Would you be interested in covering QUBE, the worlds first interactive television service from 1977? It pretty much made modern cable boxes, on demand services and viewer feedback.
(35:24) NUON by VM Labs: I doubt they would carry a compatible remote like what you're looking for, but when I need a remote for an outdated television-closer to the original remote than a universal remote-I go to ReplacementRemotes (dot) com, which is labelled as Dan's Electronics on the site. Admittedly, I've only had to order from them 4 times since 2010, but all 4 orders I got the exact remote control I needed (my latest order October of 2020). I don't know about international ordering.
@@Christopher-N different games required different controllers as well, some needed an analog stick which wasn't a standard pack in with all machines. Pity they royally screwed up the marketing as the machines are pretty capable hardware wise but only 7 games got released and 1 of those only plays on a single south korean player.
My Aunt Ann and Uncle Larry got me one of these for Christmas in 1988. Everyone was super excited to try it out and quickly realized that it was not fun at all. I'm still grateful for the gift, they couldn't have known how bad it would be.
Just an extra note: the captain power toys in the U.S. would actually respond to the TV show as well as the VHS. There were several other toys along with the ship that all had the small video sensor in them, so if you were watching the show on TV while holding the toys they would do things like flash, play audio clips, or let you shoot at the enemies and react to the events in the show. And every single one of the captain power toys would go absolutely ballistic during the 'armor up' scenes (aka:magical girl transformations)...
The amusing thing is that it tries to trick you into thinking you are actually pointing and hitting what you are shooting at when in reality you are just following the target.
It's literally a company doing what my older brother did when I was 3, where he'd give me a controller on a single-player game and tell me we were playing together. Literally just an entire product line based around that.
@@retrogamernes3121 ; It was to me when I got older and did the same with my little siblings, nieces, and nephews. It's the circle of life! Shit rolls downhill. If you can dodge a turd boulder you can dodge a ball!
So far I haven't had a personal connection to any of the technology being discussed in any of Nostalgia Nerd's videos that I have watched, but the quality of research, writing, editing, etc. keeps me coming back for more. I don't have any of the nostalgia, but the nerd is fascinating!
As a kid living in a trailer the Action Max was the most awesome game system. The local police that would come by for uhh, reasons, actually played the haunted house game a bunch then one day 2 of the officers came by after school and gave me Ambush Alley and it was probably the coolest day of my life. One time a few months later a neighbor got pretty drunk up and cops were called. One of the cops was walking around their trailer and I heard him radio it was all clear and the response call was "STAY ALERT BABY, STAY ALERT" They were quoting Ambush Alley in what I later found out was a drunk guy with his x-wife at gun point in the house.
@@kutter_ttl6786 I did. Except for the one that spent almost 20 minutes talking me into looking at a dead body. Then when he finally got me pumped enough to look, it was a bug he stepped on.
@@coreym162 in the south it's the opposite; the cops and sheriffs in a city area don't give a shit about anything, but small town cops have nothing better to do than extort people for money
I remember we got an action max for Christmas one year. I had to wait till the older siblings got bored of it before I could try it. That was about 20 minutes.
My pops tricked me into getting that instead of Nintendo a few weeks before Christmas he was like you could get this now or wait for Christmas for Nintendo and of course my 8 year old dumbazz went for it
I'd imagine it would be pretty cool at first but as you play another round it dawns on you. Not only does it make a 2nd and 3rd game boring, it also takes away the fun of the 1st time when you realise it's a static video
Out of curiosity, did you at all brag to your friends how realistic the "graphics" of these games were and/or invite them over to share this...unique experience? Haha.
@@radicalraccoon within 5mins of standing there think you are actually playing. It hits you 😳 shyt they got me!! Then you hide this crap somewhere in your attic basement closet or you bury it so nobody knows you spent $80 - $100 cause you can't return it.
@@pennstation5638 Shouldn't you be able to return it if the creators claims it does something which it clearly doesn't? I mean if it's not an interactive game you'd think they'd have it spelled out in the fine print somewhere in case someone wants their money back? Or consumers had no rights back in the days?
@@rustneversleeps85 watch Action Max clip again they over exaggerated what the game did making it seem as if it was live action. Only the clicker and target worked. No the stores didn't do refunds. Bradley's lol would not take it back.
@@wolfetteplays8894 The point of my comment really whistled over your head _that_ quickly, huh? That's not at all what I was saying or even implying, but A for effort. You must be so much fun at parties.😏
@@wolfetteplays8894 Okay nevermind I just went to your channel and saw a little bit of your latest video. Fucking _yikes,_ dude. Touch some grass, get help, and re-home that poor dog, you doorknob.🤨
@@penfold7800 DITTO! DITTO!! DITTO!!! DITTO!!!!! :-) Too many losers, useless anuses and jerky corporations cutting in on everyone else's lives these days. If someone or some group(s) need to cut in on my dull life to enhance *their* livelihood, what does that say about him / her / them?!?! The answer is that these *people* (since they're the ones behind everything) *have* no lives and need to get some. Pathetic... It's for this very reason I don't have a dopey iPhone or iPad and intend to avoid having one for as long as possible. BTW - you may want to reconsider voluntarily having a *chip* jammed under your skin in the near future just because everyone else is and you won't be allowed into certain movies, theaters, casinos, sports arenas, and shopping malls without one. At that point, I consider it "GAME OVER," and hopefully others with the same objections / rejections will agree and take action along with me... ;-)
@@IgorOzarowski Actually, no...but I can see the parallel there. Difference is, coronavirus is something which, though invisible, is very contagious and very, very *real* . Thus, so is the need for innocculation. Whilst concerns about bots and other additives are reasonable, I haven't seen evidence of such as of yet. However, there is NO need for an organization or entity to require you to place a chip under your skin just to be able to use a certain type of phone or computer hardware OR software. THAT is true "Big Brother" territory and where dystopia has in fact begun. :-/
I was born in the early 80’s and let me tell you that when teddy ruxpin came out it was amazing. My neighbor had one and i thought it was the coolest thing that a stuffed animal was telling us stories.
@@TJ-wg3ud I remember that, we could never afford one so a kid in our school would bring one in on the last day of school because you were allowed to bring in any toy in for that day those were the days
I've heard of VHS games before but I was confused as to what that even meant. This was a great video on explaining that, and the history and variety of these games. It's really fascinating how they could do so much with a single signal.
“He started going to the air force base every day, for work. Time and again, military base officials had to break the news that he wasn’t actually a pilot.” 😂🤣
I still remember the moment in dawned on me as a kid that I wasn't, in fact, changing my Sega Video Driver VCR game in any way with the steering wheel. Life lesson right there.
@@kloggmonkey It's like when you leave the Mormon church and realize that you could have been helping people in need instead of playing dress up and be holy in L.A.R.P. clothing.
I’m sure she was just as angry at you for having all that stuff laying around the living room. But it was really her fault because she should have just bought you the SNES like you asked.
Tv teddy was sold in argentina as an interactive bear but with no vhs. The bear simply reacts with the tv with the tv signal of state channel "canal 7". During the 90s
That captain power toy was pretty genius. An arcade game that allowed pvp multiplayer. I would’ve loved it as a kid. Especially the cockpit flying open and ejecting to give you an actual consequence. Pretty sick.
You really have to admire the fact that they managed to pull off what they did at all. It's all very much a case of making a system do something that was never in its spec sheet.
Living behind the Iron Curtain thus not getting access to these things also help. You could read poorly researched articles about these magical interactive toys in your kids magazines, though...
I Had At Least Some Fun With This: “Debuting in 1987, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future was a multi-media brand which included a TV series, a toy line, and various tie-in products. So why am I writing about it on my retro gaming blog? Because at its core, Captain Power was a game.”
@Eugene Cam What makes you think they could've afforded a VCR and the unit to play these games? May as well have gotten a NES. Super Mario Brothers is infinitely better to play/replay than watching the same tape over and over never even knowing if you actually killed your foe or not.
Ya man at that time if it was 1987 or prior to that ,the NES was the sure way to go or Sega Master system before that you couldn't go wrong with the Atari 5200 or even the classic 2600 , ColecoVision etc. just lots of solid systems out there. I don't know why anyone would go VHS. I supposed the deceptive marketing contributed to people being duped into buying an inferior gaming product.
