I’d like to offer up a little clarification. I’m the designer of SCANNER, and Super Glove Ball for the NES. The Scanner cart that somebody now has on ebay is a technology demo I put together with RARE to drum up retailer interest at the Consumer Electronics Show (or “CES”, where we showed our games before there was E3). It’s not a gameplay demo, and here’s why:
To get Mattel to give me the green light so that I could hire RARE to make the actual game, I had to demonstrate retailer interest. To do this, I put together a tech demo, and an animation that demonstrated intended gameplay. Putting together a simple gameplay animation takes little effort compared to the substantial effort it takes to program gameplay on the NES. Programmer Paul Byford’s description that you mention is a bit off. Paul’s describing another game I was working on called “Manipulator”! btw, Paul was also programmer on Super Glove Ball, which was actually completed and released. The trouble was, Glove Ball wasn’t released until a full year after the Power Glove. By the time 1990-1 rolled around, anything to do with the Power Glove was poison. The Glove earned this reputation because for the first year it was out, there were no games that were specifically designed for it; it sucked with “regular” games. Mattel only gave me the green-light for Glove Ball when the Glove’s sales started to fall. Pretty stupid huh!? If Super Glove Ball was released at the same time the Glove launched, as I proposed, the Glove might have done a little better. So all the games I had in various stages of development were cancelled when the Glove became retail-poison.
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Re: Two Unreleased NES Games Surface On eBay, Could Go For "Thousands"
@superbigN : further clarification: by "somebody" I mean it's my wife who has it on ebay. We found the cart recently when cleaning out the garage.
Re: Two Unreleased NES Games Surface On eBay, Could Go For "Thousands"
I’d like to offer up a little clarification. I’m the designer of SCANNER, and Super Glove Ball for the NES. The Scanner cart that somebody now has on ebay is a technology demo I put together with RARE to drum up retailer interest at the Consumer Electronics Show (or “CES”, where we showed our games before there was E3). It’s not a gameplay demo, and here’s why:
To get Mattel to give me the green light so that I could hire RARE to make the actual game, I had to demonstrate retailer interest. To do this, I put together a tech demo, and an animation that demonstrated intended gameplay. Putting together a simple gameplay animation takes little effort compared to the substantial effort it takes to program gameplay on the NES.
Programmer Paul Byford’s description that you mention is a bit off. Paul’s describing another game I was working on called “Manipulator”! btw, Paul was also programmer on Super Glove Ball, which was actually completed and released. The trouble was, Glove Ball wasn’t released until a full year after the Power Glove. By the time 1990-1 rolled around, anything to do with the Power Glove was poison. The Glove earned this reputation because for the first year it was out, there were no games that were specifically designed for it; it sucked with “regular” games. Mattel only gave me the green-light for Glove Ball when the Glove’s sales started to fall. Pretty stupid huh!? If Super Glove Ball was released at the same time the Glove launched, as I proposed, the Glove might have done a little better.
So all the games I had in various stages of development were cancelled when the Glove became retail-poison.