Nintendo Power Glove: I love it. It's so bad.

In the late 1980s, if you were playing video games, you were probably playing on a Nintendo entertainment system. And in 1989, Nintendo came out and said, actually, you've been playing video games all wrong, and we have come up with a better way. The Power Glove for your NES. From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and weirdest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and on today's show, we're talking about the Power Glove, the wild accessory that you've almost certainly heard of and almost certainly never touched. to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. So if you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. Go to shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. Power your business with the platform trusted by millions today. When things get hard, how do you talk to yourself? I'm Robin Arson, VP of Fitness Programming and Head Instructor at Peloton. And this week on my new podcast, Project Swagger, I'm sharing my strategies for how to build better self-talk. It's time to work on befriending yourself. Follow Project Swagger wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. It's power glove time. The silliest gadget I have seen in a very long time. Steven Totillo is here. Hello. From GameFile.news. Yes. Welcome. Chris Grant is here. Hi, Chris. Hi, how are you? I'm back. You have a power glove somewhere in your life. Yeah, it's not my childhood power glove. I didn't have a childhood power glove. As an adult with income, I perhaps foolishly purchased a power glove for sure foolishly yeah I bought one because I I was fascinated by it as a kid I remember much more than playing it I knew one person that had one I remember the commercials the commercials were on ad nauseum I had a friend who had it I don't know if you all had a friend like this he had it and I was like oh man you have one and he was like ugh that seems stupid and I was like let's do it and he was like no you gotta And I finally convinced him to do it. And it just didn't work. And he was playing a game and using the D-pad, like using the controller on the actual device. And I was like, no, how does it work? He's like, no, that's a whole thing. It never works. And so I never, that was it. That was my experience with the Power Glove as a kid. It's a whole thing. It never works is basically like the thesis of this episode. Steven, did you ever use one? I've never wielded the Power Glove. Would you like to right now? It would be amazing. Yeah, that's why I'm here. Please. I heard there'd be a power glove. I wasn't even scheduled to be on this episode. Incredible. Oh, there's a wooden hand inside. Let's see if I can take this out. I don't want to wreck your whole shoot here. No, it's okay. So as you do this, what was your late 80s gaming situation? Well, so we had an Odyssey 2 with Pickaxe Pete, KC Munchkin, and other off-brand versions of Donkey Kong. Amazing. Pac-Man and what have you. And I had friends who had the NES, and I don't know if anybody had the power glove. But I was so excited when I saw the commercials, like you, Chris, I saw the commercials on all the time. It fits like a glove. For folks at home with their ears, Stephen's trying on the power glove. It's got a bunch of Velcro on it. It's got this kind of nylon glove that your hand goes in. There was a wooden hand inside. This had been set up on the table in front of us. And for the first time ever, I am now wielding a power glove. I think it's supposed to be in like a one-size-fits-all, right? You didn't have to buy a specific size? There were two sizes. It was medium and large, but it was only right-handed. And even the medium and large were not designed to be forever. And sort of turning on it and looking at my forearm now, because it's more of a glove gauntlet, right? It's going halfway up my forearm. And I see it's got the D-pad and the AB, all the NES controller buttons. And then all these number buttons. I don't know what any of this stuff is up here. Is that the calibration? I can tell you what that is, yeah. So zero through nine. So enter the funnest thing about playing with the power glove is you have your friends over. You've got some sodas out. You got some Mr. Pibbs or you get some RC colas, which you have out. And you're snacking and you're playing the power glove and you put a game in and you're like, hold on one second. I got to calibrate it to this game. So hold on, guys. Can you give me that booklet? And then there's a giant booklet. And then you're punching all these buttons that are on my arm. And it changes basically what it does. Nintendo insisted that they make it compatible with every NES game. So it basically works. Every game. It works as a controller. That was a key part of the thing. This had to be a universal controller for every NES game. And so whether you like punched or moved your hand or whatever, it changed what it did as input and you programmed it based on the game. And so depending on the game or the action in the game, you would like punch, punch, punch. And it is, look, I'm going to say this is stupid. Yes, correct. Everyone, we're not arguing. I'm not arguing that. Do not at me. I know it's stupid. however it's sick though it's sick it's very cool to lift up your right hand and be like hold on a second beep boop boop like this yeah and you're hacking into the matrix it is actually and you look cool doing it i'm gonna say yeah thank you it's very like dick tracy yeah no it's awesome smartwatch like there's yeah there's something about it right yeah there's a slow-mo button yeah because that's the every third party nes peripheral had to have slow-mo or turbo Stephen, how do you feel? Do you feel more powerful now? My life is now divided between before glove and after glove. It's amazing. I will say you looked much cooler actually pressing the buttons on your arm than anyone I've seen actually use the glove in a game. Thank you. But okay, so let's just back all the way up here. So the story of this thing really starts in 1981 with this guy named Thomas Zimmerman. He is an MIT grad, and he had this fascination with this thing. He called it a virtual orchestra. And he had this big idea that like, what if you could play air guitar and the sounds you were mimicking would come out of speakers? And for some reason, this is like a fascination that leads a lot of people over the years to make video games. Yeah, there's a Guitar Hero vibe in here too. Totally. Like you go all the way back and people are like, how do I make music with not instruments? And there's just all kinds of interesting stuff that comes out of that. But this guy, Thomas Zimmerman, trying to build something, he uses a garden glove and a bunch of electronics to just rig up a system that could detect finger movement. He said at the time the whole thing cost him like $10. Even electronics are fascinating. It's LEDs and then a photo sensor on the other side. Yeah, so basically what it was is like you hold out your hand flat and there's a tube that it can see the light through, right? And as you move your fingers, it starts to obscure the light. And the amount of light that it's able to see registers as how much you've bent your fingers. Very simple. Very elegant. Super simple. But it worked. And so he makes this thing in order to build some software that then interprets those signals. One could actually interpret sign language. So you could do sign language signs with your fingers and that would work. There was another that would play musical notes based on how you moved your fingers around. He ends up getting a patent for this thing. Let me show you this patent called the Flex Sensor. And this is in 1982 he gets this patent for a fairly complicated thing. And you can see in this patent, which is just a normal patent drawing, that he's like, he's got ideas about how do I actually see color and see light and sort of put it all over your body, which I find really fascinating. I'm also going to say normal patent drawings are awesome. This one is no exception. Correct. I encourage everyone to look it up. One of these figures, figure five, is a person with just sensors on every nook and cranny of their body, clearly designed to do this same thing. So Thomas Zimmerman ends up going to a game making class to learn how to do more of this stuff and gets connected to this guy, Steve Meyer, the co-founder of Atari. Atari at the time was building an R&D lab, hires Zimmerman to go work there. So at the same time, Atari also liked this patent that he had come up with and was like, oh, this is cool. well, maybe we can do something with it. And offered him 10 grand for it. Just, we'll buy the patent, you can have it. Zimmerman says no. And then a year later, Atari gives up on this whole R&D project. Everything's kind of falling apart. Good move by Zimmerman. Lays everybody off, including Thomas Zimmerman. So this is 1983. And there's a huge video game crash in 1983 that is actually like a key part of this story. The gaming industry is both bigger than ever and kind of falling apart in the way that you're talking about it. And it's not super clear where we're headed. So this leaves our buddy Tom Zimmerman with this cool invention, this cool patent. Lots of people are like, this is neat. We should do something with it. And he has just absolutely no idea what to do with it. He ends up meeting this guy named Jaron Lanier. This is my favorite part of the