Today's Innovations Yesterday: Motion Controls - News
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 15 July 2011 / 7,546 Views
Buttons – they've been gamers' friends since the beginning. They've put controls at our finger tips, whether it is for shooting, accelerating, punching, or whatever. They aren't perfect. Not only can they become complicated to use as you add more, but they also aren't exactly physically involving. Ever since the early days of gaming, players have been dying to immerse themselves more into titles, hence the hopes and early attempts of virtual reality. That's where motion controls come in. They let the players physically take control of the action on screen. But right out of the gate, motion controls have had a rough road.
When in the realm of third party peripherals, it's hard to say who did what first. But gaming motion controls seem to track back to a company called Datasoft Incorportated. After finishing work on the title Popcorn, the company decided to take a shot at building a controller. And by the end of 1981, they had their very first controller – a motion controller. Titled “Le Stick” and developed for the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64, it was basically a joystick without the base. The stick contained mercury inside to determine where the controller was facing. And to stay in line with then current industry standards, it included a single button on top. Unfortunately, no software was designed around Le Stick. Thanks to that the product never really saw any real life outside of an expensive alternative to a normal joystick.
After Le Stick, you can probably find plenty of 3rd party motion controllers across a wide variety of platforms, especially starting into the NES days with peripherals like the U-Force. But the one and only Power Glove stands out in the mind of many gamers as a colossal mess of how bad motion controls can be. Interestingly enough, the Power Glove was actually created by Mattel, and not Nintendo, which showed in software support as the only original title made specifically for the Power Glove was published by Mattel. In a way, it sort of functions like Nintendo's Wii Remote, but instead uses ultrasonic sound instead of infrared light to track where the glove is. Despite it not being developed by Nintendo and only one title being specifically made for it (of course you could use it with any other NES title to simulate button presses), it's a surprise that it become an icon for the NES. That's probably mostly thanks to the movie The Wizard.
While Nintendo didn't officially have a motion controller at the time, SEGA's stab at the control scheme took a completely different route with a strategy that sounds familiar to what what Microsoft is doing today. Instead of having a controller the player moves, the player simply moves themselves. The SEGA Activator for the SEGA Genesis is somewhat like the Kinect of yesteryear. The hardware was a ring of infrared lights placed around the player's feet and, if the light was disturbed, it would count as a button press. The SEGA Activator failed from both a technical and marketing perspective just like the Power Glove. Both devices were a technical mess with a high price point. Unlike the Power Glove, there were actually about six titles designed with support for the device in mind, including some big name titles like Mortal Kombat III, Street Fighter II: Championship Edition and Comix Zone. Despite the support, the peripheral was still unsuccessful.
After years of failure, a mass produced motion control seemed unlikely. Technically, they just didn't work and so they remained a incredibly small part of the market. But in 2002, Sony decided to try their own take on the concept with the Eye Toy. While basically just a web cam placed on top of the TV, the Eye Toy puts the players in interactive experiences on the TV. Technically, it was functional enough to have a line of software built off the experience. But from a market perspective, it was an early break out in motion gaming. And by 2008, the device had pushed over ten million units.
And now we step into the in-progress transformation of motion gaming. Nintendo has their Wii controller, which basically exploded the market, shooting the system to the top of sales charts at least in terms of hardware sales. Sony is following a similar path, but still incorporates its eyetoy into PlayStation move gameplay, which has been met with varied results. And finally, Microsoft's Kinect revived SEGA's old promise of hands-free gaming. And thanks to a huge marketing budget, they have already made their way into ten millions homes. Portable gaming devices and even smart phones are starting to implement motion controls as well.
It took us thirty years to get here after the launch of Le Stick, and motion controls still aren't perfected. It's has been a slow burn and probably will continue to be. Motion controls definitely have a future, but it's hard to say exactly when and where that future will be and how it will play into our gaming lives. Most gamers would probably agree it definitely isn't close to the level of precision buttons and a analog can give you. But considering its roots, they've has come a long way.
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Actually the Power Glove wasn't an original idea, it was a cheap version of the much more expensive gloves, with very finer motion detection, used for Virtual Reality researches and early applications. Back then, though, neither consoles nor PCs, even high end ones, could handle the most advanced VR environments and applications, very expensive workstations were used for that, so the simplifications made with Power Glove weren't necessary just for price reduction's sake, but also because computing power available to most people didn't allow to handle much more.
I like what I saw. I hope VGChartz continues to give history lessons like this. Looking forward to articles on analog controls, voice control, portable consoles, online gaming, and whatever else you guys can think of. The youngsters need to know!!
Nice article. Informative. I knew about Le Stick and had heard Power glove mentioned once or twice, but this article put everthing together nicel. Please, more like this!
Nice article :-)
And you are saying what about motion controls?
I had a Le Stick. It was a great idea, but hard to use, as you had to keep it strictly vertical and there was no calibration or self centering. It would work on any Atari 2600 or Atari 400/800 computer game. The only cool thing was I could get some weird diagonals in the airplanes in Atari Combat.
My feelings on the matter are this. I remember being a kid, and thinking about Virtual Reality and wishing/dreaming of the day when I could be in the game! Now we have devices that do almost that, and we're bemoaning it??! The reason is that games cost so much to research and make, that it's hard to try new things with the motion controls without great risk of loss/failure. But the thing is most of the games and genres we have today are built and designed to work best with the standard button controller. If games were being built from the ground up with these motion controls as the ONLY option, and the gameplay reflected the need/use of motion controls only, then we'd finally have what we want, that interactive VR experience. But no, the devs are lazy and too comfortable to REALLY innovate gameplay to adopt these controls. That and/or the heads of these huge corps, won't allow the teams to risk millions of dollars to create this new experience that motion controls demands. As long as we keep getting games that "tack-on" motion controls, gamers won't buy it, so corps won't justify the risky endeavor of innovation. What a sad and shameful stalemate.
@Benjamin Yoder
You need to get your fact right before making rubbish calms, the person who came up with the Power Glove worked for Nintendo before taking the idea for the Power Glove to PAX, as Nintendo did not like the glove as it never worked.
Seeing that power glove brings back memories. I remember being exicted only to find out it was a giant d-pad. But at least Ninitendo made the attempt to innovate. And now we have the wii-mote and soon the wii-pad.
Good article! I never knew that the Power Glove was made by Mattel...
@o_O.Q: It's not that Nintendo made everything first, they nearly never invent the technology, it's more that they take existing and mass market ready technology that noone at the time believes in or thinks of in a certain context, and they make it the de facto standard and show what new experiences can be realized with it. That's something that Nintendo is much better at than most other companies.
@Jaos: yes, they share this ability with Apple and a very few others.
Props for the article... and one day with better brainwave reading techniques we can have a true 1:1 of what you want to do and what the game will do... and of course it will be really nice for handcapped people.
@Benjamin Yoder
You need to get your fact right before making rubbish calms, the person who came up with the Power Glove worked for Nintendo before taking the idea for the Power Glove to PAX, as Nintendo did not like the glove as it never worked.
oh wow look the device that was actually the first motion control that certain people tend to disregard when claiming nintendo came up with everything
so eye toy was a steady seller!
