Mattel / Nintendo · 1989 · Nintendo Entertainment System
The Power Glove was a motion-sensing wrist controller for the NES designed to be worn like a glove, marketed aggressively as the future of game control — and remembered as one of the most poorly functional accessories ever produced for a major platform.
The Power Glove was developed by Abrams/Gentile Entertainment and manufactured by Mattel for the North American market, based on technology licensed from VPL Research, a company founded by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. The underlying concept — tracking hand position and finger flex to translate physical gesture into game input — was genuinely forward-thinking. The commercial execution was not. Ultrasonic sensors placed in the television's corners detected the glove's position in space, while flex sensors along the fingers tracked bending. The system had to be calibrated before each play session, a process that was finnicky and imprecise, and the resolution of both positional and flex tracking was insufficient for reliable game control. Of the roughly 100 NES games tested with the Power Glove during its development, only two were designed specifically to take advantage of its control scheme: Super Glove Ball and Bad Street Brawler, both of which shipped on a special two-game cartridge included with certain bundles. The vast majority of NES games were intended for a standard d-pad and two-button controller; attempting to play them with the Power Glove meant using a numeric grid on the device's forearm panel to select a control mode that mapped gesture inputs to button presses. This mapping was imprecise and tiring to use, and players quickly reverted to standard controllers for any game they actually wanted to finish. Despite its functional failures, the Power Glove became a cultural icon. Its appearance in the 1989 film The Wizard — a feature-length Nintendo commercial featuring Fred Savage — gave it a moment of breathless on-screen endorsement ("I love the Power Glove. It's so bad.") that has been quoted and satirised ever since. The line became one of gaming's most famous unintentional admissions of product failure. Approximately one million units were sold before Mattel discontinued the peripheral in 1990, a figure that represented reasonable commercial volume for an accessory but poor return on the marketing investment made to support it. The Power Glove's cultural legacy outweighs its practical one. It demonstrated, years before the Wii, that motion control was a concept consumers would pay for — they simply had to be sold on execution that actually worked. The peripheral surfaces regularly in retrospective discussions of gaming's greatest failures and greatest marketing successes simultaneously, occupying a unique category of product that failed as hardware while succeeding as an idea.