Same here....I begged my dad for one, but when I played it, it was like "WTF???" I wound up taking it apart to see how it worked after barely playing it
4:52 so THAT'S where that toy gun came from! I grew up playing with that exact gun but as it was just another hand-me-down from a brother 10yrs my elder I never had any clue what it was for
Man, you're the best 80's nostalgia tech channel that I've discovered. Subscribed a while ago, and slowly savouring, enjoying, and re-watching all of your incredible work. Thank you.
I'm impressed by having four different streams of video at the same time on a VHS! I'm also impressed by encoding data on the edge of a video signal and the data communicating with the Interactive Vision to draw onto the screen. That's really cool.
I used to cheat at DuckHunt with my brothers when I was like 8 years old, I figured out by myself that if I pulled down the shade in the kitchen window just right, then I could make the square that the Nintendo light gun picked up. I could literally just point the gun at the TV and it would always pick up the square from the window. I could get a perfect 10 out of 10 for many rounds without even trying. Then when I finally lost from the game going to fast I would stand behind my brothers in-between the tv and the window, so there was no more white square for them to use.
It doesnt detect the square shape, just the light. The system then checks where the electron beam is pointing, and if the gun recieves light at the same time the beam is creating the light a hit is count.
@@LittleRainGames Well when you pull the trigger, it first makes the whole screen completely black for one frame, then it make a white square where the duck was for the next frame, and it detects the intensity of the light from black to white to register a hit. That's why pointing the zapper at a constant light source like a lightbulb won't work.
@@lmcgregoruk His cheat wouldn't work with the legitimate duck-hunt, but we're looking at old degraded memories here. Perhaps he had one of the knock-off immitations.
I'm not a gamer or a collector, but you do such a thorough and passionate job archiving these things that I find myself clicking on your content from time to time! Thank you for sharing your passion and knowledge with the world.
Lol I think it was sold in dumbass states I never heard or known someone with this and trust me we had every system just about except that Atari handheld
The action max somehow popped in my head earlier this week. I had one as I kid. The game we had was like a haunted house ghost game . But when it popped in my head I couldn't get past on how it worked just being a VHS tape. Glad I came across this video.
Captain Power! Wow. I forgot that existed, but as soon as I saw it I completely remembered it. I was totally into that show when I was about five. How did I forget about a show I was so obsessed with. That was a major trip down Nostalgia lane. I wonder how many other things from my childhood I’ve forgot about that would blow my mind to remember? I’m gonna look up an episode of Captain Power as soon as I finish this awesome documentary.
Thank goodness I was born too late for these. Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen were my first forays into gaming, and they definitely did not disappoint.
You never new the joy of being on a cross-country road trip in 1982 and having your older brother say "Hey this hotel has Donkey Kong!" and knowing you had your evening planned.
My first games were Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Illusion of Gaia, Final Fantasy 2 (us). [Game set match, don't be jealous, I just had good taste, or at least my older brother did lol]
"Even to this day, this kid, now a grown man, believes entirely that he is an ace pilot. it was the Action Max that made him this way, and it's that kind of technology that you need in your life"..... ahhahahahaha classic.
@@Trimint123 It wouldn't have been that hard to make one that worked without flashing lights, but you'd need a base unit and it would cost more than the little battery powered handheld Video Challenger. Pass the video signal through the base unit. A vertical (or horizontal!) bar off the visible part of the screen would encode X,Y coordinates of each target. Then the base unit compares the timing of a pulse of light picked up by the light gun as the electron beam passes where it's pointed. Then all they need to do is ensure all targets are brightly lit. As a bonus, since the video signal passes through a base unit, it could also do more tricks like obscuring parts of the frame, demuxing multiple 240p video streams, or just drawing the score counter on screen.
I remember an old video by James Rolfe and Mike Matei, when they suggested that people should start making Action Max homebrew games. That would be neat.
My family found Atmosfear in the early 2000s at a second hand store. We found the audio hilarious. We never got into the actual board game so sometimes we'd just play the VHS in the background as every few minutes a character pops up and says funny things.
Makes you appreciate how influential Night Trap was. It helped push the tech behind these VHS games only to be dropped, picked back up by Sega CD and then spur the creation of the ESRB. Yeah, it still sucked gameplay wise but it influenced a lot of stuff.
Night trap has an important place in gaming history. They tried so hard to censor it and prevent it existing! I own a boxed copy for that reason.... It's dumb but ridiculous and fun to play with unexpecting people
Reminds me a bit of the XBOX Kinect. It worked horribly, but they wanted to get it on the market as fast as possible just so nobody else could steal the technology. Roughly a decade later, the technology is still in it's infancy.
You reopened a whole cubby hole full of memories I unconsciously stashed away - THANK YOU!! Omg the nostalgia - I remembered all the feelings that came with watching these commercials as a young boy and even remembered my teddy ruxpin and his buddy grubby. Just amazing.
When I was 11 or 12, I went with my uncle to a garage sale and seen that laser tag and thought it was the craziest thing ever to find THAT at a garage sale. Each gun and pack took six double A's each, which meant a total of 24 double A's if you wanted to play a round with a buddy. And the accuracy was about stormtrooper level.
Just a correction. Takara known for Transformers and Tomy known for Zoids are two different companies that later merged to Takara-Tomy. Also it's Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.
I was about to say the same thing. As soon as I heard “Takara-Tomy” in a video about 90s stuff, I was immediately thinking “Wait. That company didn’t exist yet!”.
I played with the airplane gun one with my friend down the block in 1986 or whatever. I remember shooting at the tv and then running around shooting each other's ships. What a memory seeing this video. I was born in 79
@@CarrotConsumer It was tried in the very early days of aircraft. The hit rate was an impressive zero. It didn't take long to realise that the solution was 'more dakka' - fit the plane with a machine gun or two and pump out enough bullets that some of them might actually hit.
Holy crap - I had one of those Connor Videosmarts systems as a kid. I’ve been trying for years to figure out what it was called so I could look it up and see it again. But no matter how much searching I did I could never find it. I had to UA-cam search some videos of the content and now I’m playing a fun game of looking through the videos for bits and pieces I remember! You’ve lived up to your channel name for me with this one - thank you!
This show held my attention longer than my buddy's Action Max flight game. I knew he had it for Xmas but he wouldn't play it until I begged for a couple days. Then he reluctantly set it up and gave me the pistol. I thought it'd be like a mix of Afterburner and Top Gun. Ten minutes later I understood why my buddy hated it, and we never played it again. Forgot all about it until now.
Afterburner makes sense for about 10 minutes, then it's just utter nonsense. Space Harrier is kind of the same deal, but there's less happening at once so you can KIND of work it out.
I wouldn't mind finding one of the sit down versions. I would spend my meager salary rebuiding it and improving the speakers. It was my favorite game at the time. RENRUB RETFA foreva!!!
@@parteibonza That and G-Loc were fun for the motion-control cabs. Though one of the only times I've had the chance to play the G-Loc one, it was partly broken and the seat was just tilted to the left the entire game, though IIRC the forward/back tilt still worked.
I remember getting Battlevision at Christmas one year. It was a pretty cool experience...once or twice... then it just became a hideout for my G.I. Joes to launch daring attacks on a friend's My Little Ponies.
I got “Video Driver” for Christmas when I was 6 or 7. I remember thinking, “hey, it’s a Sega product! It should be fun.” But then right after that I thought, “wait a second...it’s a video tape. Videotapes are pre-recorded, so you can’t actually control it.” Dissatisfaction and disappointment quickly ensued.
@@andrewmosley2588 pretty sure you could be a 4 or 5 year old and realise that a VHS is a VHS and doesn’t do anything. I have, ironically, VHS tapes of me playing Mega Drive around that age and I absolutely knew the difference between a VHS and a game cartridge.
I still remember that Gargoyles VHS+Boardgame. Man that 90's were the shit.. No one knew what was gonna be the next big thing so everyone was cranking out all kinds of random shit. What a time to be alive.
I remember a VHS / game / story / AKA choose your adventure and we had to pause and then FF to a set time, based on clues that we had to guess the answer to, to continue the ADVENTURE. I also thought I had the power of GOD when I was finnaly able to save lines of data in text box feilds, with the AWSOMENESS of my new (second hand) Epson 286 .....🤣🤣🤣 /run... 20 GOTO 10 ..... /end...
oh man this video brings me back to my first glitch gaming experience. the action max, if you slightly offset the sensor it will expose the white light in the corner, than all you have to do is shoot the non moving corner light. thanks for bringing a great part of my childhood back.
