Never Drink Wine (Or Release a Product) Before Its Time

Way back in January I watched a documentary called The Power of Glove on Amazon.  It told the story of the Mattel Power Glove for the original Nintendo.  Remember the Power Glove?  It was a glove (duh) you put on and it would let you use your hand as the controller.  Sort of a precursor to virtual reality and the Nintendo Wii.

I love the Power Glove.  It's so bad!

The documentary is only about an hour that could easily be distilled into a 5-10 minute YouTube video.  The distilled version is this:  back in the late 70s a couple of guys came up with a glove that could control primitive computer programs and electronic music of that time.  In the 80s they sold the idea to a company that sold it to a toy company that sold it to Mattel in the late 80s.

What ultimately killed the product is Mattel loved the idea so much they they rushed it into production so it could be out for the holidays in 1989.  There was a huge, gaping problem:  there was no software actually designed for the Power Glove!  The programs were still being written that could maximize the Glove's features.  When used on existing games, the Glove worked, but it didn't work as well as using the normal controller.  So people buying into the hype were soon disappointed and the product crashed and burned.

Though a cult following developed around it and people have hacked the Glove for use as a VR controller, drone controller, and other stuff.  About 20 years later, Nintendo came out with their own motion-capture system, the Wii.  And some of the same problems still came up.  The games actually designed for the Wii like Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort were really fun.  Playing them with my mom and sisters on Christmas made me go out and get a Wii of my own.

But the problem was when I tried other games that weren't made specifically for the Wii, the kind made for all the platforms of the time:  PS3 and X Box.  Software companies didn't want to program a whole new thing just for one platform, so you'd end up with awkward controls even on games like baseball or basketball or football where you'd think motion control would make it a lot easier.  I mean to pitch a baseball you should just wind up and pretend to throw, right?  Nah.  That would be too easy.  So those weren't much fun to play and the actual Nintendo games were mostly minigames that got boring after a little while.  So in the end the Wii mostly got used for Netflix until I sold it back to Amazon for like $40 credit or something.

Anyway, there's an obvious lesson for writers and everyone else:  don't release your product until it's absolutely finalized.  Had they waited a year for games to actually be made for it, the Power Glove might have done better.  Though I suspect it would have had the same problem as the Wii in that third parties still weren't going to make stuff designed specifically for it.

So often with self-published books you see a lot of typos and/or really shitty covers--sometimes covers with typos!  Obviously those people needed to take a little more time on the project before releasing it.  By releasing the Power Glove earlier than they should, Mattel made some money right away, but lost more than they probably would have made had they waited.