HERE<\/a> and tell me what you think.) The game was famously so bad that Atari literally buried unsold copies of the game in an Alamogordo New Mexico landfill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n(Really. Somebody dug them up a few years ago. You can find a copy of the \u201crecovered\u201d game on eBay. They aren\u2019t cheap.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While E.T. has become a punchline of horrible games, it serves a great purpose in demonstrating how poor video games had become. The games were being created for the sake of creating more games, not for the sake of creating GOOD games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was the market Nintendo wanted to enter\u2014a market saturated with crappy games and knockoffs of decent ones. As I talked about earlier, the FAMICOM was successful in Japan; Nintendo knew they had a winner in a solid system to run games Nintendo carefully crafted themselves. What they needed was a way to sell a new system to a country more or less overwhelmed with gaming systems. They decided to do it in a way completely different from any of the other games; they were going to sell the Nintendo as an \u201cEntertainment System.\u201d I\u2019m not exactly sure how to describe the goal of Nintendo\u2019s American launch, except that it was a combination of two or three ideas. The NES wasn\u2019t just going to be a video game console. It looked different, like a VCR, not an Atari. It had a variety of peripherals\u2014instead of just a simple joystick controller, it also had a light gun. And it was educational: it came with a robot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Robotic Operating Buddy, or R.O.B., was supposed to be the next big thing in home gaming: a robot that gamed with you. It wasn\u2019t just a part of the system; it actually played along with you while you gamed. And it kind of (just barely kind of) did what was advertised. Looking at the R.O.B., you can see the big bulbous eyes\u2026they were actually an offshoot of the lightgun tech that watched the T.V. along with you. The game was coded to briefly flash certain signals (usually color patterns) that R.O.B. would pick up on, and then he would help you play the game, by moving part of the in-game world to allow you to continue gameplay. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It seems to have worked. The R.O.B. was a hit when the NES started to be sold in fall of 1985; Nintendo sold the gaming press of the value of the system, and it was incredibly unique. Nobody else was selling a robot who sat on the coffee table and helped you play your games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem, however, was three fold. First, the R.O.B. wasn\u2019t always helpful. I myself vividly remember a friend trying, for at least a half an hour, to make the game work when she was showing off how to play Gyromite. It never worked. She wasn\u2019t alone in her challenges. If R.O.B. wasn\u2019t perfectly aligned, he wouldn\u2019t work. And if he did, he had to be set up perfectly to work, which didn\u2019t always happen when you were a kid, which the NES was marketed for. And finally, even if he was set up perfectly, he wasn\u2019t fast. He moved walls and objects back in forth the games released as part of the R.O.B. system, but the robot took time to spin up to speed and moved slowly; competitive players found R.O.B. to be too slow for the games he was supposed to help with. The second challenge was a bigger one\u2014the games R.O.B. played weren\u2019t very exciting. The system released with two games, Gyromite <\/em>and Stack-up.<\/em> Gyromite involved guiding an absent-minded professor around his laboratory to collect dynamite (which is the definition of absent minded\u2014who leaves lit clusters of dynamite on the floor?). R.O.B. helped you raise and lower red and blue columns, moving (and creating) obstacles to help you through the levels by spinning a gyro and pushing red and blue buttons. It\u2019s a nifty way to involve the robot, adding a sense of \u201cplaying along\u201d with a robot. In Stack-Up<\/em> R.O.B. (unsurprisingly) helps you stack colored blocks that start laid out around R.O.B., and the player controls the robot to collect, order, stack, and move the colored blocks. Unlike Gyromite<\/em>, however, Stack-Up<\/em> has doesn\u2019t feel like you\u2019re \u201cplaying along\u201d with a robot\u2026it feels like you\u2019re using the NES to tell the robot what to do. And that\u2019s stack colored blocks. The final issue with the R.O.B. is surprisingly simple\u2026R.O.B. wasn\u2019t needed to play the games. In Gyromite<\/em>, there was physical linkage between the red and blue buttons R.O.B. pressed\u2026they pushed the A and B buttons on the second controller, tucked in behind the robot. Players quickly learned just pushing the buttons on the other controller was far quicker than counting on R.O.B. to do the pushing for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAnd that\u2019s where the R.O.B. games stopped. Two were released with the Deluxe system sold at launch, and no more games were ever released. That turned R.O.B. into an expensive paperweight\u2026it was a system linked to only two games, one of which (Stack-Up<\/em>) wasn\u2019t any good, and the other didn\u2019t need the robot to actually be played. (there was an unofficial game released in the late 1990s that used R.O.B. to play Christmas music).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Nintendo R.O.B. was, in all likelihood, intended to be a Trojan Horse: it was a fancy peripheral device, but Nintendo never truly meant for it to be a long term part of the NES system. While Gyromite<\/em> is a fully formed game, Stack-Up<\/em> apparently went from final code to release in less than a month, a needed second game to put some weight behind R.O.B.\u2019s game library.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNintendo\u2019s effort with the R.O.B. worked. I\u2019m sure there were dads out there, shopping for Christmas presents in 1985, who conned a mom into letting Junior have an NES because \u201cthere\u2019s a robot, and it\u2019s an entertainment SYSTEM, not a gaming console.\u201d That said, the robot ended up being a footnote to the success of the NES instead of the hallmark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I still, really, really want one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m back. Somehow it\u2019s been 3 months since my last post, despite the fact I was finally getting into the swing of writing. But as soon as I got going with my Nintendo playthrough goal, I picked up a massive project at work\u2014I ended up running a safety investigation, based […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":104,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3,5],"tags":[9,14,8,13,15],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gameplay","category-nes","category-history","tag-gameplay","tag-gyromite","tag-history","tag-rob","tag-stack-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}