Every Sunday, we dust off an article you may have missed the first time around or may enjoy again. In this week of Kinect Sports Rivals' release, we thought we'd republish this piece from June 2009, where Dan Whitehead peers through the curtains of time to the earliest days of the motion control phenomenon and charts the path that led us from Power Glove to Wii MotionPlus. This article was written at what might be considered the peak of the motion control craze, so five years later some of its surety about the future of the form feels a little optimistic, albeit understandable at the time. Perhaps the same will be true of VR five years hence? In the meantime...
"Love's got the world in motion," trilled New Order, but even a majestically awkward John Barnes rap couldn't change the fact that we were all sadly misinformed. It was our old pal games, not soppy old love, that eventually got the world in motion. Specifically, it was Nintendo's Wii Sports, making us throw our gaming hands in the air and wave them like we just didn't care, and with the MotionPlus add-on now available, those who doggedly claimed hand-waggling control was just a temporary fad are biting into a stale sandwich of wrong.
After E3 2009, it's no longer just Nintendo throwing money at motion control and looking for new ways to turn our entire bodies into surrogate joypads. Sony unveiled its Ann Summers take on the Wii Remote, while Microsoft gave us a glimpse into a terrifying interactive future where sallow-faced digital children will invite us to molest fish using virtual fingers. Far from being a new trend, however, the move to motion control has been a holy grail that the games industry has chased for the better part of two decades. And it was, rather fittingly, Nintendo that got our arms twitching back in 1989 with the legendary Power Glove for the NES.
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