Modern Nostalgia: Nintendo Power Glove

If you have a kid or a much younger sibling or cousin, they probably know nothing about the wonders and horrors of video gaming’s past. All they know are Wii motion controls and X-Box Kinect body flailing. They don’t know any about the grandfather of motion control, the Nintendo Power Glove.

For most people, the Power Glove was nothing more then that thing that the asshole from The Wizard uses to make Fred Savage feel like a sack of smooshed assholes for not being able to unimpressively steer an 8-bit car. But for the rest of us, we know the Power Glove as that thing our parents never actually bought us, but our cousins gave to us after they had deemed it a worthless piece of crap.

To best explain the Nintendo Power Glove and it’s uselessness, we reference the opening lines of the Power Glove’s Wikipedia page:

“The first peripheral interface controller to recreate human hand movements on a television or computer screen in real time.The Power Glove was not popular and was criticized for its imprecise and difficult-to-use controls.”

What’s great about that description is that is sounds like a cleaned-up and slightly academic version of what the person that gave you their Power Glove would say to you as they attempted to pawn off this terrible hunk of technology.

You: “What’s the Nintendo Power Glove?”

Your Cousin: “It’s some glove shit that makes you look like a cyborg that forces you to move your whole hand around if you want to control a video game.”

You: “Is it good?”

Your Cousin: “My dad is broke and spent what little he had to get it for my birthday. Now that I want to get rid of it, he’s crying in his bedroom, mumbling something about ‘life being unkind’. So, yeah, sure. It’s a blast. Want it?”