How did a $10,000 lab glove become a $100 toy?
The Power Glove descends from the VPL DataGlove, a research instrument sold to labs and simulation programs in the late 1980s. Its core idea came from Thomas G. Zimmerman, who filed a patent on a bend sensor for a glove on September 29, 1982. It was granted on September 17, 1985 as US 4,542,291, "Optical Flex Sensor," and the abstract describes electronics that "detect a combination of direct light rays and reflected rays when the flexible tube is bent."
Zimmerman built the first version himself. "I built a glove with an optical sensor that could pick up finger bends," he told Mental Floss in 2017. In the same oral history, VPL co-founder Jaron Lanier put the research version's price plainly: "The glove went for about $10,000."
Nintendo licensed the consumer rights to Abrams/Gentile Entertainment, a New York marketing firm, and never designed the product itself. Mattel manufactured it for the United States and PAX handled Japan. The engineering brief was brutal. AGE co-founder Chris Gentile told Mental Floss the job "became about taking a $10,000 device and turning it into $26 worth of materials," and that "we had about nine months to get it done."
How was the Power Glove supposed to work?
Two systems ran at once. Ultrasonic speakers on the glove pinged receivers mounted around the television, and the console worked out where your hand was by triangulating those pings. Separately, bend sensors ran along four fingers, the pinky excluded, so the glove could tell a fist from an open hand.
The cost cutting landed on both halves. The lab glove's fiber optic sensors were swapped for cheap resistive strips, and the fine positional resolution that made the DataGlove useful in simulation work did not survive the trip to a $100 retail price. What reached kids in October 1989 was a plastic forearm brace with a directional pad, A and B buttons, and a numeric keypad used to punch in program codes, one per NES game, that mapped arm gestures onto ordinary button presses.
Mattel engineer Will Novak told Mental Floss in 2017 that the ultrasonic triangulation genuinely worked, but that calibrating it was hard enough that no kid was ever going to bother. A controller needing a setup ritual before every session is a controller that loses to the one sitting next to it.
Did The Wizard sell more gloves than the ads?
The Power Glove had a feature film working as its commercial. Universal released The Wizard on December 15, 1989, ten days before Christmas, with Nintendo hardware in nearly every act. The rival gamer Lucas Barton opens a steel briefcase, pulls on the glove, and delivers the line that outlived the product: "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad!"
Novak remembered the scene landing exactly as intended. "The kids were playing Rad Racer with it. 'Oh, it's so bad,'" he told Mental Floss. The film gave a peripheral almost nobody had used a demonstration that looked effortless, on a screen, to an audience of children with two weeks left to ask for it.
The trade press was already primed. In 1989, Design News ran a cover story that opened by telling readers to "Throw away your joysticks, kids," a line the Australian Centre for the Moving Image later quoted as the high-water mark of the hype. Nintendo had spent the decade rebuilding an industry that the NES pulled out of the 1983 crash, and in 1989 almost anything with its logo near it moved.
What went wrong once kids got it home?
Novak said Nintendo's own research showed a typical play session ran 90 to 120 minutes. "With the Glove, your arm would get tired after 15 or 20 minutes," he told Mental Floss. Holding an arm out at a television is exercise, and nobody had tested for that before the tooling was cut.
The software was worse. Only two titles, Super Glove Ball and Bad Street Brawler, were built around the glove, and neither shipped in the box. Both played fine with a normal controller, so the glove added nothing you could not already do. Caesar Filori of Nintendo gave Mental Floss the one sentence version: "There was no game experience that became better for having used the Glove."
Mattel executive Hall summed up the home experience for Mental Floss: "Your arm getting tired, you have no idea where the center is, there's no 3D. So you shove it into a closet." Mattel pulled the Power Glove from shelves in 1990, after roughly a year. It joined a short list of Nintendo era hardware that sold on promise and died on use, a pattern that repeated six years later with Nintendo's own Virtual Boy. Nobody cancelled the Power Glove in a press release. It simply stopped being reordered.
How many Power Gloves were actually sold?
The numbers depend on who is counting. Chris Gentile told Mental Floss that the debut at CES produced "700,000 orders," with Toys R Us and Kmart each committing to 100,000 units before a single consumer had touched one.
On lifetime sales, Gentile's figure is the one from inside the company: "We sold a total of 1.3 million Gloves, including in Japan." His brother John Gentile put the Japanese share at 600,000 units, sold under the PAX brand rather than Mattel's. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image gives a higher estimate, roughly 2 million units and about $88 million in revenue.
Either way, the Power Glove was not a sales failure. It was a usage failure. The gloves moved at retail on the strength of a movie and a magazine cover, then stopped moving once the first wave of owners told their friends. That gap between units shipped and units used is why the accessory reads as a flop despite seven figures of sales.
What is a Power Glove worth in 2026?
PriceCharting tracks a loose NES Power Glove at $99.94 in September 2026, with a sale logged at $111.20 on August 15, 2026. Complete in box sits at $216.45, sealed examples run to $641, and a graded new one sold for $3,493.05. Condition of the foam and the ultrasonic receiver bar drives most of the spread, because both degrade in storage.
The more interesting market is the one that cuts them open. Hackaday has covered a decade of rebuilds: Dillon Markey converted a glove into a stop motion animation controller in 2015, Nolan Moore rebuilt one as a universal wireless HID that flew an AR Drone in 2016, Alessio Cosenza shipped a Bluetooth nine axis version called Power Glove Ultra in 2017, and Teague Labs bolted one to an HTC Vive the same year. The shell is comfortable, distinctive and cheap, which is exactly what a maker wants around modern sensors.
Where to find one today: working loose units turn up in the $100 to $150 range and boxed ones above $200, so expect to pay more than a Wii and its motion controllers for something that does far less. Retro specialists such as Stone Age Gamer's NES accessories shop are the safer route than an untested auction listing, since the failure points are internal.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Power Glove still work on an NES today?
A Power Glove from 1989 will still plug into an original NES and register button presses, since the wired controller portion is simple and durable. The ultrasonic motion tracking is the part that fails, because the receiver bar and the glove's sensors drift with age and the system needed careful calibration even when new. Most 2026 owners use them as display pieces or donor hardware rather than controllers.
How many games used the Power Glove?
Only two NES games were designed around the Power Glove: Super Glove Ball and Bad Street Brawler, both from 1990. Neither was packaged with the glove, and both were fully playable with a standard NES controller, so the glove-specific moves were optional. Every other NES game had to be driven through numeric program codes that translated arm motion into ordinary button presses.
Who invented the Power Glove?
The underlying bend sensing technology came from Thomas G. Zimmerman, whose optical flex sensor patent was filed in 1982 and granted in 1985, and from the VPL DataGlove he developed with Jaron Lanier. The consumer version was designed by Abrams/Gentile Entertainment under a Nintendo license and manufactured by Mattel for the 1989 US launch. Nintendo itself did not design the Power Glove.