R.O.B. | Code Like It's 198x

R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy, was a grey plastic robot about a foot tall that sat beside the television and played games with you. It had no cable. It watched the screen, and when the game flashed a coded pattern at it, R.O.B. swivelled, raised and lowered its arms, and gripped or dropped whatever it was holding. Only two games ever used it. Its real job was to help Nintendo sell the NES in America at a time when shops there wanted nothing to do with video games.

Fast facts

Full name: Robotic Operating Buddy; the Family Computer Robot in Japan.
Released: July 1985 (Japan); October 1985 (US, with the NES in its New York launch).
Designed by: Gunpei Yokoi’s R&D 1 team at Nintendo in Kyoto.
Height: 9½ inches, according to Nintendo Power.
Connection to the console: none. It reads flashes from the TV screen with a photodiode.
Games: two, Gyromite and Stack-Up, sold as the Robot Series.
Price: in a November 1986 American mail-order advert, $42 on its own, or $149 in the Deluxe Set with the NES, the Zapper, Gyromite and Duck Hunt.

Why Nintendo built a robot

Nintendo of America’s first attempt to sell the Famicom in the United States was the Advanced Video System, shown at the Consumer Electronics Shows in 1984 with a keyboard, a music keyboard, a cassette recorder and wireless controllers. Retailers still remembered the 1983 crash and would not order it. In David Sheff’s account, Minoru Arakawa scrapped the computer parts, and Nintendo’s R&D 1 group in Kyoto was given the job of making “a new peripheral that would make the system something other than a video-game machine”.

Yokoi’s team produced R.O.B. Sheff is blunt about it: the robot was “one foot high, gray, legless, and he really didn’t do much … More than anything, ROB looked cool. He would be used to sell the video-game machine.” Nintendo’s advertising put the robot and the Zapper in front of the console itself. When the NES reached New York shops in October 1985, it came with R.O.B., and looking back in 1995, Nintendo Power described the pair as “two peripherals designed to intrigue players”.

In Japan the same robot came out three months earlier, in July 1985, as the Family Computer Robot, an add-on for a console that had been on sale there for two years.

How it works

R.O.B. is not wired to anything. It watches the television through a photodiode in its head, the same kind of sensor as the Zapper’s, and the game sends it commands by changing the colour of the whole screen once per frame:

black (palette $0F) is a 0 bit;
a bright colour, usually green ($2A), is a 1 bit.

A command is 13 bits, sent over 13 frames in the pattern 000101w1x1y1z. The fixed 0001 and 01 bits let R.O.B. find the start of a command, and the four bits wxyz choose one of ten actions: move the arms up or down by one or two steps, turn the body left or right, open or close the arms, switch the head light on, or reset. On a 60 Hz television one command takes a little over a fifth of a second, so a game has to plan its instructions ahead. A steady flicker at 25 or 30 times a second makes R.O.B.’s head light blink in time, which helps the player point the robot at the screen.

CRASH described this for British readers in 1987: “ROB isn’t connected to the console however - data is sent via the television. The screen flashes to indicate that data has been sent, and ROB responds accordingly with either a left, right, up or down movement.” Nintendo’s own UK advert put it more warmly: “Seat him next to you, send him signals from your tv screen and together you can tackle the enemy.”

Because the robot cannot report anything back, neither game knows whether R.O.B. did what it was told.

The two games

Gyromite. A professor has to collect dynamite in his laboratory, and moving pillars block his way. The player’s second controller sits in R.O.B.’s base. R.O.B. picks up spinning tops and sets them down on two pivots, which press the controller’s buttons and raise or lower the pillars on screen. CRASH thought it “doesn’t offer much long term challenge to the ardent arcade player, but it will undoubtedly appeal to younger games-players - especially because of ROB’s involvement”. Because the robot only presses buttons on controller 2, a second person can do its job by hand.

Stack-Up. R.O.B. stacks coloured blocks to match a pattern shown on screen. The game never learns where the blocks actually are; it only sends the orders.

Nintendo Power’s ten-year retrospective summed up his repertoire: “He moved back and forth and up and down. That’s it. Not exactly exciting stuff by today’s standards. But he did look cool, and he even came with custom shades (a glare guard, actually).” Retro Gamer later called him “cool-looking but basically useless”.

In Britain

Mattel’s British launch in 1987 kept R.O.B. in the Deluxe set, alongside the Zapper, Gyromite and Duck Hunt. The set was advertised at £199.99. By July CRASH was reporting it cut to £155 after trade criticism, and Nintendo’s September advert gave £159.99. The basic set, with Super Mario Bros., came without it.

Later life

No more R.O.B. games followed, and the robot quietly left the range. It returned in Nintendo’s own games as a nostalgic character, unlockable in Mario Kart DS (2005) and a playable fighter in Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008).

Sources

David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999), chapter “Enter the Dragon”: the Advanced Video System, R&D 1’s brief, Yokoi’s team and R.O.B., and the robot and Zapper in Nintendo’s advertising.
Nintendo Power issue 78, November 1995, “10 Years of NES History”: R.O.B.’s height, his two games, the “custom shades”, and the New York launch with 17 games.
Digital Press, May/June 1993, p. 5: Gyromite and Stack-Up released in October 1985.
Ahoy! issue 35, November 1986: mail-order prices for R.O.B., the Robot Series and the Deluxe Set.
CRASH issue 41, June 1987: Nintendo launch advertisement (“send him signals from your tv screen”; Deluxe set £199.99).
CRASH issue 42, July 1987, pp. 102–103: how R.O.B. receives commands, Gyromite, and the Deluxe package; the news pages report the Deluxe set cut to £155.
CRASH issue 44, September 1987: Nintendo advertisement with the Deluxe set at £159.99.
Retro Gamer issue 16, 2005, NES feature: “cool-looking but basically useless”.
NESdev Wiki, “R.O.B.”: release dates, the photodiode, the 13-bit command protocol and its command table, and the calibration flash (web, secondary). https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/R.O.B.
Wikipedia, “R.O.B.”: the robot’s discontinuation and its appearances in Mario Kart DS and Super Smash Bros. Brawl (web, secondary).