Power Glove

Lore & Background

The Power Glove was originally released in 1989. Though an officially licensed product, Nintendo was not involved in its design or release. It was designed by Grant Goddard and Samuel Cooper Davis for Abrams/Gentile Entertainment (AGE), made by Mattel in the United States and PAX in Japan.

Additional development came from Thomas G. Zimmerman and Jaron Lanier, a virtual reality pioneer who had co-developed the DataGlove and made a failed attempt at a similar design for Nintendo earlier. Mattel brought in Image Design and Marketing's Hal Berger and Gary Yamron to develop the raw technology into a functional product, designing the Power Glove over the course of eight weeks. The Power Glove and DataGlove were based on Zimmerman's instrumented glove; his original prototype used optical flex sensors, which were replaced with less expensive carbon-based flex sensors by the AGE team.

The Power Glove is based on the patented technology of the VPL Dataglove but with many modifications for consumer hardware and affordability. Whereas the Dataglove detects yaw, pitch, and roll and uses fiberoptic sensors with 256 positions per finger for four fingers, the Power Glove only detects roll and uses sensors coated with conductive ink, yielding a resolution of four positions per finger for four fingers.

The design of the glove was based on the titular protagonist of the RoboCop franchise. The glove has traditional NES controller buttons on the forearm, a program button, and buttons labeled 0–9. The user presses the program button and a numbered button to input commands, such as changing the firing rate of the A and B buttons.

Two games were released with specific features for use with the Power Glove: Super Glove Ball, a faux-3D puzzle maze game, and Bad Street Brawler, a beat 'em up. Both are playable with the standard NES controller but include moves that can only be used with the glove. These two games are branded as part of the 'Power Glove Gaming Series'.

Since no Power Glove-specific games ever retailed in Japan, the Power Glove was sold only as an alternative controller. Two more games, Glove Pilot and Manipulator Glove Adventure, were announced but never released. Another unreleased game, Tech Town (or Tektown), is a virtual puzzle solving game that can be seen in a sneak peek in the Official Power Glove Game Players Gametape.

Reader's Guide

The Power Glove sold nearly one million units and was a commercial success, but it generally received extremely poor reception because the controls were incredibly obtuse, making it completely impractical for almost every game on the console. Only two games were specially constructed for the Power Glove, and many users had no practical use for it for playing other noteworthy games of its time. Consumer complaints noted the poor connection signal between the glove and the console, build quality of the materials, and high price point for 1989.

Despite its commercial failure in the gaming market, the Power Glove was adopted by the emerging virtual reality community in the 1990s to interact with 3D worlds in a cheaper way than the popular high-end DataGlove produced by VPL Research; REND386 was the bridging shareware software to support it. The Power Glove has persisted in popular culture, appearing in the 1989 film The Wizard, where antagonist Lucas Barton declares, 'I love the Power Glove—it's so bad.' It is also featured in the 2021 movie 8-Bit Christmas, the YouTube featurette Kung Fury, Andy Weir's novel Project Hail Mary, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, and parodied in Regular Show and The Henry Stickmin Collection. A documentary titled The Power of Glove was released in 2019.