Friday 5 May 2017

Power Glove's Secret Games

Today we want to uncover a story behind the Mattel's Power Glove for the Nintendo Entertainment System!
When Power Glove was released and featured in "The Wizard" movie everyone was shocked: could that glove be so cool?
Answer was...
sadly, no!...
Power Glove is far from being good as shown in advertising, it's extremely inaccurate and we are sure everyone who tried it went nervous after powering off the console!
But the early concepts of the glove worked far way better and were a giant leap in accessories technology. The early prototypes of the glove costs more than 700$ each and were full of motion sensors.
Sadly, when Mattel acquired rights for the glove, final product was completely changed from prototypes: motion sensors were replaced with ultrasonic sensors, far way cheaper and inaccurate: changes brought production costs of each unit around 20$ and Mattel done a huge sponsor campaign with insiders to let his peripheral being officially licensed and launch it on the market.


 They asked a famous programmer, James Sachs (lead artist on the groundbreaking Amiga computer game Defender of the Crown), to do some Power Glove demonstrations to inlcude in the show to let people know what can be done with their new controller.


Tales from the NES have the original Mattel tape that was distributed to Mattel insiders (Italian division) so we wanted to know everything about those demos shown in the video. **ENG SUBS AVAILABLE**
After 2 italian never released ads featuring italian rap singer Jovanotti, the Power Glove's Ad starts and shows how they tought gaming will be with it.
the "new" games shown are Super Glove Ball, Manipulator: Glove Adventures, Glove Pilot and Terror of Tech Town.
Except for Super Glove Ball, these games are unreleased and there are no prototypes of them floating around. Tales from the Nes reached Mr. James Sach to speak with him about his work behind the Power Glove project.  We can't publish our private interview with him but we can say that we got what we were searching for:

 Mr. Sachs told us that he remebers very well that he worked on the early demos (Terror of tech Town seems to be an updated version of the unreleased C64 game Time Crystal from Mr. Sachs) of the glove and there was no game and no code behind them, they were only animations! They were only created to convince the executives to make the Power Glove and he never actually saw one.


There was another "Tech Town" demo found in the wild (you can see it at the left) but it's quite different from Mr. Sachs work seen in the Mattel tape, so they switched to something "real" after they got Power Glove on the market but those 3 "games" are still lost like many cancelled/unreleased nes projects!

We hope all of you enjoy this read as we enjoyed digging infos about them. Radical!!!

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