The terrible Nintendo controller that helped make VR happen

The Nintendo Power Glove was not good. It’s important that you know that. The Power Glove was ambitious, impressive, even important — one of the very first mainstream devices that let you control a game using your body instead of just your thumbs — but it was not good. In some ways, its not-good-ness is a key part of the story.

The Power Glove showed up in the late 1980s, at a complicated time for the gaming industry, when Nintendo was a hugely powerful force for the future of fun. But the Power Glove wasn’t really even a Nintendo product. It started as a research lark, became a toy, and only wound up with Nintendo’s name on it after a particularly fateful pitch meeting. Thanks to a remarkable marketing campaign, and the feeling that VR often gives of simply being the future, the Power Glove wound up a reasonable (if brief) business success. And you can draw a line from the Glove to some other hugely successful Nintendo products — and maybe even to the whole VR industry as we know it.

On this episode of Version History, our chat show about old technology, we dig into the story of the Power Glove. It is, somehow, both very brief and very long. David Pierce, Fandom’s Chris Grant, and Game File’s Stephen Totilo explore the projects that led to the Power Glove, the many (many) reasons it wasn’t a very good product, and the ways in which it changed the future anyway. They also attempt to set up a decades-old Glove and play games with it, which goes… poorly.

If you want to subscribe to Version History, there are two ways to get every episode as soon as it drops:

And if you want to know more about the Power Glove, whether you got to try it or not, here are some links to get you started: