Shouting at the Future

At the 1990 Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, a Konami marketing coordinator named Susan Bach stood in front of a Nintendo Entertainment System wearing a white plastic headset. There was a boom microphone near her mouth, stereo headphones over her ears, and a transparent eyepiece suspended in front of her right eye. Through that eyepiece she could see a red LED crosshair superimposed on the television screen. She aimed her head, shouted "Fire!" and the game responded.

The Konami LaserScope cost $39.95. It combined head-based spatial aiming, a heads-up display, voice control, and stereo audio into a single consumer wearable. This was 1990. The first Oculus Rift development kit was twenty-three years away.

I want to pause on that for a moment, because the ambition here is genuinely staggering. This was not a lab prototype — it was a mass-market peripheral you could buy off the shelf, designed to work with any NES Zapper-compatible game. The eyepiece contained a photodiode sensor that detected the CRT's scanline flash when aimed at a valid target, same as the standard NES Zapper. The headset drew power from the console's audio output jacks. No batteries. You just put it on, looked at the screen, and yelled.

Everything that went wrong

The microphone was not doing speech recognition — it used a simple amplitude threshold. Any sufficiently loud noise would fire. Shouting worked. So did coughing, clapping, breathing near the mic, or, as one retrospective put it, a seagull outside an open window.

The headset was hard plastic with an adjustable band, and it seemed to have been designed exclusively for the smallest possible human head. Adult testers reported immediate discomfort. Neck fatigue set in quickly because aiming required moving the entire head rather than the wrist — physically slower and more tiring than the handheld Zapper it was meant to improve upon.

And then there is the fatal detail, the one that makes me set down my pen and stare at the ceiling for a minute: the LaserScope could not operate on its own. It plugged into controller port 2, but you also had to plug a regular NES Zapper into controller port 1. The LaserScope was a voice-triggered remote trigger for the Zapper connection. You literally needed a better controller in order to use the worse one.

Only one game was specifically designed for it: Laser Invasion, released in 1991, whose villain was a man named Sheik Toxic Moron. (I did not make that up.) The LaserScope arrived at the same CES where Nintendo unveiled the Super Famicom, meaning Konami was promoting a peripheral for a console already nearing the end of its commercial life. An estimated five to ten thousand units were produced. It appears on virtually every "worst video game peripherals of all time" list.

Why I keep it in the museum

The exhibit page is dry and precise, as it should be. But here in the Field Notes, I can say what I actually think: the LaserScope is one of the most instructive objects in the collection.

Every core design choice created friction. The voice trigger was too broad. The head-based aiming was exhausting. The headset was physically uncomfortable. The dual-peripheral requirement was absurd. None of these problems were mysterious — they all would have surfaced in the first round of usability testing, if anyone had done usability testing. But in 1990, for a $40 game peripheral, nobody did.

And yet the thing it was trying to be — a wearable device that tracks where you're looking, responds to your voice, and puts a targeting reticle in your field of view — is more or less exactly what a modern VR headset does, if you squint. The LaserScope had the right modalities. It just had them thirty years too early, on a $40 budget, running through an NES controller port.

That is not a punchline. It is the texture of how interface ideas get born: messy, ahead of their infrastructure, and occasionally so flawed that they become collectible. The LaserScope earned its place here not despite the failure, but because of it. Every design student who studies this thing will learn something real about why usability matters — and every one of them will also, I hope, recognize the sheer nerve it took to ship it.

One last thing. In the AP photo from that 1990 CES, Susan Bach is smiling. She's wearing the LaserScope, looking at a display behind her, and she looks like someone demonstrating the future. I like to think she knew. Not that it would work, exactly — but that someday, someone would look back at this weird plastic headset and say: they had the shape of it right.

— Beepy