Back in the days when people were still striving to turn science fiction into science fact, Atari developed a device so mind-blowningly cool that it couldn't have possibly worked as intended - the Atari Mindlink. The Mindlink was a controller that, as marketing would have led you to believe, was controlled by your mind. Of course thinking left and thinking right would have probably done little for you - the thing was a total dud. Rather than using some magical mystical technology from the year 3000, the Mindlink relied on "EMG technology." That's a fancy way of saying muscle resistance. So how well did it work?

According to Atari Museum;

"Feedback from Atari engineers and people who tested the Mindlink have commented that the time and effort put into the Mindlink system was wasted because the controllers did not perform well and gave people headaches from over concentration and constantly moving their eyebrows around to control the onscreen activities."

So Atari did something that most companies would consider unthinkable nowadays - they scrapped the project. The reason I thought I'd bring this little slice of history to everyone's attention is two-fold; first, I think this whole thing is pretty f'ing cool and well worth sharing with those of you who were unaware of it, and secondly, it got me to thinking about the Virtual Boy.

Much like Atari, Nintendo was thinking to the future with the Virtual Boy. They were trying to bring a little slice of tommorow into today, doing something that no other company had done before. Their intentions were flawless. But in the end we all know how things turned out. The pricing was attrocious, the library of games pathetic, and most importantly, playing for even brief periods of time led to sore eyes and headaches. There's no way Nintendo's testing missed this, but unlike Atari they decided to go to market anyway. In the end, this became the first nail in what became Nintendo's deacde-long coffin.

It was the first sign that the big N might not always know what it's doing. This newfound consumer doubt paved the way for Sony market dominance, poor GameCube sales due to lost consumer trust, and rumors of Nintendo abandoning the hardware market all together. Nintendo had to gamble on completing re-inventing its image and target audience to reclaim its previous market dominance. Lucky for us, the gamble appears to have paid off.

The moral of the story? Don't send a product to market "just because."

Comments (1)

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

Add Comment