NES Power Pad (Family Trainer / Family Fun Fitness)

Bandai, the Japanese toy and game company, developed the Family Trainer mat and the first ten games for the Famicom, with software by Human Entertainment. It launched in Japan on November 12, 1986. Bandai released it briefly in North America as 'Family Fun Fitness' in 1987 before Nintendo purchased the North American rights, rebranded it as the Power Pad, and recalled remaining Family Fun Fitness mats from stores. The recalled launch title Stadium Events — of which only about 200 copies had reached retail shelves before the rebrand to World Class Track Meet — is now the rarest licensed NES game in existence; sealed copies have sold for over $41,000 at auction.

The Power Pad consisted of two layers of flexible gray vinyl-like plastic with 12 pressure-sensitive switches embedded between them. Each switch completed an electrical circuit when compressed by foot pressure, reading as a simple binary on/off — no analog pressure measurement. The mat used a non-slip surface and was designed for barefoot or socked use with deliberate step thresholds (light incidental contact was ignored). Connection was via a standard NES controller cable with a 6-wire protocol using two dedicated data lines (D3 and D4), unlike the standard controller's single data line. Software mapped the 12 zones to standard NES controller inputs (D-pad directions, A/B buttons, etc.), with different games using different mappings. Side A (8 zones) was almost never used; Side B (12 zones, numbered 1–12) was the standard for nearly every game.

The Power Pad asked players to use their whole body as input. In World Class Track Meet, players ran in place by rapidly alternating steps between two zones to complete 100m dash, hurdles, long jump, and triple jump events — racing against AI opponents named after animals (Turtle = slowest, Cheetah = fastest). Dance Aerobics (1987 in Japan) featured an instructor-led rhythm mode and a 'free form mode' where players could compose their own melodies by tapping out notes on the mat, arguably making it the first home music-creation game. Super Team Games supported up to six players simultaneously sharing zones for relay races, crab walks, and tug-of-war — an early example of collaborative multi-body input on a single device. Athletic World (1986) asked players for their name, age, gender, and date to provide 'customized advice,' anticipating Wii Fit's health tracking by 22 years. Kids quickly discovered a classic ergonomic exploit: kneeling and slapping the mat with hands was faster than running in place.

The Power Pad sold approximately 500,000 units in North America (per David Sheff's Game Over, 1994). It was modestly successful as a novelty accessory but ultimately limited by a very small game library (only 6 North American titles, all released by 1989), lack of third-party developer support, and the mat's tendency to wear and delaminate over time. It competed with the standard controller's precision and was retired by the early 1990s as the NES era wound down. Nintendo never released a Power Pad successor for the SNES (though the Exertainment Life Cycle exercise bike was a spiritual successor that failed even more spectacularly). A Power Pad unit is now part of the permanent collection at the Science Museum, London.

The Power Pad's HCI significance is hard to overstate. It was the first mass-market full-body home controller — proof that feet and whole-body movement could be a viable consumer input modality. It pioneered the exergaming genre, explicitly reframing video games as fitness tools in an era when gaming was seen as purely sedentary. Ian Bogost's seminal 2005 paper 'The Rhetoric of Exergaming' uses the Power Pad as its starting point. It is the direct conceptual ancestor of Dance Dance Revolution (1998, Konami), the Wii Fit Balance Board (2008, Nintendo), Microsoft Kinect (2010), and the entire genre of motion-based gaming. J.A. McArthur wrote in 100 Greatest Video Game Franchises (2017): 'As a video game franchise, Bandai's Family Trainer was widely considered a flop. However, as a stepping-stone toward personal use of motion capture devices, Family Trainer nourished a generation of thought surrounding the performance of bodily motion and its role in video games.' In 2013, developer Archie Prakash connected a Power Pad to a PC via Arduino for its 25th anniversary, building what he called the 14th game ever made for the peripheral.