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I’m not going to lie, I didn’t know much about VHS video games before today. I owned a lot of VHS tapes of my favorite movies as a kid and had a little blue CRT VCR combo in my room, but I never really played games on the TV until it came to the arrival of DVD, with the likes of the ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ quiz game.
But VHS games have existed since 1985, with the likes of the Clue Murder Mystery game by Parker Brothers in 1985 (what UK gamers will know as Cluedo). There are specific consoles like the Action Max from 1987 that used VHS tapes as their medium as opposed to the same kinds of cartridges as the NES and later the SNES. It came with a kind of sensor you would stick to your TV and a zapper for shooting things down Duck Hunt style.
If you’ve seen the works of Throaty Mumbo before, you’ll know that he’s a wizard when it comes to making awesome new tech and giving old gadgets a new lease of life. After testing out the Action Max, he decided that he would make his own FPGA VHS gaming console that could play classic retro games. As you’ll see in the video below, he picks a DE1-SoC FPGA board (covering up the ‘i’ after the A on the box) and an RP2350 MCU. Essentially, he’s building a console that allows for gameplay that’s fully interactive and not just something that’s exactly the same every time you turn it on.
Throaty Mumbo’s new machine has allowed him to make demos for VHS games that would have blown our minds back in the day. Super Mario Bros. and DOOM running on VHS would have beaten the three hours I was made to watch Titanic with my mum and Grandma while they were ironing in the living room.
A lot of the clips TM shows in the video prior to these demos feel like some kind of WarioWare-esque game on fast-forward, but the games with pre-recorded backgrounds and runthroughs on the demos showcased in the footage are easier to get your head around. I especially like the quick-time events on the DOOM VHS demo that see TM Pressing buttons on his N64 controller to pull off attacks.
The video is fascinating; Throaty Mumbo makes me feel super thick whenever I watch his videos with his extreme modding knowledge, but I always come away learning something new and exciting, and I’m grateful for that. Seeing sound signals in visual form and learning how he puts everything together with these demos will make you want to take apart everything you’ve ever owned and put it all back together like a mad scientist, possibly inspiring you to make the next exciting new niche invention in our scene! Head to Throaty Mumbo’s channel to check out more exciting projects, like playing a video game from a vinyl record!
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