How much I wish I had it... Words that all of us have spoken at least once in our lives and that, more than ever in these days leading up to the holidays, take on strong emotional connotations, both for nostalgics like the one writing and for those who, with a load of children in tow, are preparing to experience the holidays under the sign of crazy orders on the online leviathan "Amazonian".
Ma let's go back for a moment to the Eighties with the DeLorean, designed by the cursor in Automan style of our personal time machine called the mind: a world in which you didn’t need to have a connection to enjoy the wonders that populated our most forbidden nerd dreams, sci-fi peripherals that, when you saw them on television, already made you feel like a superhero among your friends in the courtyard, savoring their admiring looks upon you.
Una, in particular, immediately became a must-have for all of us: in 1989 the Power Glove was launched by Nintendo together with Mattel and thus began the story of one of the most ambitious projects of the Kyoto house and at the same time its everlasting, glorious failure.
If you had a happy childhood marked by memorable films, then you will remember the first official appearance of the Power Glove, as we kids from the courtyard called it: “The Little Wizard of Video Games,” in which the protagonist wore a Power Glove to defeat his opponent at Super Mario Bros. 3, which was also previewed for the first time on that occasion.
Fin qui tutto bene, insomma: a launch in grand style through radio, advertisements extolling the technological power of the peripheral branded by the Big N. Yet the advanced technical specifications and the promises of an innovative way of playing reported on the box did not match the actual use of the glove-shaped hardware, unfortunately. First of all, the inconvenience of use proved to be the first major flaw: many cables connected to the console already made moving the glove in space complicated in itself, not to mention the more significant issue and the one that, basically, should have been the first problem to solve before putting it on the market, namely sensitivity.
Senza entrare too much into detail and except for the little finger, each finger corresponded to a sensor that detected its bending, effectively transforming the movement into an impulse that would go on to interact the limb with the characters on the screen: but while the hero of the film displayed an unequaled skill with the Power Glove (imagine Tony Stark grappling with his armor), we poor human beings found ourselves frustratingly getting angry in front of a command response that was, to say the least, approximate.
To put it mildly, today I would call her totally out of sync, like a trap singer without autotune and with hoarseness.
Eppure the problem in itself was not the technology, which for the time was absolutely incredible, but the implementation in a machine that, however much we all ultra-forties fans loved it madly, had its hardware limits, and the Power Glove, with an unconscious coup de main, forgive the play on words, exposed them all, one by one. Think that most players preferred to use the NES joypad faithfully reproduced at wrist height, which says it all. Legend has it that many ambidextrous people became left-handed from playing in this uncomfortable way, but those are just legends, fairy tales for the children of those pioneers who bought the Power Glove hoping to become little video game wizards, and who instead found themselves with an object destined to become a cult item, then as now. No longer a glove to wear, but the status symbol of an era when people did not fear pointing the index finger toward the highest point on the horizon, without fearing, in naive unawareness, that the sensor might not respond to the shape of the dream.
