Commerce Conflict
A strange little toy that was the thing to have for about 2 whole
minutes.
The advert on TV convinced me I had to have one of these, so much
pleading and whining later, and I was opening the box excitedly one
Christmas morning.
It was basically a small barcode reader crossed with top trumps. It
came with a set of bar-coded cards with various heroes and
villains/monsters as a starter set, but you could actually tape your
own barcodes to a blank card and make up your own fighters! It sounds
much less exciting now than it did when I was 12, but not only did I
ruin the box that it came in by cutting off the barcode (making it's
re-sale value now much less), but that machine was responsible for the
defacing and barcode pillaging of nearly every consumer product in the
house.
You could play one or two players on the same machine, each person
scanned their card in turn and the barcode reader translated these into stats
like Hit Points etc... There were no graphics, just boxes with
numbers and some pretty appalling sound effects. You would then
just take it in turns either attacking or defending your character by
pressing a button.
It didn't stop there though, you could also use a
barcode as a weapon or power-up for your characters. It was
interesting for about a week, in which time my friends and myself had
managed to cut barcodes out of everything and anything we could find, in
search of an Uber-barcode that would make us supreme champion of the
playground.
I did a search on eBay and they are selling for about £10 (around $15) these days.
I think that if they taped on a Pokemon license it would probably do
pretty well today.