Don't Touch: The Story of the U-Force

it was 1989. at the winter consumer electronics show in las vegas a new product inside the nintendo booth was blowing people's minds a controller that required no touching spectators couldn't believe what they saw one person speculated that there had to be a hidden player somewhere controlling the game but it was real it was called the you force and it was the hottest attraction at the show pay attention folks this is what we're all going to be doing next christmas the uforce device senses what

your hands are doing and translates that action to the screen it's truly amazing kids will love it this is you force no buttons no joystick you got hands you can do this one of the new items expected to spur the growth of the industry this year is the wireless controller in which the player directs the action simply by the way he moves the you force wanted to change the way people played video games but another controller looked to do the same mattel's power glove the two products went head to h

ead in the emerging world of virtual reality a lot of time and care went into you force the glove you were with a wire having to hold it in the air or having to do moves that weren't intuitive you force was intuitive you would throw a punch you would move the plane up and down it was made to be that extension of how you would engage with reality was the goal and the magic was there and it did work years later others tried like connect and connect used art technology i think we had a chance to re

ally do it right but getting the u-force to market wasn't easy and despite all of its potential the device failed to catch on this is the story of the rise and fall of the u-force in 1987 software company brooderbund was ready to expand into new markets founded by brothers doug and gary carlston brooderbund rose quickly in the fast-growing computer software industry they found early success with arcade type games such as shoplifter and load runner but broderbund made a name for themselves by exp

loring other genres edutainment titles like where in the world as carmen san diego and productivity software such as the print shop were very successful but the computer software industry was rapidly changing games were no longer made by small kitchen table operations instead companies were forming larger in-house development teams to make games with each new release there was more and more pressure to deliver a big hit reuterbund was no exception to this new era of software development to keep

the profits flowing the company found additional revenue streams one big money maker was licensing in 1984 brute urban licensed load runner to hudsonsoft a japanese software company looking for titles to publish on nintendo's newest video game console the famicom loadrunner was a massive hit becoming the first third-party famicom game to sell 1 million copies nintendo was particularly impressed when the company decided to bring the famicom to north america as the nintendo entertainment system th

ey approached brooderbund about becoming a licensee and publishing games for the console but breederbun declined having witnessed the north american video game crash of 1983. the terms of the agreement were also one-sided only nintendo could manufacture the games and they decided how many copies would get made but no one could deny the power of the nintendo entertainment system the console sold well after its nationwide release in 1986. nintendo estimated that video game sales would reach millio

n dollars in north america by the end of 1987 and could more than double the following year reuterbund finally caved in june of 1987 brooderbund announced they were now a nintendo licensee at the summer consumer electronics show in chicago their first titles were load runner radon bungling bay spelunker and deadly towers still computer software was brute urban's main money maker wanting to keep the business separate the company handed nintendo cartridge distribution over to a newly formed divisi

on aptly named new ventures established in 1987 new ventures oversaw anything that wasn't computer software until the nintendo deal they had not done much their only release was a board game personal preference created by psychologist don carlston a brother of the brooder bun founders business boomed for new ventures the nintendo cartridges sold well so the new ventures division looked for more opportunities to make products company representatives regularly flew out to japan to scope out the lo

cal arcades searching for the latest and greatest game they could license for the nes but brute urban's most ambitious opportunity came in 1988 from a local man named dave capper capper was an inventor and marketing whiz he made a name for himself in the toy industry capra worked on the he-man toy line at mattel and oversaw the marketing of micro machines at galoob his biggest success came when he helped launch the koosh rubber band ball it was a massive hit but capper was not one to rest on his

laurels he was always looking for new innovative ways to play so capper experimented with different technologies that could apply to toys and games i was in the gadgets from the minute i saw a goldfinger and saw the car or from russia with love in the case then started building heath kits and one of them dealt with capacitance where you could actually build a kit and take a disc and when you touch that disc it would trigger the light and they used it in elevators and whatnot in years to come bu

t there was also a trick that if you added a component you could make this disc more sensitive and that would affect the circuit and affect the light if i made it really sensitive you could take that wire and bury it into plants so i loved that type of interaction and thought this could be a game and by increasing the sensitivity i started to throw off the circuit that you couldn't touch the game when you got close to it it would throw the circuit and so i was enamored with this idea of not bein

