Dear Reader:
The Power Glove was birthed from a failed Virtual Reality project with Hasbro
For better or worse, the Power Glove is a big part of Nintendo's history. The peripheral was given some major promotion by appearing in the film The Wizard, and thousands of NES owners couldn't wait to slide their own hands into the glove. Too bad it just didn't seem to work very well when all was said and done.
Just how exactly did the Power Glove come about? Marty Abrams, one of the co-founders of AGE (Abrams/Gentile Entertainment), explains in a recent interview.
We literally were working very closely with Hasbro and we had developed in 1989… an idea to create a virtual reality headhunted display video gaming system where you could literally get in, put on the display, put your head in the cap, get all these great games and ride through space. We needed something to manipulate objects in a 3D space besides a joystick.
So we found literally at the MIT design clinic a patent that they could turn around and put on a glove, that they could manipulate objects in a 3D space.
We licensed that tech from them and we built this entire system, and we were about to go to the marketplace with Hasbro. And at that time, it just grew and grew and became unruly in terms of going out and doing it, so we just pulled the glove out of it to work with Nintendo systems.
I can only imagine why the Hasbro project didn't come together. I would love to see how the glove would have worked with that original project!