My friend had the Video Driver game in the 80s. As a kid I genuinely thought it was magic. (Not a very bright kid) but also shows how the marketeers took the premise of 'suspension of disbelief' to a whole new level :) Awesome vid this really took me back - Thx
Wow it's been so long! And I've been searching a long time for this rare thing I played as a very young boy. I started to think I imagined it. Captain power! Blew my little mind back then. Probably more the video than the actual "game" Thanks for reassuring me that actually happened lol
Honestly, the Captain Power thing seemed like a really neat idea. If people still watched TV instead of streaming online at their own leisure, I could've seen something similar happen today with the use of a smartphone app.
It's worth noting that Takara mandated that the japan exclusive Transformers Headmasters featured interactions with video challenger. This happened roughly at the same time of Captain Power (both show started airing in 1987 in the respective countries), but the Transformers cartoon in question used a very crude technique to achieve the same effect.
And it went deeper than that. They actually had Daniel Witwicky play with the Video Challenger in an episode or two. Of course, the actual "interactivity" with this series was just a seizure inducing version of the opening theme that came on about halfway through the show's run, basically having the home audience shoot at the flickering Decepticons. This was preserved for the US DVD release. Not the eyecatches or the next episode previews, but a gimmick for a long since dead toy from another country, without context was left in.
I was born in 1998 and seeing the Connor VideoSmarts unlocked memories I haven't thought of in years, I very vaguely remember playing one of those on our VCR in probably 2001-2003, I had no idea it was as old as it was! Thank you for bringing back some extremely early memories from my childhood!
I absolutely loved Captain Power as a kid, and my dad was usually up at that time and would watch it with me lol... glad to hear you say it was worth checking out. It's like... Star Trek crossed with He Man crossed with The Terminator. Weirdly dystopian for a kid's show, but that's what made it so cool as a kid.
The TV Teddy was huge for a short while over here in Argentina: they somehow convinced one of the most famous TV hosts ever to marketing the crap out of it, so we had this elderly man with a vague "mafia boss" aura telling kids to turn on their Teddies on live TV, and then the bear would tell a short night time story just before 10 PM. In retrospective it was really funny, because they made the bear sound argentinean, in harsh contrast with the generic Latin American accent of the VHS tapes included with the toy. Good times.
After seeing this, I realize my siblings and I were luckier than some, in the gaming sense. We had Pong, then Coleco Vision, SNES and finally Sega. My sister had Teddy Ruxbin lol
Super pissed when i rented Rise of the Robots for the weekend....then a few weeks later i went to my cousins house and they were so psyched they couldnt wait to play this sick game they rented...
And I thought my parents were just naive saying, "why can't we just put it in the VCR?" Talking about NES cartridges. Maybe they had seen one of these gaming systems :-)
FUN FACT: Did you ever wonder why the original NES has that really shitty front load mechanism for it's it's game cartridges? it's not because it's a better design. In fact, Nintendo knew it was going to be a piece of shit from the start. No, they did it because it emulated the feel of loading a video cassette into a VCR. During the post video game crash of 84. Nintendo made every effort to make sure that the NES did not feel like just another game console of the time. Just like Rob the Robot. Nintendo knew Rob was a gimmick, but it still help kick start the NES into the market.
@@appliedengineering4001 that's extremely interesting and might I say a good move, because I was born in 93 but have played my fair share of original NES cartridges and that is one of the things I remember most
I wonder if to get interactivity the teletext signal could be used. You had basically a way to overlay text on any video signal (TV supported mixed teletext and signal, usually done for subtitles that were transmitted on a particular page), and also to receive input in form of entering a 3 digit number (but also the shortcut of the 4 colour buttons on the remote control). No other hardware needed other than a standard VCR. Teletext games were transmitted on normal TV channels. And you could easily record the teletext signal on VHS (fun thing: try watching VHS recorded in the past and you can go back in time and see the old teletext pages. Teletext signal was just a digital signal added in the time between frames so it was recorded by most VCRs).
The signal was always a little too blurry for teletext to work, I found. There was one broadcast UK channel that had a quiz game though; it used the fact that page numbers were BCD not decimal, so the colour buttons could link to pages with digits a-f in them that you couldn't type in with the remote
i used to watch captan power and id see the sections of the show with the flashing parts and thought I bet this is for a game or something. I had never known that it was actually for a game since I have never seen the toy for it advertised or on sale in any of my local stores. Cool to know that it actually was for a game.
I remember getting Video Driver as a kid. I was quite pleased when I figured out how it worked. It seemed like such a brilliant yet simple idea to have a bar at the bottom that the car could sense to keep score. The game itself wasn't that fun to me, but I still played with it often just because the concept behind how it worked seemed so brilliant to me at the time.
I had the Captain power ship. I got it for my birthday. It never seemed to work right and got shelved for the Nintendo. It was definitely a weird time in tech. I had forgotten about these. I remember all the VHS board games as well. Thanks for drudging up some cool child memories.
Just when you think things couldn’t get any weirder, you realize that the actor who shows up at 28:49, Bill McCutcheon, played Dropo in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. This is entirely irrelevant, but my night was made.
That was by far one of the best squarespace ads I've seen on UA-cam. Almost all the other channels tell me how easy and quick it is to make a website. But you actually showed me how easy it is. If you could make a good looking one off website to show off in a video, then that definitely better illustrates how easy it is to use then just the usual stock video most others show.
I'm watching this and I'm laughing, feeling nostalgic and sad at the same time at just how much I miss those simple and uncomplicated days. I wish I had a time machine.
@@TheTillmanSneakerReview I agree! I would have been pretty mad spending money on a gaming system like that to find out, all you do shoot a blinking light!
I'm 52, and I only know about the Action Max, because my best friend in college owned that with the Blue Thunder tape... and he brought it back with him after one trimester, since we both loved Video Games and we both loved Blue Thunder (Movie and TV Series) and Airwolf.
LOL Same here!! I had the Action Max and The Captain Power XT-7 fighter. It didn't take long to figure out they were nothing but high score challenges. The action max could count hits as fast as you could pull the trigger (and keep the gun on target). I remember being able to get either 37 or 47 points before the training mission was over in the Action Max jet game!!!
@@killjoydod4937 Of course, some people didn't mind trying to keep topping their previous high scores (or simply figuring out how to max out the counter). But even then there was no replay value besides that - like with FMV games, this was style over substance.
@@gordontaylor2815 Well, reclaiming the top score from friends always made me want to "REPLAY" it!! There's a key word in this statement!! Look for it!! XD
That’s true enough, but it’s really only a couple of features short of an arcade-style rail shooter like Lethal Enforcers or Time Crisis. The stages play out in a linear way, the only difference is that you get feedback on your performance via graphics rather than just a high score system. In that respect, Action Max et al are an odd mix of FMV games and rail shooters without branching paths.
The idea of using the two fields of an interlaced frame as separate images sorta reminds me of the Sony Mavica cameras, those were early digital cameras that were essentially made from the video sensors of video cameras, and took pictures by "recording" a field of video and displayed it as a single image.
I remember the Atmosfear board game / VHS tie-in. Had a mate who owned it and I was incredibly jealous. The other concepts here range quite a lot in terms of their overall ingenuity but it's still impressive how they tried pushing the limits of the humble, passive VHS tape. Lovely stuff.
That Video Challenger actually seems really cool! I can’t believe they ported a version of Road Blaster and After Burner 2 onto it. I imagine it must’ve been really fun, the first time at least, although it might’ve got boring once you realised the enemies always moved the same way and blew up at the same times.
We had an Action Max back in the 80's. My mother didn't care about our video game consoles, but damn, she loved that Action Max. She was always playing it. It was actually quite fun, and worked really well. It was just a target shooting game, but it was simple, and fun. The sad thing was that you had to actually get your parents to be willing to buy the video tapes for different target shooting experienced. And my parents only bought two of the video tapes. The advertisements made these things look like a video game. We were never "conned" though. We knew that it was just a target shooting game. And we had no problem with it. The funny thing about the "Video Game Crash" that everyone talks about, is that if you were a teenager in the 80's, you wouldn't have even noticed that there was a "Video Game Crash" going on. Video games were everywhere. Video arcades were everywhere and all kind of classic video games were coming out. The only people who ever seemed to be claiming, "The video game industry has crashed and that video games were just fads." were financial sources. This "Crash" just wasn't noticed by the general public. Video games were still king all the way through with us.