story. What a twist. It's like a cameo out of the side door. Yeah. And Jaron Lanier, who has just come up with a term called virtual reality that we were just starting to talk about for the first time, these two end up deciding to create a company. together. They call this company VPL Research. And Jaron Lanier was at the time trying to make a programming language that used physical objects. That's like the simplest way I can explain it. Rather than writing text, you would take symbols and put them together. Use iconography. Kind of. Yeah. And it was like a symbols language for coding. And his big idea was like, okay, well, what if you could use this glove to actually code in physical space? Which is an insane idea. But this is what they were talking about, right? And so this is at the beginning of all this stuff, and they're trying to do this stuff. So they formed this company, VPL Research, and they make a glove called the Z-Glove. And they redo all the tech. It starts to use this thing called ultrasonic tracking, basically using sound mapped in space to see where and how you're moving your hands. But then the next model, they start using fiber optic cables to measure bending of your fingers and they use magnets for tracking it in space. And this is the one that really starts to work. They call this thing the data glove and it becomes VPL's like main product. Also a cool name. Yeah, they like really kind of crush this all the way through. The data glove is an exceptionally good product. They get a bunch of other people who want to work on this. NASA becomes a customer. NASA's big idea was to let people wear the glove to do work remotely, essentially. They were like, what if astronauts could have this to stay inside the spacecraft and do work outside the spacecraft just by mimicking what's happening with their gloves? The glove cost like $10,000 to make at this point. So this is not like a commercial product. But it's cool. And it works. And people are into it. I love that thinking about this, the ambition of that product that you just described, even in today's terms, like that's pretty cool. We can imagine that this is like the early 80s. Yeah, this is wild. This is like some wild forward thinking technology that actually works is the craziest thing. And just reading about the fact that the Power Glove is written like this actual tech was fascinating to me. I had some bits of that, but obviously it was not part of the marketing to a 10 year old. Yeah. The other thing that VPL is working on is this product they called Reality Built for Two. And the way to think about it is it has two people standing next to each other. So it would be the two of you. You would both have 3D goggles on. You would both have a glove on your right hand. And there would be four super high end computers near you. and then the idea was you would actually be able to like coexist in a shared virtual space the one they created was uh it was an alice in wonderland world hence the reality built for two you could either be alice or the hatter and this is like this reminds me of all the early like oculus rift demos where they were like look you can look around and it's like can i do anything and it's like no but you can look around and uh this whole thing cost approximately four hundred and thirty thousand dollars uh and here's what it looked like this is the iphone eye phone prototype and you can see so the the the glove that they're both holding up on their right hand is the data glove and it just looks like a pretty simple like glove winter glove that you would wear but it has cables running off of it and they have headsets on that look like alarmingly like modern vr headsets like there's a bunch of ideas in here that we kept seeing for decades it looks like johnny mnemonic wearing an isotoner glove yeah yeah that's basically right this whole thing just like screams oculus rift prototypes metaverse yeah mark zuckerberg saw this photo and he's like yeah yeah that's what i gotta do exactly those headsets are way too heavy though like they're so there's so much in the front that i'm sure those people's necks were like in serious pain yes and there's there's like 10 cables running off of each of them uh they're both also wearing headsets with microphones. There's just a lot going on here. But this is the thing that they want to build. And Jaron Lanier also has this idea of how can we use this not just for these sort of academic purposes, but in business. He had this idea that it would let architects move with clients through unfinished buildings, which is still a thing people talk about. Autodesk was a client. They were using the system to model a thing they called cyberspace, which is fun. Everybody was talking about this, like, how do we put people in these virtual spaces together? How can they play sports remotely? And it was all not just the headsets, but the gloves, which is so fascinating to me, because now, 40 years later, we have less ambitious ideas about how all of these things are supposed to work, instead of like, what if we actually had incredibly accurate tracking of your hand and ultimately your whole body in space? I mean, the technology was perfected. How now How could anybody think of something better? That's exactly right. So this thing is a big hit in the scientific community. Like, still nobody knows exactly what it's going to be for or what to do with it. But it ends up on the cover of Scientific American in 1987. Like, this was like a real scientific advancement that people were doing. And the whole issue of Scientific American was about basically this, like, new bodily revolution in computing that was coming. This is 1987. seven i'm also just gonna say this cover is also awesome like just the whole vibe it's a it's the isotoner glove kind of mapped on top of a polygonal hand holding a pencil that's not there in real life and the vibe is awesome i'm impressed today 2025 like i want to do the glove well so this is one of the things that was most striking to me in preparing for this is this is just a thing that people have gotten instinctively excited about forever and it feels like in in gaming in whatever field you want, you show somebody something like this and it just like gets their brain going. And it feels like we're still that way. Like I'm sure you both have gotten versions of this product pitched to you 10,000 times in your careers. And there's just something about it that is exciting. I think people recognize that keyboards are an abstraction, that the way we interact, we've interacted for so long with electronics is not in some way, not natural. And so there's a desire to have something that feels more natural. You can look at Nintendo much later in, and not in the timeline of the Power Glove, but Nintendo in the mid 2000s throwing up their hands as they struggled in the video game industry at the time thinking, okay, well, what if people had an interface that was just with a stylus, right? And they start doing things that are more about just interact with the screen by holding a pen or they do the Wii, which comes from the idea of people are comfortable holding TV remote controls in ways they may not be comfortable holding game controllers. I think there's always a sense when people are making electronics that if only we could reach so many more people, if only we could do something that felt more natural. And for whatever reason, typing is seen as unnatural. Even mice is seen as unnatural. But something you could wear, something that just involves movement, has some level of, I guess, aspirational comfort. have we ever actually proven that theory true? Even as you say it, it's like, that sounds right. This makes sense to me that that is a good theory. But I'm racking my brain to think of like, is there a product that you can point to that is like, that is proof of the theory? The one I would point to that is the most compelling would be touch phone screens. The thing that just like made more sense than all the other stylus-based interfaces or sort of UXs before. I think you can, you know, get more narrow after that. But I think the idea that something as simple as that where anyone can see it and immediately understand it, pinch to zoom, whatever, makes sense. But certainly the pursuit of it, that Scientific American cover, the logic and sort of like elegance of just saying, oh, you move your hand and the thing moves. It's compelling today. There's still a lot of sort of room for that, you know, using modern headsets. Like this is still something they pursue. accurate hand modeling. Yeah, I buy it. So, okay, so in the mid 80s, as VPL is working on this tech, it's still pretty primitive. It's still really expensive, but like it's very clear to them that they're onto something. The other thing that's happening right now is the Nintendo entertainment system comes out. And as far as I can tell, like more or less single-handedly convinces everybody that gaming is going to be saved. In part because the NES was such a hit, the gaming world immediately starts to run through Nintendo, that like competing with Nintendo was sort of immediately seen as like a total waste of everybody's time. There were attempts. There were attempts, but they didn't, none of them, like it was sort of Nintendo's world and everybody was living in it at that point. Certainly here in North America. Yeah. In North America, the NES had a runaway hit. Yeah. So around this time just before the NES really