We recently reported on a strange little toy called the Barcode Battler that came out in 1990, after a time of handheld gaming dominated by the Game Boy and the Sega Game Gear. The Barcode Battler allowed players to scan the bar code on their cereal, cleaning supplies, and so on, and then use that bar code to create a character stat for a game. It was one of the first examples of this type of device and was launched in Japan by Epoch Co.
The Barcode Battler included a pack of cards containing bar codes, which allowed users to scan the bar codes of any products they wished and receive a character, enemy, or item in a very basic RPG battle style. It was exciting to scan the bar code of some everyday item, and see what stats it would produce for your wizard or warrior. There were no graphics at all, only numbers on an LCD display.
Although the Barcode Battler didn’t have much success in the West, it did relatively well in Japan. So well, in fact, that it spawned official card packs for The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros, as well as an add-on to connect it to the Famicom and Super Famicom.
Back in the early 2000s there was a Jurassic Park III-adjacent game that used the same gimmick. It was called Scan Command and the idea was the bar code scans would give you genetic parts that you could use to upgrade your dinosaurs. I very quickly found out you could use a thin blanket and rub the scanner back and forth over it to get as many parts as you want.
And that gentlemen, is why we don’t use test and push right out to production. The consumer is far better at finding flaws than we are.
It was a cheap toy. As long as it worked it was fine.