The crash only really happened in North America, in Japan and Europe it was a boom time for home computers and consoles. As a UK resident I never even knew there was a crash until American youtubers started mentioning it. We were more into home computers than consoles back then (easily pirated games had a huge hand in that I'm sure) so the Atari market crashing wouldn't really have much relevance and from what I remember no magazines ever mentioned it.
@@meetoo594 It's funny Nintendo are often credited as have ended the crash but in truth they probably only accelerated its revival in the states, gaming stayed strong elsewhere and would of seeped back into the US market even without Nintendo's help. However i feel like gaming would of been very different without Nintendo's toy based marketing.
@@Clara_Page yup, and Nintendo bodged the marketing in the UK so up until the 1990 turtles bundle pretty much no one had one. The master system ruled due to great marketing, much better looking games that were familiar to arcade goers and the fact Nintendo released years old games that no one was interested in. They learnt their lesson with the SNES though, that was huge here.
@@meetoo594 I live in North America. I can assure you that to the general public, there was no crash apparent here. I mean that there was still LOTS of interest in video games here. Arcades were still all over the place. Those didn't start closing down till the late 90's, and some, mid-2000's. Where I DID notice what could be considered a "crash" at the time was with home computers. When you look at places like the UK and Europe, they seemed to embrace home computers. Here, in the US, though, it was super rare for anyone to have one. If you did, you were isolated on an island by yourself, for the most part. You were LUCKY if you had a Users Group near you. If you owned a computer as a teenager, you were considered either a genius or just an alien. Computers weren't embraced here till the mid to late 90's, early 2000's. And now, thanks to smart phones, they again seem to be on their way out of style for the average person.
@@BlackburnBigdragon That's really interesting, here in the UK home computers dominated and consoles were secondary machines for a lot of households. Pc and Mac were way out of reach up until the mid 90s for most so ST and Amiga were the platforms of choice up until then. In the 80s Sinclair, Commodore and Amstrad were the big 3 but we had loads of other machines like the BBC micro and dragon 32. Weirdly, the Atari 2600 was sold up to the early 90s, I never saw one in the wild though.
Awesome vid man! We had a VHS board game that used NFL football clips. Our VCR was old, no remote, just a pause button on a long wire!! Like you said, board game format at least allowed some random aspect to the "interactive experience" but it did also get pretty boring quickly seeing the same clips over and over. I think the "Scene It" DVD experience was a success and also pretty fun for gatherings and allowed for way more outcomes due to DVD instant scene accessessablity and larger capacity but again, the same clips repeated and outdated quickly.
I vividly remember that Action Max commercial from live TV. So _that_ made me feel old. But even then, I was skeptical of how a linear format was going to offer any meaningful interactivity.
Please remember to SmAsH tHaT bElL
Good video, although it might be a good idea for an epilepsy warning for the video challenger section but im not an expert
Would you be interested in covering QUBE, the worlds first interactive television service from 1977? It pretty much made modern cable boxes, on demand services and viewer feedback.
(35:24) NUON by VM Labs: I doubt they would carry a compatible remote like what you're looking for, but when I need a remote for an outdated television-closer to the original remote than a universal remote-I go to ReplacementRemotes (dot) com, which is labelled as Dan's Electronics on the site. Admittedly, I've only had to order from them 4 times since 2010, but all 4 orders I got the exact remote control I needed (my latest order October of 2020). I don't know about international ordering.
GoodTimesWithScar intro music :)
@@Christopher-N different games required different controllers as well, some needed an analog stick which wasn't a standard pack in with all machines. Pity they royally screwed up the marketing as the machines are pretty capable hardware wise but only 7 games got released and 1 of those only plays on a single south korean player.
My Aunt Ann and Uncle Larry got me one of these for Christmas in 1988. Everyone was super excited to try it out and quickly realized that it was not fun at all. I'm still grateful for the gift, they couldn't have known how bad it would be.
It's the same feeling of giving a unplugged controller to your small brother while you play.
I just got PTSD
Small brother
😆 ohh, memories
Little brothers everywhere having their mind's blown as they read this comment.
This is the console that you’d give to your little brother so he won’t overwrite your save files again.
Just an extra note: the captain power toys in the U.S. would actually respond to the TV show as well as the VHS. There were several other toys along with the ship that all had the small video sensor in them, so if you were watching the show on TV while holding the toys they would do things like flash, play audio clips, or let you shoot at the enemies and react to the events in the show.
And every single one of the captain power toys would go absolutely ballistic during the 'armor up' scenes (aka:magical girl transformations)...
I LOVED Captain Power toys.
I remember this as well.
You could also shoot the screen with Captain Power.
The amusing thing is that it tries to trick you into thinking you are actually pointing and hitting what you are shooting at when in reality you are just following the target.
It's literally a company doing what my older brother did when I was 3, where he'd give me a controller on a single-player game and tell me we were playing together. Literally just an entire product line based around that.
@@glitchgatsby4290 No, not literally.
This is like the advanced version of giving your little brother the broken controller so he can think he's playing too.😆
Big bran NRG
It's never funny when you ARE the little brother though
@@retrogamernes3121 ; It was to me when I got older and did the same with my little siblings, nieces, and nephews. It's the circle of life! Shit rolls downhill. If you can dodge a turd boulder you can dodge a ball!
🤣
Someone has to control Tails!
So far I haven't had a personal connection to any of the technology being discussed in any of Nostalgia Nerd's videos that I have watched, but the quality of research, writing, editing, etc. keeps me coming back for more. I don't have any of the nostalgia, but the nerd is fascinating!
The way they used the vhs frames to hold scenes for Night Trap like that is actually pretty ingenious
As a kid living in a trailer the Action Max was the most awesome game system. The local police that would come by for uhh, reasons, actually played the haunted house game a bunch then one day 2 of the officers came by after school and gave me Ambush Alley and it was probably the coolest day of my life. One time a few months later a neighbor got pretty drunk up and cops were called. One of the cops was walking around their trailer and I heard him radio it was all clear and the response call was "STAY ALERT BABY, STAY ALERT" They were quoting Ambush Alley in what I later found out was a drunk guy with his x-wife at gun point in the house.
Sounds like you had some pretty cool cops in your area.
@@kutter_ttl6786 I did. Except for the one that spent almost 20 minutes talking me into looking at a dead body. Then when he finally got me pumped enough to look, it was a bug he stepped on.
@@superpj Hahaha, dude, that's freaking funny! Loved the story too, thanks for sharing.
@@kutter_ttl6786 Leave the cities and the cops are super chill.
@@coreym162 in the south it's the opposite; the cops and sheriffs in a city area don't give a shit about anything, but small town cops have nothing better to do than extort people for money
I remember we got an action max for Christmas one year. I had to wait till the older siblings got bored of it before I could try it. That was about 20 minutes.
😂😂😂😂😂
My pops tricked me into getting that instead of Nintendo a few weeks before Christmas he was like you could get this now or wait for Christmas for Nintendo and of course my 8 year old dumbazz went for it
@@danobelelement7828 heh. You got finessed
Lmao Faxctz
I'd imagine it would be pretty cool at first but as you play another round it dawns on you. Not only does it make a 2nd and 3rd game boring, it also takes away the fun of the 1st time when you realise it's a static video
Why hasn't ActionMax developed a lively homebrew scene? Imagine the possibilities...
"Nana's 80th Birthday: The Game"
"Grandpas 8th Racist Rant of the Day: The Game"
Columbine Massacre Footage: The Action Max Edition.
@@mr.pavone9719 lol that's awful
Action Max presents: The greatest hits of Ron Jeremy
Mission impossible: german spy execution the game
Hillary Clinton in Action Max's "Under Bosnian Sniper fire"
Im realizing that as a child playing our Action Max, we never once hooked up that red light. My childhood was a lie.
We hooked it up trust me it didn't help lol
Out of curiosity, did you at all brag to your friends how realistic the "graphics" of these games were and/or invite them over to share this...unique experience? Haha.
@@radicalraccoon within 5mins of standing there think you are actually playing. It hits you 😳 shyt they got me!! Then you hide this crap somewhere in your attic basement closet or you bury it so nobody knows you spent $80 - $100 cause you can't return it.
