When you think of the Nintendo Entertainment System, certain images spring instantly to mind. It was, of course, probably the definitive “toy” for an entire generation of gamers, the platform and stage upon which many characters and franchises that are still around today got their start. It’s a common touchstone for Generation X’s childhood, a sort of lingua franca by which geeks of any background or culture can easily relate to one another.

Of course, when something gets elevated to this sort of exalted status, some things are going to be forgotten by history. And one of those things in the case of the NES is this: Nintendo made a lot of mistakes in the early going.

Perhaps their biggest miscalculation came as a result of their attempts to rebuild the American video game industry, which had all but collapsed following the Great Crash. In those uneasy days, “video game” still had a stigma to retailers of hundreds of unsold Atari 2600 cartridges and Coleco Adams collecting dust in clearance bins and being sold back to manufacturers for literally pennies on the dollar. So, needless to say, they were all leery of getting back on this merry-go-round when Nintendo came calling; the video game “fad,” in their eyes, was as dead as hula hoops and Pet Rocks.

Nintendo realized this, however, and took steps to change up the marketing of the NES in those early days to make it more palatable to gun-shy retailers. Does anyone remember the original 1986 commercials? (Here’s one to jog some memories.) The words “video game” were never used once; instead, the NES was marketed as a toy, one that just happened to be connected to a TV screen. Instead of “cartridges,” the NES used “Game Paks,” terminology that would survive at Nintendo up through the N64 era. The now-classic NES Control Pad was specifically designed to look as little like the Atari CX-40 joystick as possible, more resembling the controller of an RC car.

But the biggest point of all is that the NES itself played second fiddle in those ads. Instead, center stage was given to the included accessory that Nintendo was banking everything on to help differentiate it from the Ataris and Colecoes of the world – the Robotic Operating Buddy, or R.O.B. for short, which was included in many first-generation NES systems.

R.O.B. - Robotic Operating Buddy (NES accessory, 1986): Strictly speaking, R.O.B. was a controller, but one unlike any the world had seen before… or, thankfully, since.

The concept was simple enough. Robots were a fairly big fad around this time among American kids, as witnessed by Transformers, Voltron, and various other toy lines and TV shows of the era. Tomy even had a line of actual robot toys (such as Verbot and Omnibot) that were fairly big sellers back then. Nintendo reasoned “Well, why not a robot that plays video games? That’ll be a great way to make us attractive!”

R.O.B. itself was a pretty weird-looking thing. I always personally thought he resembled Johnny 5, the robot from Short Circuit:

Well… OK, maybe not so much.

He had a hexagonal base, a stick body, shoulder pads that moved up and down (thus giving the illusion of R.O.B.’s neck extending and retracting like he was E.T. or something), and a pair of large glassy “eyes.” These you pointed at the TV screen, from which R.O.B. received his instructions.

Sort of.

Here’s how it worked, using the bundled game Gyromite as an illustration. In this game you equipped R.O.B. with a pair of gyroscopes, a centrifuge, and a housing including giant red and blue buttons, into which you inserted a standard NES controller plugged into Port 2. Gyromite is a fairly standard “collect-em-up” platformer, in which you guide a small professor-type character through a maze of girders and pistons, collecting all the bombs before they detonate, and avoiding various nasties along the way. Where R.O.B. comes in is when you encounter the red and blue pistons; by placing a spinning gyroscope onto one of the two colored buttons, R.O.B. can raise or lower the positions of the accordingly-colored pistons on the screen, allowing you to access different parts of the maze and collect more bombs. The catch, however, is that the gyros will only do this if they’re spinning, and you’ll have to have R.O.B. juggle gyros between the centrifuge and buttons constantly throughout the more complex levels.

To control R.O.B., you press Select on your controller during gameplay; the action freezes for a moment and the screen starts flashing red. By pressing a directional button at this point, you control ROB’s movement (if his eyes are staring at the screen and his batteries are fully functional); his body twists or raises/lowers in the direction you press, and the game meanwhile resumes on-screen. That’s how you get R.O.B. to move the gyros to the centrifuge, or the buttons.

An interesting idea in concept, but it was marred by an obvious flaw. It didn’t take long for gamers to realize three things: 1) R.O.B. tended to take his own sweet time in moving around, leading to many stupid deaths for your professor; 2) it was easier and far more elegant to simply take out that second controller and hold the buttons down manually to get through the levels; and 3) without R.O.B. Gyromite was far too easy and simplistic to hold one’s interest for very long.

Gyromite was one of only two NES games that ever utilized R.O.B. The other was a puzzle game called Stack-Up, in which you guided the same professor on a grid of controller commands for the robot, hoping to “program” him in such a way as to arrange a stack of colored discs in his arms in a prescribed order. It was marginally more interesting than Gyromite, and actually might have made a good educational game for kids looking to get into programming and/or robotics as a career, but it – kind of like R.O.B. himself – was kind of doomed from the beginning.

R.O.B. was little more than a sort of “Trojan Horse,” a way for Nintendo to sell video games without looking like they were selling video games. Their strategy was to get stores that swore they would never carry another game cartridge again to sell their “toy” instead, by marketing it as a robot that received instructions from a TV screen. It worked, to a degree; the NES became a top seller in its New York test market during the 1985 Christmas season, and Nintendo soon rolled it out nationally – and the rest, of course, is history.

But R.O.B. himself was quickly discarded once the NES made video games “acceptable” again. And that’s for the best. R.O.B. was a poorly-designed gimmick, prone to breakdowns and malfunctions, that was designed with little forethought put into whether or not it was actually practical to have a robot play a game for you. In less time than it takes to tell the tale, poor R.O.B. went from the centerpiece of the Nintendo Entertainment System to just another forgotten relic in the Museum of Failed Controller Experiments, right next to the unreleased Atari Mindlink and Sega’s Activator.

Despite his short and unspectacular lifespan – or perhaps as a result of it – R.O.B. is one of the most sought-after collectibles in NES fandom, with complete sets often fetching upwards of $150 on eBay and other avenues. (Complete, functioning R.O.B.s are increasingly rare themselves, due to their many easily-lost and/or broken components.) Nintendo themselves have kept R.O.B.’s memory alive by inserting the robot as a cameo character in various games over the years, starting with 1990’s StarTropics (guess who played the role of “Nav-Com,” the control robot of the Sub-C?) and more recently slipping him into a few WarioWare microgames and even as a playable character in Mario Kart DS.

Ultimately, R.O.B.’s legacy is that of being an essential part of early NES lore, and as the device that allowed Nintendo to get their foot in the door and reintroduce video games to the post-Crash marketplace. It’s doubtful that he was ever intended to be anything more than that, and at that task it can at least be said he succeeded. But as an actual game control device, R.O.B. was ill-conceived from the outset, and may have missed the whole point of gaming, video or otherwise. When we play games, we like to actually play them, not control a klunky plastic man-thing that does it for us!

If you liked that, try...

1. Retro-Active: The Guardian Legend
2. Retro-Active: Action 52
3. Retro-Active: NES Tetris Revisited
4. Retro-Active: More Consoles That Never Made It
5. Retro-Active: Action 52 (Genesis)

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