Video Shows Wiimote-Like Design From Eight Years Back
By Chris on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 9:53 PM PST In Game Companies, Game Consoles, Game Platforms, Gamer Life, Hardware, Midway, Nintendo, Nintendo
You may never have heard of Patrick Goschy before; he’s a former employee of Midway. There’s nothing notable about that. What is noteworthy about him, though, is the fact that he apparently designed something extremely similar to the Wiimote. Eight years ago.
As Engadget pointed out yesterday, when we see lawsuits filed for patent infringement, they’re often over very generic ideas from not too long ago. But this looks to be the real deal, as you can see in the YouTube video above. The concept between Goschy’s idea and what we have today in the Wii clearly aren’t too far apart.
Originally, it was falsely believed that Goschy was intending to sue Nintendo, but we have since learned this isn’t the case. Midway actually owned the patents to his designs, which were apparently sold to Nintendo as one of them is actually referenced by Nintendo.
Goschy claims he simply wants people to know the truth.
“I just wanted to people to know. Wanted the truth to come out. Did this 8 years ago, and the Wii has been such a huge deal, I wanted the truth to get out there. It wasn’t these two or three Japanese guys that came up with this thing.”
We’ll have more on this story as it develops.
Just because he says he “invented” hand-held acceleration controls doesn’t mean he’s responsible for the Wiimote. The Wii controllers are also infared-refrencing pointing devices and are able to communicate detaled movement, sound, and position information back to the base station without wires. Hell! It’s even a memory card! I don’t hear any of those bits of prophetical information in the video. If you wanna tell everyone you came up with the idea of a handheld “reality controller” please try to remember that you were beat to the “punch” 11 years earlier by the Power Glove.
if his plans weren’t sold to nintendo they would be sued right now. i think that justifies him being responsible for creating it.
He’s responsible the idea of putting acceleromerators into console controllers. Not for the whole wii-mote.
But without the acceleromerators, all you have is a controller with memoryspace that’s unexpandable, wireless, and has a speaker.
Thats cool that he helped provide some tech for the remote, but honestly who cares who came up with it. What matters is that Nintendo recognized this technology would be very cool in a mainstream console and had the conviction to base their entire model on it (among other technologies they’ve included in the remote). If they bought this patent before Sony or MS, then they were certainly visionary none the less. But yeah, kudos to this guy for getting the word out that his patent helped form what is now the controller to the most popular game system. I’d want some credit too if I was this guy.
Well, I wouldn’t say he invented this idea. Y’know cause of the Power Glove. But he does have evidence that his design fueled the Wii.