@@pennstation5638 Shouldn't you be able to return it if the creators claims it does something which it clearly doesn't? I mean if it's not an interactive game you'd think they'd have it spelled out in the fine print somewhere in case someone wants their money back? Or consumers had no rights back in the days?
@@rustneversleeps85 watch Action Max clip again they over exaggerated what the game did making it seem as if it was live action. Only the clicker and target worked. No the stores didn't do refunds. Bradley's lol would not take it back.
I was born in '84 and just the _sound_ of you sticking that tape into the VCR astral projected me straight back to my childhood, my _god._
The clunk-thunk sound along with the hum of it coming to life makes a VCR seem almost steampunk nowadays.
@@iluvcamaros1912 Pair that with the crackling dissipating static of the CRT turning off and it's just 🤌.
Just buy a used VCR and more tapes. It’s not like they’re illegal to own now
@@wolfetteplays8894 The point of my comment really whistled over your head _that_ quickly, huh? That's not at all what I was saying or even implying, but A for effort. You must be so much fun at parties.😏
@@wolfetteplays8894 Okay nevermind I just went to your channel and saw a little bit of your latest video. Fucking _yikes,_ dude. Touch some grass, get help, and re-home that poor dog, you doorknob.🤨
Ah the 80s where the toys did everything you wanted provided you have a high quality television studio to edit out the frustration
Better than now where the games don't even work
At least the computers in the 80s only did what you told them to and nothing else. I miss that.
@@penfold7800 DITTO! DITTO!! DITTO!!! DITTO!!!!! :-) Too many losers, useless anuses and jerky corporations cutting in on everyone else's lives these days. If someone or some group(s) need to cut in on my dull life to enhance *their* livelihood, what does that say about him / her / them?!?! The answer is that these *people* (since they're the ones behind everything) *have* no lives and need to get some. Pathetic...
It's for this very reason I don't have a dopey iPhone or iPad and intend to avoid having one for as long as possible. BTW - you may want to reconsider voluntarily having a *chip* jammed under your skin in the near future just because everyone else is and you won't be allowed into certain movies, theaters, casinos, sports arenas, and shopping malls without one. At that point, I consider it "GAME OVER," and hopefully others with the same objections / rejections will agree and take action along with me... ;-)
@@larkefedifero you talking about the vaccine?
@@IgorOzarowski Actually, no...but I can see the parallel there. Difference is, coronavirus is something which, though invisible, is very contagious and very, very *real* . Thus, so is the need for innocculation. Whilst concerns about bots and other additives are reasonable, I haven't seen evidence of such as of yet.
However, there is NO need for an organization or entity to require you to place a chip under your skin just to be able to use a certain type of phone or computer hardware OR software. THAT is true "Big Brother" territory and where dystopia has in fact begun. :-/
I was born in the early 90s and up until now I thought I had imagined the bear from the library that told me stories for hours.
🤣😅
I was born in the early 80’s and let me tell you that when teddy ruxpin came out it was amazing. My neighbor had one and i thought it was the coolest thing that a stuffed animal was telling us stories.
Had one also
@@TJ-wg3ud I remember that, we could never afford one so a kid in our school would bring one in on the last day of school because you were allowed to bring in any toy in
for that day those were the days
Omg...i wanted one of those SO bad 🤣🤣🤣
I've heard of VHS games before but I was confused as to what that even meant. This was a great video on explaining that, and the history and variety of these games. It's really fascinating how they could do so much with a single signal.
Check out Captain Power .. it was such a great vhs and PvP setup.
“He started going to the air force base every day, for work. Time and again, military base officials had to break the news that he wasn’t actually a pilot.” 😂🤣
I still remember the moment in dawned on me as a kid that I wasn't, in fact, changing my Sega Video Driver VCR game in any way with the steering wheel. Life lesson right there.
Same, I didnt steer for a moment and well,video kept going. Turned it off and never looked at it again.
certainly sounds like one of those 'realization followed by a powerful sense of betrayal'-experiences from childhood
*anger*
Direct analogy to voting, right there :)
@@kloggmonkey It's like when you leave the Mormon church and realize that you could have been helping people in need instead of playing dress up and be holy in L.A.R.P. clothing.
Had all 5 games. Loved this as a kid. My dad wasn't super tech savvy but he would play this with me. Great memories
I still remember playing this as a kid and figuring out it was a con and getting really angry at my mom. Forever.
I’m sure she was just as angry at you for having all that stuff laying around the living room. But it was really her fault because she should have just bought you the SNES like you asked.
@@PajamaManor honestly.
Fucking brats.
@@BeerBreath702 😂😂😂
1992 playing the original nes
Tv teddy was sold in argentina as an interactive bear but with no vhs. The bear simply reacts with the tv with the tv signal of state channel "canal 7". During the 90s
and TV teddy in Australia
That would be be pretty cool nowadays. Back them it must have been amazing.
Microsoft did something similar with Teletubbies interactive toys that react to their tv show known as Actimates.
Lo promocionaba Sofovich, que se ponia a hablar con el coso ese, una bizarreada.
That captain power toy was pretty genius. An arcade game that allowed pvp multiplayer. I would’ve loved it as a kid. Especially the cockpit flying open and ejecting to give you an actual consequence. Pretty sick.
You really have to admire the fact that they managed to pull off what they did at all. It's all very much a case of making a system do something that was never in its spec sheet.
Even as a kid I had serious doubts about these things, so glad I didn't have to experience them.
Living behind the Iron Curtain thus not getting access to these things also help. You could read poorly researched articles about these magical interactive toys in your kids magazines, though...
I Had At Least Some Fun With This:
“Debuting in 1987, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future was a multi-media brand which included a TV series, a toy line, and various tie-in products. So why am I writing about it on my retro gaming blog? Because at its core, Captain Power was a game.”
As a kid I really wondered how it worked, I remember watching a lot of VHS and it just didn't make sense to me
@Eugene Cam What makes you think they could've afforded a VCR and the unit to play these games? May as well have gotten a NES. Super Mario Brothers is infinitely better to play/replay than watching the same tape over and over never even knowing if you actually killed your foe or not.
You probably didn't experience much as a kid
Watching the section on the ActionMax made me want to cry for all the children who received it and the parents who bought them.
Ya man at that time if it was 1987 or prior to that ,the NES was the sure way to go or Sega Master system before that you couldn't go wrong with the Atari 5200 or even the classic 2600 , ColecoVision etc. just lots of solid systems out there. I don't know why anyone would go VHS. I supposed the deceptive marketing contributed to people being duped into buying an inferior gaming product.
Yep. I had the Action Max. I was SO excited to get that. I played it one time and it never came out of the box again.
me too. played it once. Still have it though
@@scottcol23 you could probably get a nice bit of change if you find a collector for it.
@@sneakysnake7695 yeah looks like about $130 on ebay. Ill keep it. At this point I don't even own a VCR or a CRT tv.... So its just a thing in a box.
@@scottcol23 Fully functional, it's basically just a thing in a box. Lol. It probably would make a lovely sound if you throw it out the window.
Same here....I begged my dad for one, but when I played it, it was like "WTF???" I wound up taking it apart to see how it worked after barely playing it
4:52 so THAT'S where that toy gun came from! I grew up playing with that exact gun but as it was just another hand-me-down from a brother 10yrs my elder I never had any clue what it was for
Man, you're the best 80's nostalgia tech channel that I've discovered. Subscribed a while ago, and slowly savouring, enjoying, and re-watching all of your incredible work. Thank you.
I'm impressed by having four different streams of video at the same time on a VHS!
I'm also impressed by encoding data on the edge of a video signal and the data communicating with the Interactive Vision to draw onto the screen. That's really cool.
That encoding is also how Teletext worked
I used to cheat at DuckHunt with my brothers when I was like 8 years old, I figured out by myself that if I pulled down the shade in the kitchen window just right, then I could make the square that the Nintendo light gun picked up. I could literally just point the gun at the TV and it would always pick up the square from the window.
I could get a perfect 10 out of 10 for many rounds without even trying.
Then when I finally lost from the game going to fast I would stand behind my brothers in-between the tv and the window, so there was no more white square for them to use.
It doesnt detect the square shape, just the light.
The system then checks where the electron beam is pointing, and if the gun recieves light at the same time the beam is creating the light a hit is count.
