Atari 2600's Mind Maze Exploits Your ESP

Thanks to Atari Age, who point to the AtariProtos site's new information about the unreleased Mind Maze for the Atari 2600. The writers have spoken to original designer Howard Scott Warshaw, also famous for Yar's Revenge and the cataclysmic E.T. for Atari 2600, and "...apparently Mind Maze was based on the unproven theory of ESP (Extra Sensory Perception) and was an attempt to create a mind reading game for the (also unreleased) Mindlink controller." The updated preview, based on a recently unearthed prototype, reveals: "Supposedly, the headband was to read the player's Alpha and Beta waves in an attempt to help predict their actions. However, since the Mindlink was really just a sensor that detected muscle movements in the player's forehead, this was complete bunk."

Comments

Similar experience

[dtfinch]

While working for the shareware distributer RocketDownload I had to review a similar game, but it didn't involve headbands or other forms of input. Just a random number generator moving something that you're supposed to try to control with your mind. Give it long enough and it'll always arrive somewhere. What a crappy day that was.

With a headband to control it through slight muscle movements, that sounds like a great way to impress your friends. Too bad it never took off.

Innovation

[Hedonist123]

Sure it was a bunk idea, but at least they were trying to be innovative way back in the day. I wish more companies would try stuff like this now. Of course, with going for the sure-fire dollar, stuff like this just isn't going to happen anymore. I long for the days when every game was a crapshoot, so companies had to be innovative.

hed.

Re:Innovation

[Babbster]

Innovation like that gives us (and, more importantly, video game companies) items like the PowerGlove which usually turn out to work badly...of course, the specific kind of "innovation" referenced in this story gives us things like the miracle of spoon-bending and The Psychic Friends Network.

It reminds me of the days when I could astound easily astounded people by reading tarot cards. I used the Arthurian tarot (because the deck looked cool) and had a whole spiel about why I considered it superior to other forms of tarot. To make a pretty short story longer, I became quite adept at identifying what was going on with people's lives by interacting with them over a deal of the tarot and some of the simple-minded really believed my malarkey - at least I wasn't charging money.

Getting back to your point, I would submit that innovation in terms of controllers does happen, though it tends to be more practical, particularly in the area of rhythm games. Dance Dance Revolution would be nothing without the dance controller pads and Samba de Amigo was all about shaking the ole maracas. Heck, I used my fishing controller on the Dreamcast quite a bit (yes, I was one of the few).

Designing new and innovative game controllers is expensive and there needs to be a good reason to do it. Too often, they turn into curiosities which are unprofitable, unworkable or both.

Re:Innovation

[orthogonal]

I became quite adept at identifying what was going on with people's lives by interacting with them

Are you sure that Slashdot is the right web site for you?

Re:Innovation

[h0mer]

You don't think Steel Battalion was a 'crapshoot'? I've got a great idea, let's make a complicated mech game, include a HUGE specialized controller with it, and we'll sell it for the same price as the actual system!

Needless to say, Capcom definitely took a risk with that one. I'm fairly sure that any stores who happened to get the package, sold out of them. Steel Battalion 2 is coming soon!

Re:Innovation

[Molt]

I'd say a recent and rather more successful innovative input device is the Eyetoy.

Sure at heart it's a cheap'n'nasty USB camera, but it's something that hadn't been used to control games before and which a rather large number of people actually seem to consider fun, at least more fun than rapid eyebrow twitching.

Re:Innovation

[Hedonist123]

Any way to back up that it's successful actually? It just came out fairly recently, and I sure haven't seen any numbers on it. Not that I'm complaining though, I like the innovation of it, though the GBA had something similar to it.

hed.

reminded of U-Force

[heliocentric]

I'm reminded of the U-Force for NES.

Man, the commercials made that look awesome, and I gave into the hype and got my own light-sensing board with some switches. ::yawn::

Long story short, it "stinked," but I found the unadvertised joystick part of it highly fascinated. It had central post that sort of rested in a depresson on the base and it had two buttons, when you pressed them they made a plastic part on the bottom move. Sort of like a choke on a carbruetor, and this movment activated a white part/black part thing that in turn activated on of the sensors (of whichever side you pressed).

Granted I was and will always be excited by odd shinny objects the U-Force in general was a total bust, but I never owned tyson's punch out which seemed to be what the commercials hyped the most so perhaps I missed out on the intended experience.

Re:reminded of U-Force

[BTWR]

I was always fascinated by that U-Force. How exactly did it work, and why didn't it function correctly? I always assumed, like the Power Glove, that it worked ok, but was plain stupid.

Re:reminded of U-Force

[heliocentric]

It worked by a series of light sensors. From the drawing you'd think 8 total, four on each "side" from one in each corner. In reality it only had 6 I think, two of the spots weren't life. There were also A/B buttons along with start/select and several slider switches to set which setup (pin out) you used.

It wounld sense the change in light of you moving your hand over a spot.

It sorta worked, but it had problems with misreads (not reading an actual movemens) and false positives (reading the shadow cast by accident on another sensor).

You could lay it flat and play games like metroid my moving your hands all over, but you looked like a DJ on smack. It had the 90 degree setup where it would sense combinations of moves, but I don't recall what that was for. Tyson was the only one that used a slightly more open setup - like 100 degrees. As I never had that game I can't really say what that got you, but commercials indicated you could punch at the thing and it would register it was a punch in the game.

The stick I mentioned earlier was for flying/driving games and the buttons would trigger the sensors for A/B buttons. But, the ability to leave them constantly depressed (for RC Pro-AM) was impossible. If you had something that A would decrease throttle (B to inccrease) for example, I guess it might work, but nothing like that comes to mind. instead of it sensing the direct movement of the stick it relised on the sensors in the board to see that you were twisting the stick or not and was just as reliable as without the stick (see problems listed above).

I came across it a few years ago in the orginal box. I took it out and I had carefully put everything back, including the foam between sides. It still had that new U-Force smell, something I have never experienced since, but I do associate with a lame failure.

Quicky

[Associate]

Are they going to release a security patch?

To innovation as carp is to airplane.

[Inoshiro]

"I wish more companies would try stuff like this now."

Hmm, let's think.

• Nintendo Rob
• Nintendo Power glove
• Sega Activator
• Nintendo U-Force
• Gameboy Printer

Why would you want these things to come back? Do you know how many Christmases have been ruined because children wanted these horrible things?

There is a "modern" version of the Activator that Future shops in the city have, setup on Soul Calibur 2. It's just as horrible and gimmicky as the original Activator that was supposed to make Eternal Champions so good.

Cheap crapness aside, there's also the matter of peripheral support. How many games support the N64 microphone? Dreamcast microphone? Xbox USB keyboard adapter? And these are things that can really add a lot to games! Unless it's a memory card or a controller with rumble support or something cool, chances are it'll only have a 5-10% attachement rate tops. That's no way to make ROI on development of something cool, and no real incentive to support those cool addons with software. Look how long it's taken EyeToy to get something that wasn't a minigame for it, or the PS2's lackluster headset and online support (compared to the Xbox, where Microsoft made everything standard by force of will and money).

In summary: these things always sucked, there's no economic gain to developing them, and no incentive to support them. 3 strikes pretty big strikes against innovation.

Re:To innovation as carp is to airplane.

[bjb]

I once owned a Nintendo ROB, and yes, that was craptacular. I had both games for the thing and neither one was worth more than about 10 minutes of your attention before you started cheating by pressing the buttons that the robot was supposed to work.

However, I'll disagree about the Microphone argument. The original Famicom had one, the N64 did, and the Dreamcast did (others, I don't know). As far as I know, the Famicom never used it. I never heard of the N64 one, but at least with the Dreamcast it was used in a few games. Sure, it could add a lot to a game, but there are two things that prevented its use:

1. It changes the way games are played; most people aren't ready for voice activated games yet
2. The hardware isn't powerful enough, and the software isn't advanced enough to make use of voice activation that would be fool proof.

My case in point: Seaman on the Dreamcast. This game actually used the microphone for voice recognition, not just transmission of your sampled voice to someone elses' computer. While it did an amazing job for a machine with the specs of the Dreamcast, it still wasn't perfect.

Basically, I don't knock microphones; they're just not quite mature yet. Think of them, in the present, as a hint of what we'll probably see in 10 years.

Re:To innovation as carp is to airplane.

[BTWR]

The microphone on SOCOM for ps2 makes the game

a) much more convinient(i.e. less annoying menus to cycle through)

b) More realistic (yelling commans to alpha squad is a lot cooler than pressing the triangle button)

Re:To innovation as carp is to airplane.

[BTWR]

what the heck is the activator? Anyone have a link for a site with a REAL description? I googled (not very long - 2 pages) and only found text about people selling them.

