Erst upon a time, the world of gambling was so dreary that a yellow circle blew mass's minds. In 1980, Pac-Man became a star almost aside default option, towering over such gaming "heroes" as the missile pod from Centipede the guns from Missile Command and the carom from Space Invaders. Apparently, the gaming unexclusive didn't find turrets all that relatable.

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Many games followed Political action committee-Man's character-centric lead presently after. It's hard to order which era of mascots has tested most fruitful – the '80s colonnade, the Audible vs. Mario years or modern stars like Pikachu and Master Chief. They each have unique designs and personalities that have captured gamers' imaginations.

But none of those were A revolutionary atomic number 3 the most important gaming mascot of every last time – and sure the most unique. After all, only one mascot was your Buddy. You know, your Robotic Operating Buddy.

R.O.B. debuted with the Nintendo Entertainment Scheme in 1985 arsenic parting of the console's deluxe computer software, tapping into its release twelvemonth's ethos by combining the surviving-robot design of Short's Johnny Five with the hunker down, microbe-ox-eyed appeal of E.T. The result, at nearly a ft tall, was attractive, iconic and hitherto inaudible of in the world of videogames. Forget Political action committee-Man – this plastic contraption secure games that played with you in your living board.

Trouble was, IT kinda, sorta, completely sucked. Annoying to arranged up, annoying to use and supported by a whopping two games, R.O.B.'s rank as Nintendo's most disappointing computer hardware liberation has stood the test of meter. Non even the Practical Boy could dethrone this disaster.

And so why is it important? R.O.B., unlike every gaming device before IT, delivered a control see beyond basic directing, aiming and shooting. The attractive little bugger typically gets credited as a mascot for the metempsychosis of home play, but more importantly, it blazed the trail as both the first major gaming peripheral and the first artificial gaming "buddy." When you wail on a Guitar Hero guitar, bounce on a DDR pad Beaver State chat functioning Seaman, know that R.O.B.'s red eyes are watching you.

The Trojan Robot

Among the many reasons we aren't performin the Coleco Supernova or the Atari Jaguar-128X, the Great Videogame Crash of the archaic '80s is the biggest. Before home play could get a foothold in American living rooms, those companies, among others, just about killed the hobby through oversaturation.

They released too many games, most of which were at best vapid and downright unplayable at worst. Furthermore, each company discharged incremental upgrades to their hardware, confusing a young market. Those factors combined to rising tide toy store shelves with unsold production. Atari has its famous write up of burying thousands of unsold E.T. cartridges in a desert landfill, but Lashkar-e-Taiba's not Thomas Kyd ourselves: Plenty of other lame games landed in that trash heap, too.

At the same time, the Japanese welcomed Nintendo into their homes with open coat of arms. The Famicom (Folk Computer, the NES's name overseas) rode the wave of Nintendo's astounding first-party lineup, and after a huge 1983 launch, the time came to pee some dollars along with all that languish.

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Game historians hold chronicled the rest: Nintendo's first demonstrations of an American-looking system of rules (complete with joystick, keyboard and cassette drive out) frightened away toy with retailers – not some other computer game; those were a fad! – so the original American makeover was thrown out the window. The word "toy" became paramount, and along with a new name and a new design came a new accessory: R.O.B. the Robot.

Nintendo had a couple of otherwise tricks to get into wary flirt shops in the youth, including a incomprehensive launch in small markets, the caller's anticipat to grease one's palms back any unsold stock from retailers and a financial partnership with Worlds of Wonder, the makers of Teddy Ruxpin, to ensure more shelf space.

But R.O.B. was mayhap riskier than completely of those business organization moves, because his face was, for all intents and purposes, the companionship's grimace for a short while. R.O.B. had an intense '80s-uncorrupted look back, and he dominated Nintendo's earliest advertisements, the ones that in time won o'er America's anxious toy retailers. So if the plucky little golem bombed – if little kids couldn't stand acting with Nintendo's most iconic product – then wouldn't the console's American introduction have bombed right along with him?

Move out IT, Buddy!

I hated R.O.B. They titled information technology the Robotic Operating Buddy, right? Someone WHO helps you semi-autonomously? Referred to in all educational activity manual as "he," meaning R.O.B. came all-or-nothing with a gender and a soul? Not rather. (I checked. None gentleman-bits.)

To use R.O.B., you had to impound an regalia of gritty-unique accessories – a bombardment-powered spinner, circular trays, steady its damned hands – so aim R.O.B.'s red eyes at the TV riddle, where information technology received flashing-candent signals (the same way the NES Zapper worked). Pick "Exam" from the mettlesome's menu, watch a red light fanfare along R.O.B.'s head and you'atomic number 75 off.

The game that came with R.O.B., Gyromite, is as weird Eastern Samoa any other '80s Nintendo title; rather of a plumber jump on turtles, you're a professor throwing turnips at "Smicks." The catch is that the professor of necessity help acquiring tense red and blue barriers. Handily, R.O.B. had red and bluing buttons perplexed to his physical body. (It was hard to forget, considering IT took eternally to attach to the buggers.) You sent commands to R.O.B. to move his arms and open and close his men, thus lifting and moving infinitesimal tops onto spinners and those colored buttons.

