VCR Plus Dice

Today in Tedium: One Direction isn’t just the name of a well-known boy band, it’s also a pretty good description of the interactivity of your average VCR. Video is a famously linear format, which is great for movies or TV shows, but struggles when it comes to interactivity. Which meant that the phenomenon of board games directly inspired by the VCR was always a somewhat curious phenomenon. But nonetheless, it was still a phenomenon, even if it feels a bit old hat today. Today’s Tedium ponders attempts to turn VHS into a game medium. — Ernie @ Tedium

Predicaments, a soap opera-themed VCR game starring Joan Rivers.

Why board games and VCRs were bound to converge in some way, shape, or form

By the mid-1980s, it was clear that VHS, not Beta (or any other secondary formats) had won the battle for living room supremacy. The fact that there was suddenly a brand new medium to enjoy, that there was consensus on, did something interesting: It created new types of business, and not just for Hollywood studios looking for a place to sell their blockbusters.

Home video’s initial high cost created the rental industry, of course, but it also created a context for public domain films to live a second life. Instructional videos, whether fitness clips starring Jane Fonda or cheesy how-to videos, became big business and helped encourage the rise of new ways of selling stuff—think infomercials.

And then there were more esoteric ideas—like board games with a VHS element. Today, they may seem more like a novelty, but back then they were common enough that you could probably call them a full-on trend.

It’s worth considering the business context that led to this growing interest in VHS board games: Home video games, despite being arguably more functional and more interactive if not as graphically complex, seemed like they were a simple fad at the time the VCR board game became a phenomenon, around late 1985.

The Nintendo Entertainment System, still in its infancy and yet to be released nationally, had yet to prove itself on the market, but the VCR had—one estimate reported by The New York Times had the video cassette industry driving $3.3 billion in sales between rentals and purchases in 1985, a rate approaching the size of the film industry at the time. Go where the audience is, of course.

The other factor was the general approach taken often seemed to lean less on selling the VHS tape as the key element, and more the board game. In a 1986 New York Magazine article, Parker Brothers marketing manager John Call spelled this point out.

“We see these games not as a new way to use a VCR but as a new way to play board games,” he explained.

In 1985 and 1986, board games were proven. Video games weren’t.

Let’s just admit that playing non-interactive video charades with Rich Little is nobody’s idea of fun, OK?

The difference between a bad VHS game and a good one

In a lot of ways, the concept of putting games against the backdrop of a non-interactive video shouldn’t have worked. It wasn’t like the video was going to change the next time you were going to watch it, right?

Watching a movie a second time around is one thing, but games simply require more dynamics. If every episode of Jeopardy featured the same answers, there would be no reason to watch.

And this was certainly a problem in some specific contexts. As I pointed out a couple years ago in my piece on Worlds of Wonder, the Action Max, which was a video game console of sorts but had most of the basic elements of a VHS board game, quickly failed on the market because its games’ replay value was basically zero. The games were all light-gun based, but unlike, say Duck Hunt, there wasn’t any randomization, so the game played the same way every single time.

(Also not helping: The Action Max required setup, and that setup was at the beginning of every tape. Just watch the first three minutes of this clip of the Action Max game Blue Thunder and wonder to yourself if you’d want to stick with the game after going through all that setup.)

But perhaps a better way to think about this is in terms of karaoke. In a way, the traditional form of karaoke works not unlike a VHS board game does, in that the video is the same every time out. What makes karaoke a fun activity are two things: The singing and the people. (And the booze, but that goes without saying.)

Karaoke works because the process is obvious and doesn’t get in the way. You’re not bogged down by rules.

Unlike a traditional video game, which has to lift the entire concept of the gameplay based on what’s happening on the screen, the best VHS games use the video as something of an accent to the game’s construct. Apples to Apples is a fun game not because of the cards themselves, but because of the word combinations (and occasional dirty jokes) that the cards enable. In other words, the game works because you and your friends are at the center of the action.

But, of course, many VHS games did not do this very well.

New York writer Phoebe Hoban suggested that one of the games Parker Bros. was marketing, Eyewitness, was incredibly thin on the gameplay front: It was simply a bunch of video clips of historical events, in which players made up their own questions and answers. (Have two hours to kill? Here’s the full video on YouTube.)

“This sounds more like a high-school homework assignment than fun,” she wrote.

And that was a real danger. In a lot of ways, VHS games faced a similar challenge as edutainment, in that the games offered the illusion of something fun but could be mired in boring process due to the awkward shoehorning of an unnecessary element into the game.

Another curious entry in the genre that really underlines this point was Rich Little’s VCR Charades, which required players to figure out the charades that Little was doing before the people playing the game on the screen did. Rich Little may be a skilled impressionist, but at some point, one has to wonder whether it’d just be easier to play charades without the help of the guy on the screen.

In a 1985 article, The Baltimore Sun ripped on the game, pointing out that it’s “a contrived attempt to jazz up a party game that can be played for free,” and featuring a quote from a child that had more teeth than Little’s entire career (which is unfortunate because Little has had a long career).

Speaking of the feigned reactions from the onscreen players, the play-tester said: “This looks like we accidentally got somebody’s home movie from the Fotomat.”

But on the other hand, there were games that used their lack of interactivity to solid effect. The board game Atmosfear, perhaps one of the most popular board games with a video element, was a board game first and a VHS tape second.

The tape works as a framing element and the game was well-regarded for its time because of how it used the recording to increase tension during gameplay.

Guessing the salary needed to hire this guy was a lot lower than Rich Little’s fee.

“As players, nothing we did could affect him; the tape played back the same way every time. But that didn’t matter,” Den of Geek contributor Sarah Hobbs wrote in a tribute to the game. “What mattered was how we, as players, responded to the tape.”

The game sold more than 2 million copies worldwide in its first two years on the market, and was successful enough that a DVD version of the game was later made. It was even a bargaining chip when the company that owned the brand, J.W. Spear & Sons, found itself subject of a bidding war between Hasbro and Mattel. (Not the main one, of course—Spear owned the international rights to Scrabble.)

The VHS game wasn’t a perfect creative medium, but when a game nailed it the way Atmosfear did, the value of the medium proved itself.