Re:To innovation as carp is to airplane.

[Inoshiro]

Read about it here.

"Sega Genesis Activator Ring. The ring was made of eight different sections that corresponded to buttons on a regular Genesis controller. Specially configured Activator games were Eternal Champions, Streets of Rage 3, Mortal Kombat CD, and Greatest Heavyweights. Eternal Champions, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter II: SCE were pack-ins. Many of the Genesis's library of games worked with the Activator. MK-1659"

They also have a picture, although not the one from the box showing a kid kicking, while on screen an Eternal Champions game has the user kicking a guy.

Re:To innovation as carp is to airplane.

[blincoln]

I have the ring part of one of these in storage somewhere. It's actually kind of cool looking, another relic of the 80s future that never was. I never tried it out as a game controller, assuming it would be as hard to use as the Powerglove (which I do not like despite the "it's so bad" factor), and the Konami voice-activated lightgun headset.

There's a couple for sale on eBay if you want to have a look.

What's the big deal?

[floydigus]

ESP=Gullibility any way.

I LOVE that word.

[Anonymous Coward]

mmmmm... "Bunk"

Psychotronic protection for Linux!

[Anonymous Coward]

MindGuard is a program for Amiga and Linux computers that protects your mind by actively jamming and/or scrambling psychotronic mind-control signals and removing harmful engrammic pollutants from your brain. It also has the ability to scan for and decipher into English specific signals so you can see exactly Who wants to control you and what They are trying to make you think.

MindGuard works by leveraging your computer's aluminum-based innards to both detect and emit psychotronic energy using advanced quasi-quantum techniques. Once a mind-control signal is identified and analyzed, MindGuard can generate a specially tuned anti-signal that will jam the incomming signal. If MindGuard is unable to properly identify the signal, it will generate psychotronic white noise to ensure the signal's harmful message is scrambled.

MindGuard is fully configurable and can be customized for the individual user using biorhythmic and eponymologic settings. MindGuard also includes an advanced DePsych utility, allowing the removal of almost all deep-burned memetic patterns -- including even commercial jingles.

With MindGuard, you can rest assured that your most valuable possession -- your mind -- is safe from the nefarious tinkering of evil-doers.

Microphones slowly getting better, yes.

[Inoshiro]

Yea, it's getting better. My point was that no one was buying them. I have all the microphone games out for the older systems, but I collect such things :)

N64's Microphone game was "Hey you, Pikachu!" The N64 voice module was required for them, it did all the language to input conversion. Seaman, as you pointed out, did all the processing on the Dreamcast itself. Alien Front Online, the other DC microphone game, only used it for online voice chat.

Some other microphone stuff includes: on the Xbox, Rainbow 6 will do voice processing and allow you to control squad members by spoken command. Manhunt on the PS2 will alert enemies to your presence if you have the microphone on and talk. Karaoke Revolution on the PS2 will guage your tone of voice (although it doesn't check that you're actually singing the lyrics -- you can cheat this way). EyeToy will record audio with the video when leaving messages on the PS2 (although, since it has no HD, it's the shittiest idea I can think of for that console). Socom and Socom 2 (PS2) also allow you to control squad members via microphone. Every Xbox Live! online multiplayer game supports the headset :)

The only current platform I can see microphone games getting widespread adoption on is the Xbox, simply because the voice encoder + headset is inexpensive, standard, and supported by all Live! enabled games. The PS2 voice support is much, much less full, as is the online. Sony's trying to get more out there by playing catch up to Microsoft's Live! commitment, but I don't think it'll work. It's too late in the console's life span; there are too many games that don't need these attachements on the PS2.

ESP eh

[RancidLM]

ESP eh...BRB. My spidey sences are tingling.

New Age Mind Reading Game?

[Lord_Dweomer]

A while ago on Slashdot, I found a story which I can't remember the title of dealing with a new-agey looking game that read brain waves to play the game. It included such things as levitating and controlling water or something, and the various activities would be done by using various mind-states, ie. meditation. Does anybody remember the name of this game? Is it out yet? How is it?

Re:New Age Mind Reading Game?

[simoniker]

It's called Wild Divine, we covered it most recently a couple of months ago, and I haven't heard what it's like, or even if it's out. But it looks, uhm, intriguing. Or something.

ob. Back To The Future 2 reference

[zephc]

"You mean you have to use your hands? That's like a baby's toy"