The Nintendo Energy Glove was not good. It’s vital that that. The Energy Glove was bold, spectacular, even vital — one of many very first mainstream units that allow you to management a recreation utilizing your physique as an alternative of simply your thumbs — however it was not good. In some methods, its not-good-ness is a key a part of the story.
The Energy Glove confirmed up within the late Nineteen Eighties, at a sophisticated time for the gaming business, when Nintendo was a massively highly effective pressure for the way forward for enjoyable. However the Energy Glove wasn’t actually even a Nintendo product. It began as a analysis lark, turned a toy, and solely wound up with Nintendo’s title on it after a very fateful pitch assembly. Due to a outstanding advertising marketing campaign, and the sensation that VR typically offers of merely being the long run, the Energy Glove wound up an affordable (if temporary) enterprise success. And you’ll draw a line from the Glove to another massively profitable Nintendo merchandise — and perhaps even to the entire VR business as we all know it.
On this episode of Version History, our chat present about previous know-how, we dig into the story of the Energy Glove. It’s, someway, each very temporary and really lengthy. David Pierce, Fandom’s Chris Grant, and Game File’s Stephen Totilo discover the initiatives that led to the Energy Glove, the various (many) causes it wasn’t an excellent product, and the methods during which it modified the long run anyway. Additionally they try and arrange a decades-old Glove and play video games with it, which works… poorly.
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