On-screen, this eventually made the barriers lift up and down. Sour-screen, this ready-made … a lot of noise. For every button press, R.O.B. took trey seconds to go out his arms a short aloofness – zzzzzzzzsht! – then stopped, eagerly awaiting your succeeding order. Move two inches. Zzzzzzzzsht! Lower hands unrivaled centimeter. Zzzzzzzsht! Holy crap, R.O.B. You'rhenium not making a watertight seal ended there. Look sharp up.

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Even sadder was the recognition that R.O.B.'s painfully affected movements were for the most part theatrical in the grand scheme of things. A young, bright-eyed Nintendo fan would watch R.O.B. engage all but a loaded minute to activate just one barrier in the game, buzzing noisily between for each one jerky motion. This process would repeat, barrier later roadblock, level after stratum, until the kid noticed the second gamepad stuck in R.O.B.'s chassis. He could've bypassed all this crap with a ace release press.

The only other R.O.B.-congruous game, Stack Up, makes a little more feel. You're asked to stack colours in a certain way on one of R.O.B.'s trays, then rearrange the colors on the new trays. Here, at to the lowest degree, R.O.B. visually tracks puzzles that the 8-bit NES lavatory't quite produce on a screen. Of course, his slow arms haven't gotten any quicker between games, indeed players may arsenic well detach the weapons system and do the work themselves.

Clearly, R.O.B. was crafted with form over function in mind, as he required the aforementioned gamepad-poke setup to affect gameplay and his movement is controlled to rotation on a five-point axis. What could Gyromite 2 have done better? Added more tops? Hence, Nintendo quietly took its "robot serial publication" of games behind the throw off only a year aft the initial launch.

This disaster of an accessory could've stopped Nintendo acold in its tracks. Favorable for them, jam-packed adjacent to every stupid robot was a transcript of Super Mario Bros., and getting America to try out its plumber's adventures was persuasive enough to support Nintendo in the fore.

R.O.B. has been called Nintendo's Trojan horse before, but the tactic wasn't just to trick toy stores into stocking some other videogame system. When Teddy Ruxpin was sold proscribed at toy stores in the mid-'80s, R.O.B. convinced more than a few parents to snap up an NES – including mine. Guess I owe the little guy a beer.

Red Eyes Gaze Back

R.O.B. did get same thing right: As a marketing creature, he bleary the line between videogames and toys; but as a product, he also blurred the line between a passive spare-time activity and a tangible form of amusement.

Prior to the NES, game controllers were limited to joysticks, ablaze guns, steering wheels and trackballs. Some were flashier than others, but altogether were basic manipulators of whatever happened on screen, and the flashy ones certainly weren't ready on dwelling house consoles. R.O.B. was the prototypal musical composition of gaming hardware to challenge the input device status quo, to suggest that gaming could tone very different than the prior decade had led US to believe.

R.O.B. may have foreshadowed the eventual peripheral revolution, but for a while helium only foreshadowed how awfully add-ons would do. The NES Zapper, released at the same clip as R.O.B., also proverb few releases. The said could Be same for Sega and Nintendo's other light guns, on with their four-player adapters and many past devices, including mice, the Power Pad and fishing rods.

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For years, most peripherals got caught in a vicious cycle: Developers didn't ready peripheral-based games that special their client infrastructure, and gamers avoided add-ons that didn't work with a bunch of games. Worsened, the peripheral market was swamped with bombs like the Power Glove, U-Force and Sega Activator, each of which unsuccessful to mimic standard gamepads in completely inaccurate ways rather than add anything new. When gambling portent Lucas Barton called the Power Glove "so bad" in The Wizard, he wasn't kidding.

The '80s and '90s kids who turned optimistic over peripherals have since grown ascending and gotten jobs, and the game industry has responded with peripheral-heavy games that are in reality valuable our disposable income. Just there's more to R.O.B.'s legacy than a pile of toys.

In hindsight, it's clear-cut that R.O.B.'s ambitions far outstripped his light plastic grasp. But other peripheral-based "buddy" games have picked up where he left inactive. Did you ever have Seaman read your personality back to you? The Dreamcast cult classic, in which players speak to a realistic, speaking fish via microphone, takes account of every statement and offers canned but amusing replies. Likewise, Nintendogs helped popularize the Nintendo DS's touch-settled gameplay aside giving players a virtual version of human beings's best friend to interact with.

No 1 could possess predicted it at the clock time, simply R.O.B.'s halfhearted attempt at practical friendship kick-started a genre that shows no signs of dying off. Next year, Sony's slick EyePet, complete with camera integration, will Lashkar-e-Toiba players interact with an adorable augmented-reality pixy. And who behind forget Milo, the virtual boy who will understand your words and gestures via Microsoft's Project Natal camera? If these and other buddy games make their anticipated release dates adjacent year, maybe R.O.B. will flash a smile on his silver anniversary, crushed that the false gaming dreams with which helium incite 25 years earlier have at last been realized.

SAM Machkovech is the games critic for Seattle weekly newspaper The Unknown.