Power Pad | Code Like It's 198x

The Power Pad was a plastic mat that went on the living-room floor in front of the NES. Instead of pressing buttons, you ran on the spot, jumped and stamped on twelve circles, and the runner or dancer on screen did the same. Nintendo Power sold it as “a great way to avoid becoming a couch potato”, and in 1988 Nintendo packed it in with the NES itself. It was not Nintendo’s own product, though. It began as a Bandai mat in Japan, and by the time it carried Nintendo’s name it had already been sold under two others.

Fast facts

Made by: Bandai.
Names: Family Trainer (Japan, 1986); Family Fun Fitness (Bandai, America 1987 and Europe); Power Pad (Nintendo, America, 1988).
Sensors: twelve, in a 3 × 4 grid, spaced about 25 cm across and 28.5 cm front to back.
Two sides: side B shows all twelve spots, numbered; side A marks only eight but still reports all twelve.
Connection: an NES controller port, usually port 2.
Sales: half a million in America, according to David Sheff.

From Bandai to Nintendo

Bandai, the Japanese toy company, released the mat for the Famicom in 1986 as the Family Trainer. It brought it to America the following year as Family Fun Fitness, with two games, Athletic World and Stadium Events, both released in September 1987.

In 1988 Nintendo took over the American rights and renamed the mat the Power Pad. In its second issue, in the autumn of 1988, Nintendo Power announced a new NES bundle called the Power Set, containing the console, two controllers, the Zapper, the Power Pad and one cartridge holding three games: Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros. and World Class Track Meet. “The Power Pad offers players a whole new way to enjoy video games—with their feet!” the magazine said. By early 1989 the mat was also “sold separately” with World Class Track Meet, and a Nintendo advert called it “an instant party”.

In David Sheff’s account, the Power Pad “was an answer to parents who worried that kids spent too much time in front of the television, sluglike, playing Nintendo”. Nintendo’s deal to sell it with the NES, he writes, sold half a million.

Playing on it

World Class Track Meet, which was Bandai’s Stadium Events reissued under a Nintendo title, turned the mat into a running track: you ran on the spot to sprint, and jumped for the hurdles and the long jump. In Dance Aerobics you worked through routines and tried to match the computer’s moves step for step. Super Team Games was built for groups, with events such as a relay race and a tug of war, and “up to six players can join in at one time”. In 1989 Nintendo Power ran a double-length “Power Pad Party” feature in which two teams, the Power Pros and the Nintendo Nuts, competed across all three games in a living room.

Some players took it seriously. A pair of readers wrote to Nintendo Power in 1989 to report that they had cut their hurdles time in World Class Track Meet from 45.12 to 34.09 seconds, and that they had “found the Power Pad to be excellent exercise and great fun”.

How it works

The mat has twelve sensors in three rows of four. Most games use side B, where the spots are numbered 1 to 12. A few use side A, which has markings for only eight positions, though all twelve sensors still report.

The NES reads the mat the same way as a controller, but over two data lines at once. The program writes 1 then 0 to $4016 to latch the sensor states, then reads the port eight times, taking one sensor from bit 3 and one from bit 4 each time. Bit 4 carries sensors 4, 3, 12 and 8 in the first four reads and then stays at 1; bit 3 carries sensors 2, 1, 5, 9, 6, 10, 11 and 7 across all eight. A pressed sensor reads as 1, so a program has to keep both bits from every read.

The Japanese Family Trainer is wired differently. It plugs into the Famicom’s expansion port, and the program selects one row of four sensors at a time, waits about a millisecond, and reads the columns back. There, a pressed sensor reads as 0.

Why so few games

Only a handful of American games used the mat, among them Athletic World, Stadium Events and World Class Track Meet, Dance Aerobics, Super Team Games and the two-in-one Short Order/Eggsplode!, which Nintendo Power announced in 1989.

Ralph Baer, whom the magazine called “the father of the video game”, described the problem any new controller faces. A 1991 profile in Video Games & Computer Entertainment said that Baer’s team at Sanders Associates had designed the Power Pad, and quoted him on its “Catch-22”: “Why doesn’t anyone write games for it? Because no one uses it. Why doesn’t anyone use it? Because no one writes games for it.”

Later floor controllers, such as the dance mats made for Dance Dance Revolution, work on the same idea.

The name has one trap for researchers: Chalk Board Inc.’s PowerPad was an unrelated touch tablet for home computers, sold in the early 1980s.

Sources

Digital Press, May/June 1993, p. 5: Athletic World and Stadium Events, Bandai, September 1987, marked as Power Pad games.
Nintendo Power issue 2, September/October 1988, p. 91: the Power Set, the “twelve color coded keys”, “couch potato”, and the first three games.
Nintendo Power issue 4, January/February 1989: Power Pad advertisement (“Now sold separately. It’s an instant party.”).
Nintendo Power issue 5, March/April 1989, pp. 72–76: “Power Pad Party”, including Dance Aerobics’ matching event.
Nintendo Power issue 6, May/June 1989, p. 101: Short Order/Eggsplode announced.
Nintendo Power issue 7, July/August 1989, letters: the readers’ hurdles times.
David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999), chapter “Enter the Dragon”: Bandai, the mat’s purpose and size, and half a million sold.
Video Games & Computer Entertainment, June 1991, p. 74: profile of Ralph Baer, the Sanders credit and the “Catch-22” quote.
Compute! issue 43, December 1983, “The Electronic Chalkboards”: Chalk Board’s PowerPad tablet.
NESdev Wiki, “Power Pad”: sensor layout and spacing, the two sides, the NES read protocol and the Family Trainer protocol, including its 1 ms settling wait (web, secondary). https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Power_Pad
Wikipedia, “Power Pad”: the Family Trainer’s 1986 release, the Family Fun Fitness name, Nintendo’s 1988 purchase of the rights, and World Class Track Meet as a reissue of Stadium Events (web, secondary).