@@LittleRainGames Well when you pull the trigger, it first makes the whole screen completely black for one frame, then it make a white square where the duck was for the next frame, and it detects the intensity of the light from black to white to register a hit. That's why pointing the zapper at a constant light source like a lightbulb won't work.
@@lmcgregoruk His cheat wouldn't work with the legitimate duck-hunt, but we're looking at old degraded memories here. Perhaps he had one of the knock-off immitations.
Great fun.
Pointing it at fluorescent tube light did the same trick.
Duckhunt was cool. Good memories.
nice. fond memories of childhood videogames are always cool
That was a really slick segue… It made the ad portion almost unnoticeable at the start of it... almost. Great job!
I'm not a gamer or a collector, but you do such a thorough and passionate job archiving these things that I find myself clicking on your content from time to time! Thank you for sharing your passion and knowledge with the world.
As someone who grew up in the US during the 90s as a tv-console enthusiast, I've honestly never-ever heard of these until now.
They even ported these rubbish "games" to DVD. I kept seeing them up until even 2012
I remember Captain Power and the little car thing seems familiar
I'm the same, never heard of these BTD
Lol I think it was sold in dumbass states I never heard or known someone with this and trust me we had every system just about except that Atari handheld
The action max somehow popped in my head earlier this week. I had one as I kid. The game we had was like a haunted house ghost game . But when it popped in my head I couldn't get past on how it worked just being a VHS tape. Glad I came across this video.
Captain Power! Wow. I forgot that existed, but as soon as I saw it I completely remembered it. I was totally into that show when I was about five. How did I forget about a show I was so obsessed with. That was a major trip down Nostalgia lane. I wonder how many other things from my childhood I’ve forgot about that would blow my mind to remember? I’m gonna look up an episode of Captain Power as soon as I finish this awesome documentary.
Im an 80`s kid and this all passed me by, intresting stuff.
Be glad it did.
thank you for putting this up! I tried bringing this up to some friends a year or so ago, and everyone thought I was crazy!
Thank goodness I was born too late for these. Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen were my first forays into gaming, and they definitely did not disappoint.
Holy shit are you me? are you 35 too?
@@roberttodd2414
Yep. Sewer Shark is a particularly rare kind of turd, it’s so bad.
At least Japan saw that concept for what it was. The PC-CD had a damn good selection of games.
You never new the joy of being on a cross-country road trip in 1982 and having your older brother say "Hey this hotel has Donkey Kong!" and knowing you had your evening planned.
My first games were Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Illusion of Gaia, Final Fantasy 2 (us). [Game set match, don't be jealous, I just had good taste, or at least my older brother did lol]
"Even to this day, this kid, now a grown man, believes entirely that he is an ace pilot. it was the Action Max that made him this way, and it's that kind of technology that you need in your life"..... ahhahahahaha classic.
Beyond Awesome! ... Thanks for this very informative Video. I saw DVD consoles that played Nes games, illegaly by the way, here in Honduras.
Surprised how the rail shooter genre didn't take advantage on this technology
One reason is epilepsy.
@@Trimint123 It wouldn't have been that hard to make one that worked without flashing lights, but you'd need a base unit and it would cost more than the little battery powered handheld Video Challenger. Pass the video signal through the base unit. A vertical (or horizontal!) bar off the visible part of the screen would encode X,Y coordinates of each target. Then the base unit compares the timing of a pulse of light picked up by the light gun as the electron beam passes where it's pointed. Then all they need to do is ensure all targets are brightly lit.
As a bonus, since the video signal passes through a base unit, it could also do more tricks like obscuring parts of the frame, demuxing multiple 240p video streams, or just drawing the score counter on screen.
Photo sensitive epilepsy is actually vanishingly rare. It's just that companies are terrified of being sued.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 It could be 1% of Americans and it'd still be 3 million people. How about you getting sued by 3 million people?
it kinda did in arcade.
I remember an old video by James Rolfe and Mike Matei, when they suggested that people should start making Action Max homebrew games. That would be neat.
I did consider it for this episode, but time was a limiting factor. But, if I can face it again, it would be a fun thing to do.
@@Nostalgianerd I’ll warrant you’d make more from the UA-cam revenue from views than the sales of said game 😂😉🕹📼📼📼📼📼📼📼
You should get that teddy to swear and growl, that would be epic.
@@Nostalgianerd I was wondering the whole time if you encoded digital signals into the video feed...
@@meetoo594 Put a Tom Waits cassette into your Teddy Ruxpin. And maybe some boric acid.
My family found Atmosfear in the early 2000s at a second hand store. We found the audio hilarious. We never got into the actual board game so sometimes we'd just play the VHS in the background as every few minutes a character pops up and says funny things.
I played it early 90s
Makes you appreciate how influential Night Trap was. It helped push the tech behind these VHS games only to be dropped, picked back up by Sega CD and then spur the creation of the ESRB. Yeah, it still sucked gameplay wise but it influenced a lot of stuff.
Night trap has an important place in gaming history. They tried so hard to censor it and prevent it existing! I own a boxed copy for that reason.... It's dumb but ridiculous and fun to play with unexpecting people
So sad the ending of Dana Plato who starred in Night Trap.
Reminds me a bit of the XBOX Kinect.
It worked horribly, but they wanted to get it on the market as fast as possible just so nobody else could steal the technology.
Roughly a decade later, the technology is still in it's infancy.
You reopened a whole cubby hole full of memories I unconsciously stashed away - THANK YOU!! Omg the nostalgia - I remembered all the feelings that came with watching these commercials as a young boy and even remembered my teddy ruxpin and his buddy grubby. Just amazing.
When I was 11 or 12, I went with my uncle to a garage sale and seen that laser tag and thought it was the craziest thing ever to find THAT at a garage sale. Each gun and pack took six double A's each, which meant a total of 24 double A's if you wanted to play a round with a buddy. And the accuracy was about stormtrooper level.
seen?
My parents wouldn't buy me laser tag. "You already have a Nintendo, it's better!"
Just a correction. Takara known for Transformers and Tomy known for Zoids are two different companies that later merged to Takara-Tomy.
Also it's Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.
I was about to say the same thing. As soon as I heard “Takara-Tomy” in a video about 90s stuff, I was immediately thinking “Wait. That company didn’t exist yet!”.
Speaking of Transformers, I think you could use the Takara gun to shoot the Decepticons in the intro to one of the Japanese series.
Zoids man, what a time. I loved watching that on cartoon network after school.
I didn't even know these existed before watching this
I played with the airplane gun one with my friend down the block in 1986 or whatever. I remember shooting at the tv and then running around shooting each other's ships. What a memory seeing this video. I was born in 79
Same.
Me neither. How odd
@Rante Aligheri ? Joke by who? Google search reveals it did exist. Is this some sort of super dry/abstract humour im not getting? LOL
I knew Captain Power, because of the TV show and the the action figures toyline.
So much detailed research - should all be archived for future generations. Just incredible. Thank you.
“... How am I firing a handgun from the cockpit of fighter jet?”
That's how fighting was done in planes in the old days. He's a traditionalist.
@@CarrotConsumer It was tried in the very early days of aircraft. The hit rate was an impressive zero. It didn't take long to realise that the solution was 'more dakka' - fit the plane with a machine gun or two and pump out enough bullets that some of them might actually hit.
GTA logic maybe
@Cheryl [Phone] First try was a strip of armor on the propellers.
@Cheryl [Phone] I think they came up with some sort of sync mechanism that times the shots so as to not hit the propeller.
Holy crap - I had one of those Connor Videosmarts systems as a kid. I’ve been trying for years to figure out what it was called so I could look it up and see it again. But no matter how much searching I did I could never find it. I had to UA-cam search some videos of the content and now I’m playing a fun game of looking through the videos for bits and pieces I remember! You’ve lived up to your channel name for me with this one - thank you!
Learning about all this old tech that easily encodes simple messages into tv broadcast raises the question of what ELSE is NOW encoded in broadcasts.
We need to find out...
This show held my attention longer than my buddy's Action Max flight game. I knew he had it for Xmas but he wouldn't play it until I begged for a couple days. Then he reluctantly set it up and gave me the pistol. I thought it'd be like a mix of Afterburner and Top Gun. Ten minutes later I understood why my buddy hated it, and we never played it again. Forgot all about it until now.
"No one really knew what was happening in afterburner anyway". After 30+ years, finally I feel vindicated.
