Glover

About Glover

Glover (1998) is Interactive Studios' Nintendo 64 puzzle-platformer starring a living four-fingered glove who must guide bouncing balls back to a castle to restore the Crystal Kingdom.

Glover in Depth

The aim of each stage is to move a ball to the goal. Six worlds each hold three stages, a boss stage and a bonus stage reached by collecting all its Garib cards, and clearing them restores a crystal to the castle. With the ball, Glover can roll, bounce, throw, slap and dribble it, walk on top of it, with reversed controls, and use it as a trampoline; without it, he can double jump, cartwheel, slam his fist and locate the ball and Garibs. The ball can be magically changed into a rubber ball, which floats and is the most versatile, a bowling ball that sinks and kills enemies, a magnetic ballbearing for precise control, or its fragile crystal form, which doubles Garib points. Potions give timed power-ups, and losing the ball or all three hearts costs a life.

In the Crystal Kingdom, a wizard's castle is surrounded by portals to worlds including Atlantis, a circus, a pirate domain, a horror fortress, a prehistoric era and outer space, and seven crystals on its spires keep the land alive. When the wizard mixes the wrong potions, the blast turns him to stone and throws his gloves away; Glover turns the falling crystals into rubber balls to save them, while the left glove, Glovel, falls in the cauldron and becomes the malevolent Cross-Stitch. A talking hat, Mr. Tip, offers hints.

Making Glover

Interactive Studios developed Glover for Hasbro Interactive, announcing it at E3 1998, and it was released for the Nintendo 64 and Windows in 1998 and the PlayStation in 1999 under the Atari Interactive label. Nintendo showed interest in publishing it, but talks with Hasbro fell apart. The N64 version was generally well received: IGN praised its gameplay and music, Edge found it not very original but full of surprises, and Next Generation called it "a refreshing angle on typical platformers". The PlayStation port was panned, IGN giving it 2.6 and GameSpot saying it had "lost its soul".

A sequel, Glover 2, was announced in 1999 and reached around 80 to 85% completion before it was cancelled; former programmer James Steele later explained that a Hasbro employee had doubled the first game's cartridge order, leaving roughly half a million dollars of unsold stock. Piko Interactive acquired the rights from Atari SA in 2017, released a remaster on PC in 2022 and console ports in February 2025.