takes off there this company called Abrams Genteel Entertainment which was mostly a toy company but wanted to make a gaming system And they found VPL and were like oh, okay, we think we can do something with the data glove that might be part of our gaming system. That was kind of as sophisticated as the idea was at the beginning, but they start building a thing. They built a game together called Band in a Hand that let you... Here's my favorite factoid that I learned about Abrams. Abrams Gentile. they made the Rambo toys. Do you remember the Rambo toys? They were huge. And they were really popular and I guess it was controversial because it was an R-rated movie and like are these Rambo toys going to be hit? And it was like a huge hit the year they came out. I remember them. And so that was like their claim to fame, the partnership between Abrams and Jotili. And so they partnered on this next project which ended up being they wanted to make a 3D console. They realized they would never beat Nintendo. So maybe if you can't beat them, join them. So this is what immediately happens is they decide, okay, rather than try to build our own thing, we're going to build something out of this glove and then we're going to convince Nintendo to support it. Like, we're going to build a Nintendo peripheral. So Abrams Gentilly goes and they demo this thing in front of Nintendo. A fun fact I learned is that Jaron Lanier shows up to this meeting also wearing 3D glasses and no one's interested in that. But they go to demo this game and it turns out that Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! is the game over and over that makes people be like, oh, there's something here. And it sort of makes sense in retrospect, right? All you do in that game is throw punches. And there is something about the idea of I can punch the air and it will punch the person on the screen that feels exciting. I did pull a clip from much more recently than that of what it actually looks like to do this. This is a YouTuber called WatchMePlayNintendo playing through this game with a power glove just to give you a sense of roughly what it looks like to actually play Mike Tyson's punch out. He's just standing there, punching four or five inches in front of him over and over. And my favorite part of this is if you notice, there's about a half second lag behind every punch. Notice also he can only punch with one hand. Yeah, he's got his left arm at his side and his right arm, and he's kind of just sort of lunging slightly forward over and over and over again. The famous boxing strategy of not using one of your arms. This is, you know, the designer at Mattel who ended up making their one original game for this. He originally saw this pitch when Abram Gentile pitched to Mattel and thought people are never going to want to play it. They're never going to want to hold their arms up because the controller is so optimized for this. And I think that anyone that's used it knows this, but watching somebody play it, it looks exhausting. It looks really exhausting to just keep your hand held up in midair, hovering in front of your body with a glove on it and then wiggling it. One of the mistakes that people who have created various motion control technologies over the years and try to implement them in games have made is a mistake that we see evident in how the Power Glove was marketed, which is that the Power Glove is marketed in conjunction with a game that involves large, violent motions, rapid movement, when in fact what the Power Glove might have been better for and what a lot of VR motion sensing technology is better for are slow movements. It's that minority report Tom Cruise thing of just kind of moving things around on a monitor. I guess he's moving kind of fast in that scene, but a lot of the more frenetic motions that people envision when they look at something like the power glove and think, oh, that's how this could be used really well. It could be, you know, I can do something like boxing or I can be controlling a race car. In fact, it's something slower and calmer that often works better for it. And so that's one of the things that's amiss that I don't think even if you put out a new power glove, we know exactly what you would best use it for but it's not something that is going to be kind of wild and action-packed because you're going to still get tired you're still gonna it's still gonna have all those flaws yeah fun fact by the way you know who helped design the minority report interface jaron lanier uh and i think it's like the the the line through all this is is so fascinating and it is so him in so many ways but at this point this demo is compelling enough to to folks at mattel in particular that they're like okay there's something here the other game that people really liked was called Rad Racer. I don't know if you guys remember Rad Racer. Super straightforward racing game. And the idea was essentially you would hold your arm out and use it like a steering wheel. Like you actually steered a fake wheel to steer the car. This got people very excited. People were into it. And Mattel signs up to build this thing. They're like, they're going to, they have a relationship with the Nintendo. It's a deeply fraught one for a bunch of reasons. But they have this relationship. They know how to build things. They know how to make toys. So Mattel says, this is 1988. And Mattel says, yes, we're in. Let's do it. We want to ship it and show it off at CES 1989. You have a few months to get this thing up and running. It's also worth pointing out real quick, Mattel, not new to video games. They made famously the Intellivision, which by this point was a huge L for them. A bit of a big sore mark. So them going all in on this is just a sign of their belief in the product. Like it's a pet project, right? Isn't the story that the CEO of Mattel, she tries the glove and knocks somebody out and punch out? And again, this is the story of this in so many ways. It's like there's all you need is you have that one experience and the light bulb goes off and you're like, oh, this could be amazing someday in the future when the technology, and it just, we never quite get there. But yeah, it was against better judgment in a lot of ways. There was just something that like got her excited and off and running they were. And notice that in that anecdote, it's one punch thrown with a glove that makes her feel that it's compelling. It's not using it for an hour and being amazed. It's using it briefly. It's also worth saying it's one punch thrown with the data glove. Yes. Oh, fair enough. This is a, which is the $10,000 data glove. This becomes the thing. So Mattel says, we want to ship this thing in a few months and we need it to obviously not cost $10,000. It needs to be a toy. Like Mattel is a toy company and they understand what this thing needs to be in order to sell. And so what VPL then has to go do is figure out how do we make the best possible version of this for almost nothing. The thing that they ended up making after a bunch of failed prototypes used ink, semi-conductive ink in the fingers, such that it would basically change the way electrical signals moved as you moved your fingers. And then it used ultrasonic tracking, which was, you know, sound in space with these big sensors on top of the television, mapping it in space to figure out where it was. There are speakers on each side of the glove and there are receivers, obviously, on your TV that are basically constantly outputting data. It's an impressively complicated thing, but way worse than the thing VPL had been figuring out how to build. but the thing was it took the glove from costing many thousands of dollars to do you guys want to guess how much do you think this thing cost to produce when they first built it I'm going to go ahead and say price is right rules one dollar I'm going to guess twenty six dollars it was twenty three dollars well done you went over so price is right you don't get to decide it's price is right Stephen wins so this thing cost twenty three dollars to produce but the big project as they're doing this again is to get Nintendo on board. And Nintendo, like you're talking about, Stephen, has a very clear sense of what this thing needs to be to work. What the NES in particular does well and the quality control and making it easy and making it a toy and making it accessible. The bars are super high for Nintendo for all of this kind of stuff. So Nintendo eventually buys into this idea and decides it's going to be into it with a couple of caveats. One is durability. They eventually had to prove that it could withstand 10 million finger bends in order for Nintendo to be on board. Do we know, by the way, do they divide by five? Like, is this five? That's a really good question. One would hope that it was 10 individual fingers or 10 million individual finger bends. Like this is one and this is one. 50 million total bends. 