Afterburner makes sense for about 10 minutes, then it's just utter nonsense. Space Harrier is kind of the same deal, but there's less happening at once so you can KIND of work it out.
Ill be honest, theres no way to play that game well. I owned a standup cab for years before it melted and never got good at it lol
Yes!
I wouldn't mind finding one of the sit down versions. I would spend my meager salary rebuiding it and improving the speakers. It was my favorite game at the time.
RENRUB RETFA foreva!!!
@@parteibonza That and G-Loc were fun for the motion-control cabs. Though one of the only times I've had the chance to play the G-Loc one, it was partly broken and the seat was just tilted to the left the entire game, though IIRC the forward/back tilt still worked.
I remember getting Battlevision at Christmas one year. It was a pretty cool experience...once or twice... then it just became a hideout for my G.I. Joes to launch daring attacks on a friend's My Little Ponies.
Now that latter half sounds like a much better time.
I got “Video Driver” for Christmas when I was 6 or 7. I remember thinking, “hey, it’s a Sega product! It should be fun.” But then right after that I thought, “wait a second...it’s a video tape. Videotapes are pre-recorded, so you can’t actually control it.” Dissatisfaction and disappointment quickly ensued.
Did you realise it was pre-recorded at age 6? That's pretty cool. That said, if it had been Laserdisc....
Ok lol. I call bullshit.
Bullshit
@@andrewmosley2588 pretty sure you could be a 4 or 5 year old and realise that a VHS is a VHS and doesn’t do anything. I have, ironically, VHS tapes of me playing Mega Drive around that age and I absolutely knew the difference between a VHS and a game cartridge.
I still remember that Gargoyles VHS+Boardgame. Man that 90's were the shit.. No one knew what was gonna be the next big thing so everyone was cranking out all kinds of random shit. What a time to be alive.
Nightmare was fun.
I think I still have it somewhere.
An hour long VHS and board game.
I remember a VHS / game / story / AKA choose your adventure and we had to pause and then FF to a set time,
based on clues that we had to guess the answer to, to continue the ADVENTURE.
I also thought I had the power of GOD when I was finnaly able to save lines of data in text box feilds,
with the AWSOMENESS of my new (second hand) Epson 286 .....🤣🤣🤣
/run...
20 GOTO 10 .....
/end...
I remember I wanted a creepy crawly maker SOOOOOOO BAD. I never got one
oh man this video brings me back to my first glitch gaming experience. the action max, if you slightly offset the sensor it will expose the white light in the corner, than all you have to do is shoot the non moving corner light. thanks for bringing a great part of my childhood back.
The up-scaling on that old game footage was haunting....
My friend had the Video Driver game in the 80s. As a kid I genuinely thought it was magic. (Not a very bright kid) but also shows how the marketeers took the premise of 'suspension of disbelief' to a whole new level :) Awesome vid this really took me back - Thx
Wow it's been so long! And I've been searching a long time for this rare thing I played as a very young boy. I started to think I imagined it. Captain power! Blew my little mind back then. Probably more the video than the actual "game" Thanks for reassuring me that actually happened lol
The SD footage upscaling creates some serious nightmare fuel every once and a while.
i was just wondering what the hell is wrong with these monsters' faces!
I had Action Max as a kid and yes jumping behind the couch and all over the place pretending to dodge incoming fire was a lot of fun.
Honestly, the Captain Power thing seemed like a really neat idea. If people still watched TV instead of streaming online at their own leisure, I could've seen something similar happen today with the use of a smartphone app.
It's worth noting that Takara mandated that the japan exclusive Transformers Headmasters featured interactions with video challenger. This happened roughly at the same time of Captain Power (both show started airing in 1987 in the respective countries), but the Transformers cartoon in question used a very crude technique to achieve the same effect.
And it went deeper than that. They actually had Daniel Witwicky play with the Video Challenger in an episode or two. Of course, the actual "interactivity" with this series was just a seizure inducing version of the opening theme that came on about halfway through the show's run, basically having the home audience shoot at the flickering Decepticons. This was preserved for the US DVD release. Not the eyecatches or the next episode previews, but a gimmick for a long since dead toy from another country, without context was left in.
I was born in 1998 and seeing the Connor VideoSmarts unlocked memories I haven't thought of in years, I very vaguely remember playing one of those on our VCR in probably 2001-2003, I had no idea it was as old as it was! Thank you for bringing back some extremely early memories from my childhood!
I absolutely loved Captain Power as a kid, and my dad was usually up at that time and would watch it with me lol... glad to hear you say it was worth checking out. It's like... Star Trek crossed with He Man crossed with The Terminator. Weirdly dystopian for a kid's show, but that's what made it so cool as a kid.
I liked the show too. It just didn't get a fair shake at the time.
Me and my brothers got all things Captain Power for Christmas one year so great!!
the figures and the art in the vhs tapes were awesome
I agree! Still have some of the figures and I loved it soooo much, very spooky story line tho for a 8 year old at the time! Rofl
The TV Teddy was huge for a short while over here in Argentina: they somehow convinced one of the most famous TV hosts ever to marketing the crap out of it, so we had this elderly man with a vague "mafia boss" aura telling kids to turn on their Teddies on live TV, and then the bear would tell a short night time story just before 10 PM. In retrospective it was really funny, because they made the bear sound argentinean, in harsh contrast with the generic Latin American accent of the VHS tapes included with the toy. Good times.
we need to get back the 90s.
Milei 2023 - 3023
Wowwww! That sounds so cringe it hurts.
Crazy ammount of work you put on your videos, thats insane ! Amazing work
After seeing this, I realize my siblings and I were luckier than some, in the gaming sense. We had Pong, then Coleco Vision, SNES and finally Sega. My sister had Teddy Ruxbin lol
I had G.I. Joe… and Voltron!!
32:09 Tv teddy grabs a knife, stands up “now it’s time to bring this interactive game to real life.” Then starts walking towards you
"Please don't run away! You'll only die tired!"
Still not as big a con as Rise of the Robots for SNES...
You sho'll aint lying...
Get over already, Eric! Your mother and I are sick of this crap!
Super pissed when i rented Rise of the Robots for the weekend....then a few weeks later i went to my cousins house and they were so psyched they couldnt wait to play this sick game they rented...
Oh I loved that game, such good graphics. Crazy gameplay. Much good
Rise of the Robots for _every system._
Wow, I thought I knew (near) everything about video games wild history. And yet, this whole thing went right by me. Truly fascinating stuff.
And I thought my parents were just naive saying, "why can't we just put it in the VCR?" Talking about NES cartridges. Maybe they had seen one of these gaming systems :-)
FUN FACT: Did you ever wonder why the original NES has that really shitty front load mechanism for it's it's game cartridges? it's not because it's a better design. In fact, Nintendo knew it was going to be a piece of shit from the start. No, they did it because it emulated the feel of loading a video cassette into a VCR. During the post video game crash of 84. Nintendo made every effort to make sure that the NES did not feel like just another game console of the time. Just like Rob the Robot. Nintendo knew Rob was a gimmick, but it still help kick start the NES into the market.
@@appliedengineering4001 thanks 😊
@@appliedengineering4001 that's extremely interesting and might I say a good move, because I was born in 93 but have played my fair share of original NES cartridges and that is one of the things I remember most
I wonder if to get interactivity the teletext signal could be used. You had basically a way to overlay text on any video signal (TV supported mixed teletext and signal, usually done for subtitles that were transmitted on a particular page), and also to receive input in form of entering a 3 digit number (but also the shortcut of the 4 colour buttons on the remote control). No other hardware needed other than a standard VCR.
Teletext games were transmitted on normal TV channels. And you could easily record the teletext signal on VHS (fun thing: try watching VHS recorded in the past and you can go back in time and see the old teletext pages. Teletext signal was just a digital signal added in the time between frames so it was recorded by most VCRs).
The signal was always a little too blurry for teletext to work, I found.
There was one broadcast UK channel that had a quiz game though; it used the fact that page numbers were BCD not decimal, so the colour buttons could link to pages with digits a-f in them that you couldn't type in with the remote
Thanks for being kind and rewinding there at the end, sir.
i used to watch captan power and id see the sections of the show with the flashing parts and thought I bet this is for a game or something. I had never known that it was actually for a game since I have never seen the toy for it advertised or on sale in any of my local stores. Cool to know that it actually was for a game.