g able to touch things but to affect their play so i went to the exploratorium in san francisco and started to play with the theremin [Music] theremin is a musical device developed many many years ago that allowed you to move your hands around it and affect the sound it was used in good vibrations by the beach boys it was a very cool technology and device but i really wanted to take that and connect the theremin to visual play and i knew that was outside the scope of my skills so i thought well

let me just find somebody who can work on a theremin at the exploratorium capper found stan axelrod an engineer designing exhibits at the exploratorium to help him develop his idea axelrod suggested infrared signals commonly used in television sets would be the best way to track movement without touching anything so i said look stan let's just build a box that has infrared on both sides one controls the y-axis and other controls and x-axis and we'll have a grid of 10 by 10 leds so i can move my

hands around and pinpoint where i want the leds to light up and you were impacting a gameplay without touching it at that time nobody was thinking about that ability to interact with games in a more natural way and meanwhile i understood where things were going with nintendo 8-bit so at the same time we thought we can take what we're learning about these thresholds of light and connect them to a vice that connects to a video game we put together a unit in the form of a t that would separate the

signals and look for your thresholds as you moved and then we would actually tune that to different games as a veteran of the toy industry capper was aware of the rising popularity of video games the nintendo entertainment system was outselling every toy on the market and was the number one most wanted item of the 1987 holiday season all capper needed was a nintendo licensee to help develop his new controller and make it a reality and that's where brooderbund came in capper had a connection with

a higher up within brooderbund's new ventures division it's the way most businesses work out in life i didn't really know brooderbund that well i had known socially a guy named ed bernstein ed bernstein was a journalist in part of his interviews he had interviewed doug and gary carlstone i believe at bruderbund and they liked him and thought he was a bright guy and brought him in to head up new business development i showed ed some of the prototypes that we were working on so that was the start

ing point a team from bruterbund including vice president of new ventures ed bernstein and producer alan weiss drove out to san geronimo california to see capper and axelrod's prototype controller axelrod showcased the device with rad racer a popular driving game on the nintendo entertainment system bernstein and weiss were impressed and saw potential in the controller but there were considerable risks brooderbund had never made dedicated hardware before their closest attempt was a small module

included with their science toolkit program the controller would also need considerable development costs but there was nothing else like it on the market a controller users didn't even touch reuterbund could make a big hollywood splash in the video game console market so in june of 1988 the company acquired the rights to capper and axelrod's controller the good thing about bruterbond they were decisive the the downside they hadn't done hardware before you know this was something totally new in

the industry but they were more just as excited as we were about the technology and the vision their first task was to shrink down the prototype it was bulky and not exactly aesthetically pleasing the team envisioned something portable a controller that players could take over to their friend's house their new design was smaller and sleeker it resembled a laptop and could fold out entirely or at an angled position capper dubbed it the ultra force but soon shortened it to u-force describing it as

a force field being an interactive part of what you are doing inside the u-force are nine pairs of infrared emitters and detectors when in use the emitters send out infrared signals when a hand or object is placed in front of a signal the infrared reflects back to the detector the detector then measures the intensity of the signal which determines the position of the hand or object information from all the sensors combine creating a 3d field at its simplest the u force can determine on and off

button presses when the player's hand moves over an emitter it's like pressing a button on the controller but the u-force was also capable of analog control which allowed various degrees of movement unfortunately no nes games at the time supported analog control reuterbund hoped that once developers saw the u-force they would start making games that could take advantage of the controller's capabilities but in the meantime the u-force was compatible with already existing nes titles a set of dip s

witches modified how the device interpreted the infrared signals the development team also came up with accessories that attach to the device to make playing games more interactive top gun uses a flight stick with trigger buttons when a user presses a trigger button a small reflector flips out to bounce the infrared signal back to the detector signifying a button press mike tyson's punch out uses a small plastic bar with reflectors on the end which allowed users to quickly dodge punches with the

retail prototype finished brooderbund was excited to unveil their new controller to the public their first chance would be at the upcoming 1989 winter consumer electronics show the u-force development team thought they had a winner but trouble lay ahead [Music] the theme of the 1989 winter consumer electronics show in las vegas was controllers inside nintendo's massive booth companies such as bandai bishou acclaim ljn and more showcased new ways to play video games the focus wasn't surprising a

n industry-wide chip shortage and nintendo's yearly limit on game releases forced companies to look at other ways to cash in on the video game craze but out of all the controllers reuterbun's you force was the star of the show brooderbund has catapulted video gaming into the 21st century with uforce for once that overused advertising adjective revolutionary legitimately applies to a new product that is part technology and seems to be part sorcery and we believe that it will be completely irresis

tible to gamers computer entertainer the u force was the talk of the town the miami herald called it the most intriguing development in video games since pong but the hype was not just around video games people imagined the eu force for home and business applications reuterbun noted a version for computers was coming the company even claimed there was interest from the automobile industry we were flooded i mean really you think of the entire consumer electronic industry and everybody who's there

i don't think anybody had more attention and more press and more excitement than you force it was very well received with close to 100 million dollars in orders it was cool to see the world loved it we had a kid demonstrator named josh who was a local guy from las vegas and he just was adorable and had fun playing the game all day long i've already asked josh i said josh would you ever go back to a joystick again and he said no while the u-force was turning heads another virtual reality control

ler also made its debut mattel's power glove based on a 10 000 device called the data glove the power glove used ultrasonic tracking to calculate the player's movement like bruterbund mattel thought their controller would change the way people played games there's an old thing in competition that high tide raises all boats it sounds really good but it becomes competitive each time to go up against mattel was a little daunting i had worked there and knew that you know they had the marketing resou

rces to to do things we couldn't do but i happen to like our product and our proposition the magic of our technology it was just a time that things started to kind of happen in the space with 100 million dollars in pre-orders and direct competition from mattel the pressure for brooder bun to deliver a great product intensified the company announced the u-force would retail for 69.95 and hit stores by july ruderbund hoped to beat the powerglove to market and make the u-force at a manufacturing co

st of twenty dollars but that was easier said than done mattel had a massive research and development department and plenty of experience in manufacturing breeder bund did not it was trial by fire but bruterbund was ready to battle said producer alan weiss the power glove was all we thought about we've got to beat powerglove so they got to work the new ventures eu force team set up manufacturing with two different companies overseas in case one company failed to deliver almost immediately there

were issues beginning with the hinge it's the last thing on a product like this that you would think you'd have problems with but ah so much went on with that hinge the hinge was a i think a three or four position hinge that would click into place so if you think you have these two panels when this one came back to a 45 there's a lot of weight on it and you wanted it to click and hold in that position but you also want if you wanted to move it then it would click out of place so there was just a

lot to get that dynamic dialed in there were other issues as well initial testing revealed the you force was wildly inconsistent an engineer discovered they were using a plastic covering that was impervious to infrared but the most significant issues were with the infrared emitters and detectors embroider bund had a lot each u-force had nine pairs of them for a time it made broderbund the largest consumer of infrared devices in the world because each emitter and detector were next to each other

light leakage threw off detection the team added small foam donuts to fix the issue but there was an even bigger issue the emitters and detectors had inconsistent strengths some u-force test models only required a player's hand to be two inches away another required a foot so the engineers came up with a jig that could measure the strength of each emitter and detector and paired them together infrared is basically one emits light like a flashlight and the other one receives it emitters and dete

ctors and you force used multiple pairs of leds to determine what your hands positions were so to get those calibrated perfectly for all those different pairs and to have those work with the different games at different levels of reflection and thresholds was a manufacturing challenge each new issue cost broderbund money and more importantly time there was talk among the team about delaying manufacturing some thought the project should stop altogether but brooder bund was in too deep if they del

ayed manufacturing they would have to wait another six to eight months retailers were waiting on pre-orders and mattel's power glove was looming in an odd twist of fate it was being made at a manufacturing plant next door ruderbund could not halt the uforce project said producer alan weiss it was like a juggernaut there was no way to stop it but they had to delay it there was no hope of reaching their july launch date their new target was the 1989 holiday season despite the array of issues peopl

e were still excited about the u-force reuterbund demonstrated the device again at the 1989 summer consumer electronics show in chicago although attendees weren't allowed to play the u-force it was still a hit the chicago tribune claimed it was the cure for joystick elbow and other high-tech ailments while manufacturing chugged along new ventures producer alan weiss tried to get developers interested in making games for the youth force at trade shows brooderbund claimed they were working on lots

of games and had a worldwide development program to encourage creation of u-force compatible titles but while the press loved the youth force many industry insiders were skeptical the u-force was a new way to play but was it better than a standard controller did it have staying power was it just a pricey novelty those same questions were also aimed at mattel's power glove accessories like these may or may not be successful when it comes to video games it depends on how many people believe they'

re necessary and that they improve the game if you're a kid and only have access to a certain amount of money do you buy two new game cartridges at 40 to 45 or do you buy a glove if it was me i'd suspect i'd buy the new cartridges steven eisenberg analyst making a game dedicated to an expensive controller could be risky and developers were not willing to take that risk weiss struggled to find interest he even demonstrated the you force to legendary game designer shigeru miyamoto and a team of en

gineers at nintendo reactions were lukewarm at best the games that we were making it work with like mike tyson's punch out or top gun it worked really well but the games were designed for button pressing that's how you scored in those games that's how you flew the plane they weren't made for gross body motion if i had you forced to do over again i would have designed games just for it that could see that level of intensity and reflection and give you that level of play and gross movement it woul

d have made it more reliable to make and would have made the consumer experience better no developers wanted to make a game but brute urban made the u-force compatible with 90 percent of existing nintendo games it worked well with some not so much with others by the fall of 1989 the u-force development team had worked out all the manufacturing issues in the end they got the production cost down to around 22 the next step was to convince consumers to pick one up reuterbun put more than three mill

ion dollars into advertising and marketing of the youth force true marketing it's trying to think of things that consumers will enjoy and giving the information they need to discover and enjoy those products it's not how people traditionally see marketing as like some level of advertising or hype for uh you force it was the ability to play games in a new and magical way [Music] nothing comes between you and the gambling game the uforce ads focused on the freedom the controller provided one ad ev

en took a swipe at the power glove no toy gloves to strap you down but mattel got the last laugh in october of 1989 mattel released the power glove beating the u force to market the power glove became a huge seller and a top item on holiday wish lists it also got incredible advertising by making an appearance in the 1989 universal pictures film the wizard i love the power glove it's so bad although u force failed to beat the power glove to market reuterbund was still confident in the product but

they were not quite ready for a national release so on november 22nd 1989 reuterbund released the u-force in a test market when we knew we were late we believed in the product's marketability and so we thought well let's just pick a local market and let consumers know about it with the tv and the press and see how it does we're in the bay area and we thought that san francisco would be not typical of the united states and thought well let's pick fresno or sacramento so we picked sacramento it h

ad a variety of the same retailers and we put product in and i think it did really well in sales and i don't think we had many returns i think it got off to a pretty good start so that was the sacramento test market it gave us an ability to see if consumers did respond to it and how it did at retail by february of 1990 reuterbund had started a national rollout after a troublesome development the u force had finally arrived but would it succeed [Music] the u-force was on store shelves nationwide

retailing for 69.95 players finally got to see what all the hype was about but the excitement wore off quickly the you force had no unique games and the titles it did work with were already several years old and players found the controller more frustrating than entertaining a few video game magazines were not fans of the device either electronic gaming monthly said the you force was painfully tedious to use when it comes to non-first-person perspective games with enthusiasm waning reuterbund ma

de one last attempt to drum up interest the new ventures division reached out to japanese video game developer tose tose was a secret developer in the industry and companies frequently hired them to program games brooder bund gave to say a development kit and a goal make a game that takes advantage of the youth force the result was uforce power games a collection of mini mini-games that used the u-force in different ways in hosem down players took control of a firefighter putting out flames and

rescuing people in a burning building the position of the player's hand determined the height of the water nuclear rat attack was essentially a whack-a-mole game rock on air allowed users to play music with a variety of instruments and finally there was power field b-ball a one-on-one basketball game it was a series of games that would show people little vignettes of the types of things you could do to play but we did them too late they were done after the excitement of the product was realized

and to actually publish the games and get them made and get them done with the unit we never got around to doing that at the 1990 summer consumer electronics show reuterbun demonstrated u-force power games at their booth but with u-force sales declining and little fanfare for their game reuterbund and tosay abandoned the project it was clear the youth force was not going anywhere out of the 100 million dollars worth of pre-orders its estimated breeder bund only fulfilled about 27 million dollars

the process of going from 100 million to 20 million on a product isn't so much about the retailers it's about us if i had more confidence that we had a special game for it and that we really hit that addictive play for a consumer i would have stayed on it i would have nursed it i would have got it through the 20 million dollars built it up to 40 and back to 100. to me gameplay is king product is king and if i didn't have enough confidence that we had that experience right i didn't have enough t

o to keep it going to that level to keep that momentum the whole experience soured ruderbund founder doug carlston he wanted out of the console video game business and to refocus exclusively on computer software and licensing in video games it was something that was kind of a side business for them but it grew in terms of expectations and inventory when they first started you could ship as many as you could sell but then certain games did well others didn't you had to commit to inventory to get

the cartridges made it's not like software where you could print it as needed and it became too risky of a business that was uncomfortable for i think doug and gary so they won to sell the video game division of brooder bun several months went by and they had no interest so i went to uh doug and said do you mind if i help move the business because i have an interest in it with you first and whatnot he said yeah you know go ahead and we'll give you a commission so i called avi arad who is probabl

y not just one of the best inventors but one of the most important figures in the toy industry and avi put me in touch with jack friedman who had thq and jack said he was interested in buying the company so i put jack together with bruterbund and he bought the video game rights from bruterbund and brought them into thq on september 18 1990 brooderbund sold their entire new ventures division to thq for an undisclosed amount reuterbund cut their losses they returned what they could to the manufact

urers and sold off excess u-force inventory to wholesalers by the holiday season people could buy a u-force for less than half the original retail cost but surprisingly the youth force wasn't dead it reappeared two years later in the united kingdom when koosh was an ongoing company the director of marketing in the uk was a young guy named john barber john loved u force and as a favor he believed in the product he worked out a deal with a friend in the uk to distribute some of the inventory in th

e uk his enthusiasm for the product and eagerness to help me that we did the arrangement with the uk and it had an opportunity for a second life but for that to happen again we should have had games that were designed around it and made it do something really well in terms of play it's in a world of its own absolute world of its own no good at all the uk was an entirely different market sega rather than nintendo reigned supreme nevertheless the u force appeared for 50 pounds and was available ex

clusively at toys r us hoping to manage expectations the box was modified with stickers stating for experienced players only and it's not easy it's not meant to be reviewers were not kind total magazines scathingly wrote we'd have more control if we'd worn dark glasses and boxing gloves and yodeled at the office nes instead and with that the u-force was officially dead and although its competitor the power glove sold better it suffered a similar fate the novelty was short-lived it's the last tim

e i did a product where we tried to make it do everything and rushed it too quickly had done a lot of products since then but tried not to repeat those mistakes we're proud of what you force was it was visionary but we should have been a little bit better on the manufacturing of it and also making sure that that consumer experience did one thing really well and that is play one game just really well it would have made manufacturing simpler and also would have made the consumer experience better

the u force project did not deter dave kapper from coming up with new products in the years after he and his business partner andy philo struck gold time and time again capper has no plans to stop anytime soon coming up with products is the easy part getting the world to care takes a lot of energy i measure success of a product when i can mention it and people light up if there's regrets sometimes you just don't you know do everything right by them but i judge success on whether or not people st

ill relate to them or like somebody will throw a vortex and go god i love that product that's everything i never remember the sales numbers and you always remember if people loved them we started with youforce doing trying to make it do too many things and to start something is one thing to restart it is always harder in an industry that wants new it gives you a very narrow window to try things but if you really want to stay with it and take it up a level there's always that opportunity because

in the end it's players that are going to determine what's successful funding for gaming historian is provided in part by supporters on patreon thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] you