50 million total bends. That's right. It's my favorite Radiohead album. There was also the thing about it had to work with every game because they wanted this thing to be really helpful. But here's my favorite. is Nintendo demanded that Mattel ship a second instruction booklet with the Power Glove telling you how to use the Power Glove. It is wildly complicated. I believe we have said instruction book. Just to explain, one of the things that 10-year-olds love, on Christmas morning especially, one of the things that's really exciting for a 10-year-old. Steven, this is what would have shipped in your Power Glove products. Hey, I want to knock out Flamingo Pete. Yes. let me just hold on let me just read this book hold on let me read the second book but it was a comic book yeah there's a comic in there yeah there's also there's a really great is this the first one or the second which is the there's a yeah that's the programming guide so that's the one that you would keep next to you to to make it work for individual games you'd kind of select the interface that you want it to you basically had to tell the glove which game it was playing yeah every time you must read this to operate the power glove By the way, don't be worried. Simple instructions. It says you can't drink and use the power glove. And there's also, again, we're going to get to how great the marketing was. But it came with this enormous wall poster that says, you must follow these steps. Must enter the program number. Example, Mike Tyson's punch out. Use program seven. Push prog seven. Enter. Enter. You must calibrate after entering program. This thing was so hard to use and everybody knew it. This is great. Tuck your thumb under your fingers and squeeze. Do it several times, it says. By the way, according to this schematic here. This is a poster. Why did this exist? It's actually a great poster. And I also want to say, like, the marketing, everything about it is my shit. Here, enjoy the book. This one's great. This one has the arm position. You guys can see this. Oh, so natural. So you actually are supposed to play the power glove with your elbow on the thing. It's a real like Emperor from Star Wars kind of vibe where you're not, you just sort of have your fingers splayed out in front of you. We also get a look in here, and this isn't really shown in a lot of Power Glove related media. The sensors, right? So the sensors that go around, which the glove isn't going to work without these things all around. Yeah, they leave the sensors out a lot because it's not sexy. I do want to say- This is the sensor array. This is the thing you had to, if I'm understanding correctly, very carefully drape over your TV in such a way that, A, it wouldn't fall down because the heavy power brick would pull it down. Right. And B, that it was like perfectly in place to map the power glove in space. Does it adhere? Is it sticky? No. How does it actually? It sits. There's a corner piece that sits on the corner of a square TV. Oh. And then there's two pieces, one that goes over to the left and one that goes down. And then there's a box that comes off. The thing on your TV would look sort of like this. Yep. And it does not want to stay up there a lot. It wants to sort of pull like this. It's also quite large. You can't see this, but it's about, you know, 18 inches, maybe a little longer. And so if you had a smaller TV, which a lot of us had in the late 80s, you might have a tiny TV. It was your gaming TV. It had to house this thing. If your TV was like rounded or curved, it would not stay up there. It was a bit of an ordeal. Again, friend's house, let's play this thing. And he was like, oh, man, no, no, I don't want to do that. There's some incredible details in here. So that thing we just looked at is called the L bar. Sure. It is an L for sure. And then they give these pictures. I don't know if you can make these out, but are the different ways you can set it up. So they recommend, in this one, they have dictionaries. So this is the stack-up solution. So the L bar will work better if you put dictionaries on it. Then the hang-down solution is just the way you described it. And then this one, the upfront solution, and you have this old-timey chair. that it's somehow draped over the arms of the chair. Oh my gosh. I love this. It's a miracle they weren't like, buy another television. Put it on that. You know what? This kind of reminds me of when the Kinect came out and there was all these goofball ways to get the thing to stay on top of your TV or in front of your TV. Yeah. I do also just want to point out and applaud the version history crew. You guys got some mint condition. Truly. This is like, these manuals are in great shape. We're going to sell this thing on eBay to pay for everything in this set. This is going to cover your production. Yeah. These are little sticky pads. Oh, it came with all sleep pads. Oh, okay. Three of them. Let's not go too crazy with how much you're going to pack in a box, I guess. And then, warning, for maximum enjoyment of your new power glove, you must read this and follow the instruction manual carefully. You're about to embark on the most incredible video game experience of your life. But you should realize that the power glove, in all red letters, is not a joystick. Not a joystick, guys. We should take a break here because what's about to happen next is, against all odds, Nintendo agrees to ship this thing and put its name on it. You can see Mattel is on the booklet there. Nintendo is on the booklet. Like, for some reason, everybody is in. Everybody is ready. This thing is just about to launch at CES. And then the story from there, spoiler alert, ends very quickly. But we're going to get into it. We'll be right back. In the wake of the release of millions of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, The rich and famous are finally feeling some pain. But even with corporate resignations here and with former Prince Andrew being arrested in the UK, the question remains. How did Jeffrey Epstein remain a thriving member of the elite for decades when everyone seemed to know what he was up to? I don't think you could be friends with Jeffrey Epstein, whose M.O. was obviously having sex with young girls, even as Trump said, on the younger side and not know his M.O. Untangling the Epstein conspiracy. That's this week on Today Explained. Every weekday and now on Saturdays. What are the main takeaways of the foreign policy section from Donald Trump's State of the Union address? I do think they've made a decision to elevate domestic issues as we head towards the midterms. We'll see if that sticks, because he keeps getting drawn back to the foreign policy issues. I'm John Feiner. And I'm Jake Sullivan. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we'll react to President Trump's State of the Union address, the situation with Iran, and the eruption of violence involving cartels in Mexico. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. We're still reading the Power Glove comic. They're characters. Hi, I'm reading right inside the introduction. Hi, I'm the Glove Master. and this is my apprentice little digit and then they explain in comic book form and then it's like 40 pages of loving instructions about how to use your power class. That's actually my dating profile. Okay so this thing launches CES and it's actually a hit. People are like pumped about this thing. It's silly now and it was silly then but again like people were super excited about this thing. They got more than 700,000 orders at CES alone. People were like very ready for this thing to exist. And then the like year of 1989 happens. They haven't shipped the thing to everybody yet but it is starting to like come out. It's starting to be super exciting. It's like culturally very relevant. Everybody's talking about it. And then at the end of 1989 just the strangest thing happens which is a movie called The Wizard is released? Have either of you seen The Wizard? I saw The Wizard in the theaters because I'm old, first. Second, a dork. The marketing for The Wizard is we'll talk about marketing in general because it's just a marketing master class but the marketing for The Wizard was incredible. Your first look at Super Mario Bros. 3 I would have killed a man to get in to see The Wizard in theaters. It's not a good movie but it is a deeply fascinating cultural artifact. Functionally, it's a movie about video games. They play a lot of video games. The big journey of it is to a video game tournament. It's weirdly sort of emotional but also very much about video games. But the Power Glove plays a huge and pivotal role in this movie. And I'm gonna play you a very long clip from The Wizard because I just want you to understand how intense a product integration this really is. The setup for this is these kids are going around hustling people to win at video games, and they try to hustle these kids, and then the guy they're about to play against pulls a power glove out of a box. He pulls it out of a briefcase with his name on it, Lucas Barton. And this kid has punched me all over his face. He's got that 80s, you know, bad dude. Wait, here's the best line in the movie. I love the power glove. it's so bad I mean there it is that's version history everybody I love the power glove it's so bad I will point out that in the in the all the different documents brochures that you handed me that were in the power glove that you bought there is a brochure promoting the wizard movie coming December 15th and so the movie is advertising the glove but the glove also advertising the movie this became very controversial because there were a lot of people who were like this is going to be this is just pure Nintendo propaganda and the filmmakers were like no this is a real movie that just also happens to feature video games a lot. And have unreleased first look footage at Super Mario Bros 3 so 10 year old Chris is like banging down the doors together. Yeah. So anyway so this becomes part of the like you know propaganda machine for this thing The name is a coup also for everybody involved because I think the marketing slogan for the NES has sort of stuck with us to this time right Now you're playing with power and this is the power glove. And so it feels like it's the consummation of what the marketing was hyping you up to do. You're playing with power and so you therefore need the Power Glove. It is a good name. I would argue Data Glove is still slightly better. That's just my own personal opinion. Now you're playing with Data. Yeah, I like that less. I take it back. Never mind. Well, I'm just saying you want to combine the two, but Data Glove's good. Yeah. Okay, so this thing comes out, it's before it ever launches, it's a big hit. That's like an important piece of this. Everybody's very excited about the idea. It costs 90 bucks. It comes in two sizes. It comes with all these instruction booklets. Mattel is already planning a second one. It's going to be called the Turbo Glove. What are our thoughts on the – now you're playing with Turbo. I'm here for it. I just want to give everyone at Mattel that had a hand in marketing and ideating this product a huge – the product itself, we'll get into it. But the marketing, branding, everything, just a round of applause. You knocked it out of the park. Do you want to know the theory behind the Turbo Glove, rather? It's the Power Glove at Turbo. Weirdly, no. Oh, okay. The thing they wanted to do was they understood that this thing was big and bulky and sort of complex. So their idea was to have a glove that looked just like the glove, basically, but offload the keypad and a lot of the weight and sort of computing stuff onto a belt. All right. I'm still here for it. So this is the idea. What if instead of having cables, you had more cables? The way they would do turbo, I guess, because you're using your own body, is you would have to give all the kids playing it some kind of stimulant. I guess, yeah. Right? How would it actually genuinely be a turbo-go? Yeah, how do you speed it up? You got to actually move your body faster. It comes as jolt. It does feel like a stimulant. Play this out long enough, and like in 1992, Mattel releases like a full exoskeleton. It'd be great. But you know what they didn't make, even for the second one? I don't know what hand you guys write with, but I'm left-handed. So I was left out in a way of power glove design. Can I tell you something that's going to make you sad? None of these companies cared about you at all. They literally, there was a meeting in which it was like, should we make a left-handed version of this? And an executive goes, ah, there's not that many left-handed people. Who cares? There is a weird historical bias in terms of these peripherals against left-handed people, including when Nintendo releases the Nintendo DS and they have the DS or the 3DS they have a they have a Kid Icarus game and it can only be played by right handed people and there's like this all of these stylus driven games and the the strangest thing about all that is that Shigeru Miyamoto considered the greatest game designer of all time the father of Zelda Super Mario Brothers Donkey Kong he left handed if anything Nintendo's peripherals including the power glove should have been for lefties like me and Miyamoto Nintendo an enormously pragmatic company. Sorry, Miyamoto. Just enormously pragmatic. And they said, yes, but 10% of the population is hard to... Capitalism, baby. It's hard to make that work. Yeah, pretty much. But like, again, we're still in this phase where between the thing has been shown off to the public and it's shipping. And the excitement is just off the charts. And now we should talk about the marketing campaign because there is maybe nothing better about the power glove than the way that they marketed it. One of the overall taglines for the thing was everything else is child's play, which just kicks ass. They had all of these, I mean, they had the big posters. They had this commercial set with, like the glove was always kind of electrified in pictures. It just looked so cool. Wait, it doesn't actually do that when you plug in? Sadly, no. It does not. It doesn't crackle. If you're listening at home and not watching, like pull over your car right now and look this thing up in your front. We were talking about the look of this before the taping. I think this thing is beautiful. I think the design of it is so cool looking. It just has such a sharp look and that's all tied into like just what it communicates and how it makes somebody feel. And so the marketing, you know, just showing it to people. Yeah. Showing this on somebody's hand. Everyone, you know, at that point, just like wanted to believe that this thing was real uh can i just play you one quick commercial that they made for this thing just to give you a sense of like they were doing a real science fiction is now real kind of thing with a lot of these let me just play you this one commercial it's just a guy walking down a hallway it's a tom cruise knockoff let's be honest yes Power glove for your NES. Now you and the games are one. It even shows him programming the game, which I love. He's playing 1943. That is the game. Well, we'll get into the game they made for it. Watch out. The power glove. Everything else is child's play. Just fan. I want one after that. I know this thing sucks and I want one now. I saw that commercial. as a kid, two, three hundred times. Like, it was, it was inescapable for about a year. And then, and then it was. Yeah, I think that the effortless way that they just show the thing working on this big TV is immediately captivating. Yeah. And so in this, in this phase, Mattel is doing a bunch of things, right? They're starting to reverse engineer every NES game in order to make it work on the Power Glove, which I don't know this for certain, but there is some evidence in some of the research I did that there was one person whose job it was to map every control in every game back to the Power Glove. And I just want to say to that person, I'm so, so sorry. Can you imagine a worse way to spend a year? There's a finite number of control types that you could program in, but it's the question of figuring out each game, which one it uses. And like somebody just had to play all the games badly, unenjoyably to figure that out and then document it. Yeah. But then the bigger plan, and everybody sort of understood that the way this thing actually works is we have to build games that take proper advantage of it. Mattel bought a game called Bad Street Brawler, which already existed. It's this kind of generic looking side-scroller game. I can show you what it looks like here. it's basically just a guy walking from left to right punching and kicking things and like you can this game existed before the power glove but you can sort of see how you would look at it and be like yeah we could make the power glove work here so yeah they bought it they effectively published it and it was the first in their series of uh the power glove series i believe is the branding on the cartridge the idea that's that they would have exclusive games just like you know That's right. But then the big idea, the first game that was like really truly made with the power glove in mind was a game called Super Glove Ball, which is a very funny thing. And I found a clip of it on YouTube thanks to the YouTuber NES friend. And here's what it looks like. You can actually see the glove on the screen, which is sort of fascinating. The idea behind a lot of these games was that you can see the glove move as you move. And as you close your fist, it'll close its fist. And this game was basically just like bouncing stuff and you could grab the things with your hand and then throw it. And you were just trying to clear levels of all of these blocks. You know, if you compare it to the other games where you're mapping these interfaces onto existing games, you can see the logic of being able to see your hand move on the screen, right? The sort of freedom that that gives you. It looks not unlike Wiimote games later that use a sort of cursor or a computer game that uses a mouse. There was one notable problem with Super Gloveball. What was that? It was like a pretty big issue with Super Gloveball, is that it didn't come out for the first year of the device's life. So you had a Power Glove, you're super pumped about it, and there really weren't any games that really were made for said Power Glove. That's right. And so this was one of, I would say, a number of issues with the Power Glove at launch. So the thing ships and this is where everything becomes a problem because a lot of people buy them, a lot of people put them on, and a lot of people discover that, oh, no, the power glove actually like really kind of sucks. In part, it was because you couldn't figure out how to do a lot of very basic things. Like if you were to just put this on and I was to tell you walk in the game with the power glove, would you know instinctively how to do it? No. No, well, how many instruction manuals have I read before that? I would consult my poster on the wall, remind myself of the steps before I need to check the manual and program the code. And not only was it really hard to intuitively figure out, it could be different from game to game. So it was like these very basic mechanics of games just didn't make any sense with the Power Glove. It took a while to set up. It took a while to calibrate. It took a while to figure out. And Mattel and Nintendo both immediately noticed what I would argue is just an unbelievably obvious problem, which is that nobody was reading the manuals. And so they were getting a lot of feedback and calls from people who were claiming that their thing was like broken in some meaningful way when in fact people just hadn't done the super arduous setup process. And there's a phone number on the back of the manual to call. It's a 900 number, $1.50 for the first minute and 75 cents for each additional minute. So people would call and pay rather than read the manual. I'm just saying, think of the logic, right? Like if people are calling, they're forgoing all this amazingly helpful documentation that they have here. Is it possible this whole thing was just a scheme to make money from phone calls? Did they make more money on customer service or the power glove than they did on the power glove? We don't know. But this is the history of peripherals for video games, right? It's that the reason that Nintendo has been so successful with so many of the gadgets that they've made. And they themselves not fully successful with all the ones that they've made. But it's generally because they have created software that is made for that interface. So the Wii is a hit in conjunction with Wii Sports where, okay, they're introducing motion control with a remote-like controller, but they're also introducing a tennis and bowling game where you swing your hand as if you're playing tennis and bowling. And so for the Power Glove to come out and to not have any natively made software that is there to show off and work quite well with the power of love is in retrospect an obvious sign or an obviously bad decision that is going to doom the device. Even from a calibration standpoint, you can imagine if you turn on a game that just told you before you start playing, here's the instructions. You're going to hit those buttons or you're going to calibrate it this way. Which is actually now a very Nintendo thing to do. Like on the Switch 2, there's a whole game that is just about how to use the Switch 2. And so I think that absence of the game, the software itself, knowing the device you're using and walking you through it meant that it was up to you to sort of bring all of that setup and calibration to bear each time you used it. So, Stephen, you bring up a question I was going to ask you guys, which is, do you think if, like, let's assume Super Gloveball is awesome. It's the most fun version of the game that you could hope for. if that had shipped like day and date with the power glove and you have even just one thing that is like a native game made for this thing could it all maybe have gone differently yes absolutely because once you have somebody show how hardware can be used successfully with a video game it's not just that players customers see that it's that other game developers see that and then they can build on that. So if there had been an early and successful demonstration of what kind of game experiences actually work well with this, then you at least have a chance of getting some iteration in the design of games for it that can lead to some pretty good games potentially. We've seen with Microsoft's Kinect, we've seen with Sony PlayStation's Move that sometimes you do get launch software that is made with a peripheral and that still isn't enough to prove that the tech is good enough or that the experience you can play, in those cases with motion-sensitive gaming, is going to be worth the investment to buy a Kinect or to buy a whatever. So it's not to say that this would have been proven to be great technology. Perhaps the idea is so limited that even the best game designers couldn't have made something that would have justified all of the idiosyncrasies and faults of the tech. But to not launch with something like that puts everybody, including other game developers, behind. Right. Yeah, I wonder if what it even buys you is just like a little bit of runway. Because what actually ends up happening here is the Super Gloveball launches in October of 1990. So like you said, almost a full year after the Power Glove launches. And that same month, it gets discontinued. And so this thing, like maybe Super Glove Ball is like fun enough that it buys the thing one more rev of technology. Like maybe, maybe Mattel launches the Turbo Glove and something happens. And it's like the, all you need is that little tiny bit of momentum sometimes so that somebody can go build the next thing or somebody can make the next tech breakthrough that makes this thing not so horrible to set up. but as it was, it was like the momentum was so bad from the very beginning as soon as people started using it that it almost never had a chance to even try again. And that's where I think good software could have saved it. You know, when I was at a friend's house and wanted to play it and it was in a drawer, like the people who bought it, the people who were excited about it, the people who were compelled by that marketing, again, great job, Mattel. They were disappointed. They were all disappointed, 201. And so you don't discontinue a product. I mean, the product was a hit. It made money. You don't discontinue a product that's a hit unless you fundamentally lose belief or that you think that you have burned all of the goodwill of the audience. They're not going to go buy a sequel. They're not going to buy another one. The reputation was so bad by that point that even with good software that would compel people to reevaluate their stance, they're not going to try it again. Well, and it seems very clearly to me that there were a lot of people involved in the project who kind of thought it wasn't going to work to begin with. And so the minute you start to see signals that this thing isn't going to work, there were a lot of people really happy to pull the plug. Like the number of sort of true believers in this technology, like sure, Thomas Zimmerman is into it. Jaron Lanier is into it. But like the people actually making these products, it barely got past Mattel. It barely got past Nintendo. So you can sort of see how everyone would pretty quickly be like, yeah, just cut our losses and walk away. And there wasn't somebody there who was like, no, this is the thing we're going to spend a decade of my money on this problem. One of the things that's fascinating about this to me and why, you know, you talk to Stephen, who's never held on before, is that this thing came and went so fast. It came out with this incredible launch. It made a lot of money. They sold a lot of units. Over a million, as it turned out, which is a big number at that point. Yeah. For $90? That's a lot of money back then. Could have been $1,100,000 if they'd made the lefty one. That's right. Just for the record. if you're listening. Would have made the difference. I think the sense that they were so successful up front in the lead up to the product and then it disappeared. And so they weren't selling them. The number of people who had them had them. They were put away in drawers. And this thing became like apocryphal, right? It was the kind of thing you just like heard about. You didn't see it in stores anymore. You didn't know people that had it, but it remained in pop culture like to this day. Like it is still such a identifiable product. It's in TV shows. It's in movies. It shows up all across the sort of pop culture landscape. It is synonymous in a lot of ways with 8-bit aesthetics. It wasn't clear to me until I was an adult that Nintendo didn't make this product. They effectively were just pitched on it and licensed it. But it seemed so first party at the time. It seemed so native to the NES. Well, it was marketed with Punch-Out!, which was a Nintendo-made game. I mean, we see that commercial. We're not seeing a holistic Mattel-made glove and game combo. We're seeing a presentation that can fool a 10-year-old legitimately and understandably into thinking this is a Nintendo controller for a Nintendo game, Punch-Out! And that's then also the disconnect and the dissatisfaction when it launches, right? Is that it doesn't work well for these games that it was never really meant to work with anyway. And so it's gone. But as a toy, like toys do come and go, right? Like toys don't necessarily have a forever legacy. So I don't know if it's completely inexplicable that it has a short life. A lot of fad toys do. I think we'll boost forever. Well, but I think the fad toy is, I think, the exact right description for it, right? Because what this ended up being is not some giant technological breakthrough. This was a fad toy. This was Tickle Me Elmo much more than it was like the future of computing. We're far from the NASA idea. Right, exactly. But there was a minute where everybody thought it was the future of computing. The last thing I want to end with here before we get to the version history questions is whether you can draw a line from the power glove to some of the other stuff Nintendo does later. Like you've both mentioned the Wii at various points. And I think like this thing was a big failure, which makes it surprising that there would be anybody at Nintendo who was like, oh, well, that was cool. We should keep doing that. But this idea of sort of more direct control, like you were saying at the beginning, has been a feature of Nintendo products kind of ever since. Does the Power Glove deserve credit for any of what would come next from Nintendo I mean it hard to get in their minds and know what they were thinking but they were definitely interested in virtual reality because you have the virtual boy right That isn that long after this And it's goggles, it's red monochromatic VR. They're trying, if not to do things that are more about direct control, they're trying to do things that are more about immersion. But their tepid investment in the Power Glove, I think is telling, right? don't go out of their way to make a game for it and they don't seem to try to sustain it so they've always been a company that is into their own ideas and is you know hesitant to kind of adopt other people's ideas so it is truly remarkable that they even bless this thing into existence but i i think you can see kind of gaming moving in that direction in general but i would be surprised if they looked that closely at this and and picked up any ideas from it i'm going to take take a contrarian take based on the success of the product the hype the belief but it sort of um the imagination it triggered in people just from the idea of controlling a game on your screen with uh your hands or with a device like a mouse cursor um i i look at wii games that are offer an almost identical prospect just with easier simpler technology that's more accurate There's a sensor bar on your TV now with two infrared lights that is much easier to place. It's much cheaper to make. There's a wand that you hold in your hand instead of a glove that goes on your hand. And it communicates with a sensor bar using similar positioning technology. It's using accelerometers instead of things. It doesn't have the finger control. but I yeah I mean I think that the sense that the power glove had this opportunity to get people excited and engaged in gaming without holding a controller and that that allure to your point whether it was the straight line from a power glove or the straight line from a tv remote why not both like it could be both things yeah and I I see a lot of technology in here that just wasn't ready for prime time didn't have the right launch plan didn't have the right software support didn't have the right tech in it. But give it 20 years and it's a totally different story. All right. We need to take one more break and then we're going to come back. We're going to do the eight version history questions before we get out of here. We'll be right back. This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm joined by Her First 100K, a.k.a. Tori Dunlop, a fellow personal finance creator who's changing how an entire generation thinks about money. Tori's journey is a masterclass in turning personal finance wins into a platform that empowers millions. She opens up about the real strategy behind hitting that six-figure milestone without the typical privileged blind advice and how she's redefining what it means to be a wealthy woman in 2026. We're diving deep into investment strategies for real people with real budgets and why financial feminism isn't just a buzzword, it's a movement. Get ready for an unfiltered conversation about money, entrepreneurship, and what it really takes to build both personal wealth and a business empire. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. All right, we're back. I should say we tried to play Super Gloveball during the last break, and we got as far as we got the game loaded and we got the thing connected, and we were able to play with the D-pad, but not with the glove, which is very disappointing. This was just like my childhood experience where my friend didn't want to get it calibrated and set up, and it said it didn't work, and so we played with the D-pad, and that was my authentic 1989-1990 Power Glove experience. We tried all three instruction manuals that were in the box. Steven, your reaction was my favorite because you were standing there trying to play it and you all of a sudden go, wait, I don't have another hand. That's right. I didn't realize that the power glove actually needs to be played by three-handed people because it has the D-pad and the buttons of a Nintendo Entertainment System controller. But your hand is in the glove. Yeah. So you can't then hit the D-pad easily and then the buttons. Now you're playing with power. Not really. Yeah, it's tough. All right. Time, as always, for the eight version history questions that we ask about every product that comes on this show. The first question for both of you is, where does the power glove fit on what we call the time matrix? And the time matrix is idea and time. Was it the right idea at the right time? Was it the wrong idea at the wrong time? Or was it somewhere in between? You can see the matrix in front of you. We have to decide where to put it. Chaotic good. So I will just start. I would like to make the argument that this was the wrong idea at the wrong time. That in fact, there is some, like if you boil it all the way down to like the basest, there's some right idea in there. But I think the power glove as a thing was never going to be the right idea. I think it's still not the right idea. I think like for a lot of the reasons we've been talking about, like we're going to reverse engineer this so that it can control every game. Bad idea. Like, I just don't think this thing was going to work. I'm going to go right idea, wrong time. I think if they had iterated on the games and spent the amount of time, I think that would have been necessary to come up with great game concepts. I can squint my eyes and imagine seeing an early variant of Wii Sports using this controller if it worked. Again, different timeline of it working. I think that there's a world in which like given some extra time and some energy and, you know, right creativity. I think that this thing could have had a hit game, which is maybe all it needed to sort of. It does seem to me that Wii Sports is the most compelling argument for this being the right idea, because there is there's a lot that's different. But there's also a lot in here that is like shares DNA with what Wii Sports turned out to be. I'm going to say right idea, right time. just because of what kind of idea it is, right? The idea to me isn't that it's a successful video game peripheral. The idea is that it is a aspirational toy add-on in a time when that's like a lot of what gaming is. I am loving this zag from you, by the way, that actually this thing was a success. It's such a perfect counterpoint to this. No, it was in all of the measurable ways this thing was both a disaster and kind of a success. I mean, I don't think it's good. And this is a history of so much technology. I don't think it's good to sell people a product that's busted, right? And you're taking money from people on kind of hype and hope. And then people are ripped off, right? Sure. That's messed up. And in that regard, it should really probably be wrong idea. But it is an idea that is so compelling that it has commercials that you remember decades later. It is iconic enough to be utilized successfully in movies and remains like a cultural talking point. It exists at a time that it allows it to be a stand-in for a lot of kind of how people were thinking about technology and the future and potential. And so it is inspirational now, I think, and it was aspirational then. So the idea, not the execution, but the idea is terrific in its moment. and it's timed, I think, pretty well for it, especially because I don't actually think you could have made that many great games for it. And so I don't actually think that there's a better version of this. Maybe it benefits from some more first-party development. Interesting. I'll buy what you're selling. That was a good argument. That was. I think the case against it, obviously, is that it didn't last, right? That it was a true, like, fad toy flash in the pan, not the beginning of some new way that we think about computing or video games or whatever. Yeah, by the time the Sega Activator came out, I mean, we were all hooked and sold on that. That's exactly right. That was incredible. But in the way you just talked about it, I'm actually willing to give this to Right ID at the right time. I'm fine with it. It feels insane, truly insane to do this. All right. Boy, is that what a win for the Power Glove that just was. All right. Question number two, was the Power Glove peak anything? I have a couple that I would like to throw at you, but I'm curious if y'all have any thoughts. I think yes. I think just like this late 80s, early 90s vibe of like cyber future, living in the future, before any of that shit was real, before it made any sense, before it worked. Peak cyber future is not bad. It is like, again. That commercial we saw is right up there. And people still use it. It's still a tool that hackers toy with and play with and rip apart and make it do new things. I think it just sort of nailed the design brief on how to look. I beat branding in terms of the name, too. We're hard-pressed to come up with any better-name peripherals, right? Like, what's a better gaming gadget, better-name gaming gadget? Hey, a Microsoft Connect called. I want to have a word with you. Oh, well, I was thinking of it as a C-O-N-N-E-C-T. I forgot they spelled it K-I-N-E-C-T. And then when you said that, I... To hang out with your family. Yeah. Because you're going to connect. Oh, because the Kin? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The Kin X? It's like kinetic, but it's also that you connect with your Kin. Oh, yeah. It's a family gaming device. They made a phone called the Kin. It was like they were... Microsoft had a lot of... Oh, I'm still going Power Glove. ...really bad ideas. Yeah, the Power Glove's an easy win on that one. So is this peak product placement with the Wizard? Oh, yeah. Can you beat, like, can anything ever beat, they just basically made a movie about this thing? The only thing that can beat that is the Super Mario Bros. 3 footage, also in The Wizard. So I'm just going to give The Wizard. So The Wizard wins. Either that or some watch in a James Bond movie, but probably Power Glove. Okay. Question number three. If you could time travel back, knowing everything that we know now, and take charge of this product yourself, could you have made it more successful? More successful than an enormous, historically huge failure? I would hope. I think, yeah. Could you? What would you, what would you, you're, I'm giving you control of this product. One single game. You have to delay it a year. That works good. We're delaying it a year? Yeah. Okay. The Wizard 2 comes out. Even more product placement, even more hype. People can't stand it. They're losing their minds over it. Okay. Yeah, that's what you got to do. Glove Pilot is one of the canceled games. Just, it sounds good, right? Yeah. I would buy Glove Pilot. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I do buy the thesis that if there was one thing that felt like truly native, even if it wasn't that good if you could just it would jog that next bit of your imagination that's like oh I can see how you put these pieces together and then and that's like we've seen over and over in this space like that little bit of momentum matters a lot. So you missed the wizard thing. You still get in the wizard but you missed the overall. Would it have been as exciting 12 months later? Did anything happen that would have made it less exciting? I think you do a hamburger helper tie in with clover and then you have it. That's not bad. That's not bad. Okay. will the youth ever make the Power Glove cool again is this thing due for a retro nostalgia comeback from what I can tell it's had that moment chiptune artists and with hackers there's a very cool community of people finding one thing that I like about the Power Glove is there are a lot of people out there making cool digital music with it which like all the way back to the beginning of our guy Thomas Zimmerman is like it sort of has come back to doing the thing that he was trying to do all those years ago which is cool. I like that. It's a very hackable object, this thing. And so people have found a lot of interesting things to do with it. Because it's sick. It's so bad. But like, I mean, there is a big, obviously like retro games movement happening now, right? Which everyone plays perfectly legally and without downloading ROMs from anywhere. But is this, is this ever going to have a moment? Like are we, are people going to buy the NESs and go buy power gloves on eBay? Well, spare in mind that six months ago you would not have expected Nintendo to even mention the word Virtual Boy, let alone announce that there was going to be a $100 replica peripheral that you could use only with a subscription service that would bring it all back. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that they, tapping into the high-budget nostalgia market, wanting to get as much money as they can from their most affluent customers, wouldn't say, well, work with Virtual Boy, let's ourselves bring back. You could basically make this exact thing, stick a Joy-Con in it. Like, you know, it wouldn't be that difficult to recreate the look. Mattel, get on it. And so, yeah, I would also buy that, that I could have a moment. I would not have had Virtual Boy $100 re-release on my Nintendo bingo card for 2026. Yeah. So to that end, actually, question number five, what feature of this product should every current version have? And I think, Chris, you just kind of answered, Like the answer is give me a glove. Yeah. More glove controllers, please. Any motion controller, give me a slot in a glove to put it in. Like that's, I really, it's the minority report gloves with the three fingers and the light at the end. Like give me those and I'll wear those to play video games. Absolutely. I feel like you pair that up with the right software where you're actually doing a thing on your screen, pinching, pulling. I'm into it. But it's like all this stuff now is like the quests and the vision pros, they're all like, oh, we just do hand control. We'll just see your fingers in the air. I'm like, that's actually much less cool than giving me like a rad pair of gloves to do my computer with. I don't know. Yeah, you go between like the really kind of like latency prone hand in the virtual world or holding the controller. I want in between. I want the controller to be the hand. That's what I'm saying. Like forget there's all of this being natural and then there's all of it being like kick ass. and this was like it went all the way for kick ass alright three more questions these are the version history hall of fame criteria questions in order to get in this has to pass all three of these questions question number one did this product do something truly new from a consumer hardware standpoint I think so to your point arguably the first like virtual reality consumer level device ever released but obviously you know the data glove had did it previously as a B2B solution. But if we're going to go consumer here. Yeah, I think this is like, another way of asking this question is like, had people ever seen anything like this before? No. I think that's right. Yeah, okay. All right, question number two. Was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? It's so bad. I mean, it is so bad. It's like, they missed by so much. It's truly nuts. Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good. Yes. Well, no, it's the line from The Wizard. It's so bad. I love it so much. It's so bad. It's both. Okay, and then this is the one I think is genuinely tricky, and I have a feeling I'm going to disagree with at least you, Stephen, on this one. Hall of Fame question number three. Did it have a lasting impact? Just to play my own cards, I think the answer is no, and I think this is why the power glove doesn't get in. I think for, this is the reason I brought up the like, can you draw a straight line to the Wii and all of that stuff? Because if this is the thing that kicked off the like motion revolution in gaming and was like the thing that made a generation of people want to make VR, fine. I just don't see it. My younger son likes a quest game called I Am Cat. And if you've seen that, he plays it in the living room. He uses hand controls and he has a sort of like ring that he sits in and he just uses his hands. He's cat crawling and doing cat stuff. And that's all just with his hands. And I think that that is, you know, to some degree, this line from those early experiments pre-Data Glove, this idea of like you're controlling 3D space in virtual reality. The Power Glove is not a great execution of said vision. but I think the idea that we are still using our hands to control 3D space today, would it have happened anyway? Probably. I think so. Part of it, I think one very compelling argument against this having lasting impact is actually that Jaron Lanier helped do it because he was there before and he was there after. You know what I mean? And like he certainly had a lasting impact on technology. And now he says we should delete our social media. Yeah, right. I think that when before I was saying it was the right idea at the right time, It's very much about what the idea of it was. And so it's this ephemeral thing that then kind of exists in people's memories as kind of iconic of the time. A lot of that runs against it actually having impact beyond being memorable. So we can't point to something that Nintendo or Mattel iterated on with this to say confidently this did in fact lead to the Wii or some Mattel toy of some type. We can, I think, mostly point to it as something that is kind of beloved and is intriguing. And in terms of, I don't know if we would define that as impact. So I think I'm with you on it now. Okay. All right. Well, I expected that to be harder than it was, but I think it feels right that this thing doesn't get in the Hall of Fame. It's like, someday when we build the, like, it's, I love it, it's so bad wing, we'll name it after the Power Glove. It would have had to at least have had more than a total one year insta-face plan. The Turbo Glove gets in for sure. You know what I mean? That's when, that's when the world changes. Where's that timeline? Yeah, exactly. All right. Sorry to the power glove. He didn't make it in. That is it for our show. Thank you both for doing this. This has been tremendous fun. The best way to support all of this stuff that we're up to is to subscribe to The Verge. As always, thank you both. We will be back next time. See you then. Version History is part of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Zayner Adams, Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffrin, and our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to follow the Version History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive and to support everything that we do and get access to all of our podcasts ad-free, including this one. Make sure you subscribe to The Verge.wie