I remember getting Video Driver as a kid. I was quite pleased when I figured out how it worked. It seemed like such a brilliant yet simple idea to have a bar at the bottom that the car could sense to keep score. The game itself wasn't that fun to me, but I still played with it often just because the concept behind how it worked seemed so brilliant to me at the time.
I think there's a sense of control and challenge in that you are trying to stay on course with the video image.
I actually had a friend who owned an Action Max. Never got the chance to play it. But I remember seeing it and the original box in his home.
Honestly a lot of these are pretty ingenious. Interesting to see how people worked around limitations of the time
it wasn't "working around limitations", they were a complete con job
Kids today really don't know how good they have it in the gaming scene.
I had the Captain power ship. I got it for my birthday. It never seemed to work right and got shelved for the Nintendo. It was definitely a weird time in tech. I had forgotten about these. I remember all the VHS board games as well. Thanks for drudging up some cool child memories.
Just when you think things couldn’t get any weirder, you realize that the actor who shows up at 28:49, Bill McCutcheon, played Dropo in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
This is entirely irrelevant, but my night was made.
Woah, didn't even notice the first time viewing, but by golly, you're right. Good eye.
That was by far one of the best squarespace ads I've seen on UA-cam. Almost all the other channels tell me how easy and quick it is to make a website. But you actually showed me how easy it is.
If you could make a good looking one off website to show off in a video, then that definitely better illustrates how easy it is to use then just the usual stock video most others show.
I'm watching this and I'm laughing, feeling nostalgic and sad at the same time at just how much I miss those simple and uncomplicated days. I wish I had a time machine.
come on man take the red pill embrace the future and create it
I am 51 years old. I grew up in arcades. I owned many of video game systems but, I've never heard of this!
@@TheTillmanSneakerReview I agree!
I would have been pretty mad spending money on a gaming system like that to find out, all you do shoot a blinking light!
I'm 52, and I only know about the Action Max, because my best friend in college owned that with the Blue Thunder tape... and he brought it back with him after one trimester, since we both loved Video Games and we both loved Blue Thunder (Movie and TV Series) and Airwolf.
As a kid growing up in the 80’s, I knew VHS was linear, and these games couldn’t possibly be what they claimed to be.
I sense that you were a smart kid.
LOL Same here!! I had the Action Max and The Captain Power XT-7 fighter. It didn't take long to figure out they were nothing but high score challenges. The action max could count hits as fast as you could pull the trigger (and keep the gun on target). I remember being able to get either 37 or 47 points before the training mission was over in the Action Max jet game!!!
@@killjoydod4937 Of course, some people didn't mind trying to keep topping their previous high scores (or simply figuring out how to max out the counter). But even then there was no replay value besides that - like with FMV games, this was style over substance.
@@gordontaylor2815 Well, reclaiming the top score from friends always made me want to "REPLAY" it!! There's a key word in this statement!! Look for it!! XD
That’s true enough, but it’s really only a couple of features short of an arcade-style rail shooter like Lethal Enforcers or Time Crisis. The stages play out in a linear way, the only difference is that you get feedback on your performance via graphics rather than just a high score system. In that respect, Action Max et al are an odd mix of FMV games and rail shooters without branching paths.
my first time watching this channel. i frigging crushed the subscribe button on my phone screen with strength and gusto.
It’s interesting to see what they came up with considering the limitations and linear nature of VHS.
You know you've got something good when the box itself has a message from the president
Ah yes you know something is trust worth when theres teh fucking president
Did that president turn from Japanese to a white dude towards the end? Anyways... ahhh... politics....
The ingenuity required for these games is amazing. I was gaming when these were out, but they somehow all flew under my radar.
The idea of using the two fields of an interlaced frame as separate images sorta reminds me of the Sony Mavica cameras, those were early digital cameras that were essentially made from the video sensors of video cameras, and took pictures by "recording" a field of video and displayed it as a single image.
its honestly kind of amazing how various games from home to arcade exploited the nature of how CRTs functioned to do what they did
I remember the Atmosfear board game / VHS tie-in. Had a mate who owned it and I was incredibly jealous. The other concepts here range quite a lot in terms of their overall ingenuity but it's still impressive how they tried pushing the limits of the humble, passive VHS tape. Lovely stuff.
That Video Challenger actually seems really cool! I can’t believe they ported a version of Road Blaster and After Burner 2 onto it. I imagine it must’ve been really fun, the first time at least, although it might’ve got boring once you realised the enemies always moved the same way and blew up at the same times.
We had an Action Max back in the 80's. My mother didn't care about our video game consoles, but damn, she loved that Action Max. She was always playing it. It was actually quite fun, and worked really well. It was just a target shooting game, but it was simple, and fun. The sad thing was that you had to actually get your parents to be willing to buy the video tapes for different target shooting experienced. And my parents only bought two of the video tapes. The advertisements made these things look like a video game. We were never "conned" though. We knew that it was just a target shooting game. And we had no problem with it. The funny thing about the "Video Game Crash" that everyone talks about, is that if you were a teenager in the 80's, you wouldn't have even noticed that there was a "Video Game Crash" going on. Video games were everywhere. Video arcades were everywhere and all kind of classic video games were coming out. The only people who ever seemed to be claiming, "The video game industry has crashed and that video games were just fads." were financial sources. This "Crash" just wasn't noticed by the general public. Video games were still king all the way through with us.
The crash only really happened in North America, in Japan and Europe it was a boom time for home computers and consoles. As a UK resident I never even knew there was a crash until American youtubers started mentioning it. We were more into home computers than consoles back then (easily pirated games had a huge hand in that I'm sure) so the Atari market crashing wouldn't really have much relevance and from what I remember no magazines ever mentioned it.
@@meetoo594 It's funny Nintendo are often credited as have ended the crash but in truth they probably only accelerated its revival in the states, gaming stayed strong elsewhere and would of seeped back into the US market even without Nintendo's help.
However i feel like gaming would of been very different without Nintendo's toy based marketing.
@@Clara_Page yup, and Nintendo bodged the marketing in the UK so up until the 1990 turtles bundle pretty much no one had one. The master system ruled due to great marketing, much better looking games that were familiar to arcade goers and the fact Nintendo released years old games that no one was interested in. They learnt their lesson with the SNES though, that was huge here.
@@meetoo594 I live in North America. I can assure you that to the general public, there was no crash apparent here. I mean that there was still LOTS of interest in video games here. Arcades were still all over the place. Those didn't start closing down till the late 90's, and some, mid-2000's. Where I DID notice what could be considered a "crash" at the time was with home computers. When you look at places like the UK and Europe, they seemed to embrace home computers. Here, in the US, though, it was super rare for anyone to have one. If you did, you were isolated on an island by yourself, for the most part. You were LUCKY if you had a Users Group near you. If you owned a computer as a teenager, you were considered either a genius or just an alien. Computers weren't embraced here till the mid to late 90's, early 2000's. And now, thanks to smart phones, they again seem to be on their way out of style for the average person.
@@BlackburnBigdragon That's really interesting, here in the UK home computers dominated and consoles were secondary machines for a lot of households. Pc and Mac were way out of reach up until the mid 90s for most so ST and Amiga were the platforms of choice up until then. In the 80s Sinclair, Commodore and Amstrad were the big 3 but we had loads of other machines like the BBC micro and dragon 32. Weirdly, the Atari 2600 was sold up to the early 90s, I never saw one in the wild though.
Spaceship dogfighting PvP toys that impartially tally up the score actually sound amazing even now.
The PvP part was basically the same as Laser Tag/Photon/whatever that line is they're selling beside the Nerf stuff even today.
Awesome vid man! We had a VHS board game that used NFL football clips. Our VCR was old, no remote, just a pause button on a long wire!! Like you said, board game format at least allowed some random aspect to the "interactive experience" but it did also get pretty boring quickly seeing the same clips over and over. I think the "Scene It" DVD experience was a success and also pretty fun for gatherings and allowed for way more outcomes due to DVD instant scene accessessablity and larger capacity but again, the same clips repeated and outdated quickly.
I vividly remember that Action Max commercial from live TV. So _that_ made me feel old. But even then, I was skeptical of how a linear format was going to offer any meaningful interactivity.
I always saw ads for these in magazines as a kid, and even back then I thought "There's no way this would work"
Turns out I was right.
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Fascinating video. Very nostalgic for me. It seems they tried a little harder than I thought at the time.Thanks.