The awesome Nintendo console that helped bring about virtual reality

The Nintendo Power Glove was not good. It’s important to know that. The Power Glove was ambitious, impressive, even important — one of the first mainstream devices to let you control the game using your body instead of just your thumb — but it wasn’t very good. In some ways, not being good is an essential part of the story.

The Power Glove came out in the late 1980s, at a complicated time for the gaming industry, when Nintendo was a juggernaut for the future of fun. But the Power Glove wasn’t actually a Nintendo product. It started as a research lark, became a game, and ended up with the Nintendo name on it only after a particularly fateful pitch meeting. Thanks to a great marketing campaign, and the feeling that virtual reality often gives of simply existing the futurePower Glove ended up with reasonable (albeit brief) commercial success. And you can draw a line from the gauntlet to some of Nintendo’s other hugely successful products — and perhaps even to the entire VR industry as we know it.

on This episode of Release dateour talk show about old technology, takes a deep dive into the story of the Power Glove. It is, in a way, both too short and too long. david pearce, FandomChris Grant, W Game fileStephen Totilo explores the projects that gave rise to the Power Glove, many of which (a lot) The reasons it wasn’t a very good product, and the ways it changed the future anyway. They’re also trying to set up and play with a decades-old glove, which goes…badly.

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And if you want to learn more about the Power Glove, whether you should try it or not, here are some links to get you started: