From Atari Joyboard to Wii Fit: 25 years of “exergaming”

From Atari Joyboard to Wii Fit: 25 years of “exergaming”
boing_boing:http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/05/15/from-atari-joyboard.html After hugely successful launches in Japan and Europe, Nintendo’s Wii Fit exercise game is coming to the United States May on 19th, where it is sure to find sales success. But Wii Fit is hardly the first example of an attempt to meld videogaming and exercise — it’s not even the first fitness offering from Nintendo. Atari Joyboard (1982) In 1982, Atari released the “Joyboard,” a simple four-switch balance board controller for the Atari 2600 that stuffed the guts of a standard joystick into a ridged, black plastic slab. A single game was released for the Joyboard. Dubbed Mogul Maniac, the game emulated the experience of slalom skiing with all the subtlety a four-position digital sensor could provide. The Joyboard is generally considered a failure, too finicky for nuanced control. In fact, one of the most interesting uses for the Joyboard involved not triggering its switches: some claim, perhaps apocryphally, that engineers building the Commodore Amiga used to manage development stress by sitting perfectly motionless on the Joyboard in zazen, leading to the “Guru Meditation” verbiage in the Amiga’s crash warning dialog. Game developer Ian Bogost developed a game of the same name that uses the Joyboard as an interface, in which fully motionless sitting causes an on-screen guru avatar to slowly decamp from his mat into the air with yogic flight. [Image: AtariAge.com] Had the Joyboard seen retail triumph, it’s conceivable Atari might have developed a proper exercise game, complete with weight statistics and performance tracking….

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