It seems that no matter what great ideas the designers and developers of this generation can come up with, it’s all been done before by someone else. Surprisingly, this is also true for what would probably be the biggest selling game in the world at the minute, were it nor for the gaming juggernaut that is GTA4 - I’m talking about the Wii Fit balance board.

You see, Amiga designed their very own games console balance board back in 1982, back in the olden days before they were snapped up by Commodore. It was a peripheral for the Wii of its time - the hugely successful Atari 2600 console, and saw some commercial success despite only ever having one game released for it - Mogul Maniac, a skiing game. Two other games, Rockin’ Rollie and Surf’s Up were in development, but never saw release.

According to Boing Boing Gadgets, who have a huge feature up today about the history of exercise games, there’s also an interesting anecdote to do with this peripheral. It’s said that it was used by the developers of the Amiga computer, who would try to sit as still on the pad as possible in order to avoid activating it, much in the style of zen meditation. Apparently, it was said to relieve the stress of the early Amiga prototypes’ frequent crashes, and is actually the source of the mysterious “Guru Meditation” error message displayed when early versions of the Amiga OS go belly up.

(Story and picture via BBG)

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