Events had to be recalled from shelves very shortly after launch. Some copies still sold and made it out into the wild.
That has led to some lucrative discoveries in thrift shops and attics. In 2013, a North Carolina woman picked up a copy for $7.99 at a local Goodwill store and turned it around for five figures, paying of some student loans. Sealed-in-the-box copies have also sold for $35,000.
The idea of Nintendo’s handheld line getting a camera, however primitive by today’s standards, is not so farfetched. But a printer too?
Nintendo being Nintendo, it also couldn’t launch the Game Boy Camera without making some dedicated games for it. These were somewhat forgettable, but they did include the ability to use a picture of yourself as an avatar in the game, establishing that as a kind of interactivity standard that had bigger manifestations on the Wii and Wii U.
The camera fit into the cartridge slot and shot some grainy, black and white images that were still sort of cool for the day (Its lifespan was 1998 to 2002). The printer was connected by a cable. It looked more like one of those receipt printers you see in restaurants when you pay your bill. It used a spool of thermal paper, the stuff fax machines once depended on.
Fans also remember it for a set of disturbing Easter eggs, triggered by pressing the “Run” button in the Camera’s menu screens.
The original Guitar Hero launched in November 2005; Donkey Konga, on GameCube, was actually at the vanguard of the music gaming craze that seized console gaming more than a decade ago.
Players used the bongos to match the beat of the music in the game. Easier songs at the beginning had a slower beat to keep; harder ones had folks slapping the bongos like they were hippies in a drum circle on the Pearl Street Mall.
Donkey Konga had two sequels, and the platformer Donkey Kong Jungle Beat also supported the controllers. But the real fun has been in people using the bongos to play games it was never meant for, like Bloodborne (above) Overwatch, and Dark Souls 3.
The Nintendo 64 had some rather advanced peripherals, including the Voice Recognition Unit, a forerunner of the Wii Speak. There was also the 64DD, a unit that could read and write to disks. It never launched outside of Japan and was a commercial flop. But it came with a game called Mario Artist: Paint Studio, for which the mouse was useful.
One of my rules (which I sometimes forget) is never to say “first” or “only” because there’s always some other example in video game history that slips my mind. But right now, I am scratching my head to think of another console that had a mouse — its own mouse, not compatibility with a mouse in general — even if this one never came to the west.
Though this never launched, it was shown at E3 2009, and who can forget Satoru Iwata explaining the concept, smiling like he was about to crack up halfway through. No specific software or applications were ever announced for it, leaving most folks to scratch their heads about what new experience it would actually offer. Iwata’s pitch centered on using video games to relax. E3, for anyone who has been, is not really a relaxing environment, so it didn’t get much of a look beyond Iwata’s stage appearance.
The Vitality Sensor became something of a running joke as writers and fans occasionally nagged Nintendo for updates on its development and forthcoming launch. Conceivably, people would have slipped their finger into the device and tried to get their heart rate and other vital signs into a calmer range of measurements, in a kind of game-ified chilling out.
