The top ten retro gaming secrets

If you thought modern games hardware had the monopoly on inventions such as motion controllers and 3D effects, think again.

Davey Winder has dug out his vintage gaming collection to reveal the surprising secrets of yesteryear’s consoles.

1. The Wii didn’t invent motion controls

The Nintendo Wii might have revolutionised and revitalised the video gaming industry when it was released in 2006, but it certainly didn’t invent the ‘swing it to win it’ style of gaming for which it has become so famous.

The Wii Remote wireless controller which detects movement in three dimensions is brilliant, especially when playing Wii Sports. But Nintendo was beaten to the punch, or should I say the swing, by some 20 years (the exact date is lost in time, unless you know better) by the Smartland SL6401.

This electronic golf game has a screen in the head of a miniature golf club, and is played by swinging the club itself. It has a very basic accelerometer (you can feel and hear a weight moving inside the club as you swing it) and the game uses the movement of the club to plot the course and distance of your ball as you play.

2. 3D gaming isn’t new

3D may well be the new black, what with 3D movies at the cinema and the Nintendo 3DS handheld on the horizon, but 3D gaming is old news.

The first game to simulate 3D was 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81, a first-person perspective, maze-exploring title. However, skip forward to 1983 and the first dedicated home video 3D hardware appeared. The Tomytronic Thundering Turbo 3D handheld was a binocular-style device providing realistic 3D effects courtesy of the two LED panels lit by external light – as your car sped along you had to avoid the LED-generated obstacles coming at you.

3. Gamers had guns 38 years ago

The gun as a game controller didn’t start with the Wii Remote/Nunchuk wrapped in a Wii Zapper in 2007, or even the infamous NES Zapper light gun that Nintendo introduced with huge success in 1984. Nope, you need to reach right back to the very first home video games console for the first gun accessory and shooting game you didn’t need to visit an arcade to play with: the Magnavox Odyssey.

Developed by video game hero and pioneer Ralph Baer, the Odyssey was launched in 1972 and sold more than 300,000 units (almost entirely in the USA) before it was discontinued in 1975. Slightly less successful, but nonetheless just as important in historical terms, was the ‘Shooting Gallery’ pack for the Odyssey which sold no more than 20,000 in total.

Along with a bunch of simple shooting games including a dinosaur safari and haunted house, the accessory pack came complete with what remains the most realistic ‘gun’ game controller ever produced. This full size, and weighty, pump action shotgun simply detected light – so a ‘target’ would light up on-screen and you would have to shoot it to score. Or you could shoot a light bulb instead for the same effect.

4. Steering wheel controllers are older than you think

While we’re shooting down myths, steering wheels weren’t invented by Sony for the PlayStation in 1994, nor Nintendo for the N64 in 1996.

Forget about the force-feedback wheels of today, and jump back to 1978 for the electro-mechanical Tomy Demon Driver complete with mini-wheel, or totally bizarre Tomy Turnin’ Turbo Dashboard driving simulator of 1983.

However, for a true steering wheel controller peripheral look to the Hanimex TVG-3000 plug-into-your-telly console from the early 1980’s which had an optional wheel to accompany a racing game and beat the big boys by at least a decade.

5. The Nintendo DS was not the first dual-screen handheld

The Nintendo DS has sold in excess of 130 million units since 2004 to become the best-selling handheld video games console of all time. Yet the DS bit was far from innovative: dual-screen handhelds have been around for nearly 30 years! Nintendo itself had a range of multi-screen ‘Game & Watch’ devices, including the million seller ‘Mario Bros’ from 1983.

Nintendo wasn’t alone in developing this kind of technology. The 1982 VTech ‘Diamond Hunt’ handheld went one better with play across three screens, as did the Monkey Kingdom handheld from Tronica which adopted a side-to-side screen approach rather than the top-to-bottom scrolling of Diamond Hunt.

6. The Game Boy was not a game changer

More bad news for Nintendo fanboys: the Game Boy, released in 1989 and selling nearly 120 million units worldwide, was not the pioneering cartridge-based handheld you might imagine. Atari fans can sit down as well: neither was the backlit colour-screened Atari Lynx of the same year.

Jump back a whole ten years to 1979 and the Milton Bradley Microvision was actually the very first handheld with interchangeable cartridges to hit the games market. It had died by 1981, a victim of being a little ahead of its time and a little short of screen estate and games to play, but did manage to put in an appearance in Friday the 13th Part 2.

7. Hi-tech used to be very low-tech

You may think that the likes of the Magnavox Odyssey, with a beam of light moving around on a TV behind a (literally) stick-to-the-screen translucent overlay, or even Pong where you ‘hit’ a blob from one side of a screen to the other were, well, pretty simplistic. However, compared to the electro-mechanical ‘video games’ that followed some five years later they were hugely sophisticated bits of tech.

Tomy released a whole batch of games consoles that were, actually, wind-up mechanisms powered with batteries to light a single red LED light, or sometimes just a plain old bulb. Blip was the most popular, being an electro-mechanical version of Pong, released in 1977. This was followed by a racing game (Demon Driver, mentioned above) in 1978 and a shooter (Missile Strike) in 1979. In the early eighties Tomy used the same electro-mechanical innards but within arcade-shaped housings under the Mini Arcade brand.

8. Games were green in 1982

The concept of environmentally friendly games might seem a little precocious now, let alone back in the heady consumption days of the early 1980s. Back then, though, some video game handhelds were truly thinking green. How does solar-powered gaming in 1982 grab you?

The Bandai Terror House handheld was released in 1982 and featured two LCD panels (stacked one on the other for 3D-alike effects) and a solar panel to provide the power. As soon as there was enough ambient light the game kicked into action, although as soon as the light faded so did the gaming experience…

9. Tablet-based Scrabble isn’t an iPad exclusive

Scrabble on the iPad has received a lot of publicity, not least as it allows multiple players to use the iPad as the board and their iPhones as tile racks. Which is undoubtedly a very cool, and very expensive, way to play the game. Things were just as cool, and a lot cheaper, back in 1983 when Ritam released Monty Plays Scrabble: an enormous red tablet device with a huge keypad.

This weighty device was a real head-turner back then, allowing three players to play a proper game of Scrabble against the computer. The 12,000 word vocabulary was not massive but allowed for a decent game, and Monty was clever enough to be challenging without being impossible to beat. Shame the screen was so small, monochrome and not touch-enabled, while the keypad was so enormous.

10. Amiga CDTV wasn’t the worst games machine ever

It’s tempting to think of the Amiga CDTV as the worse games machine ever. The 1991 Commodore Dynamic Total Vision, with its high price tag and rubbish games (I reviewed one at the time called ‘Town With No Name’ as ‘Town With No Game’ as it was so boring), looks positively sensible compared to Barcode Battler from the same year.

This handheld console saw players fight each other by swiping barcode-embossed character cards through the console to determine power-ups, damage and the like. Players were also encouraged to cut out and swipe the barcodes from everyday items such as a box of cornflakes for example, and use them in battle. No wonder it was a massive flop everywhere outside of Japan!