- Milton Bradley Playmate
-
The Milton Bradley Playmate was a prototype robotic toy developed by the Milton Bradley Company between 1969 and 1975. Though it never saw official release, it served as the inspiration for future Milton Bradley products such as Simon.
Contents
History
The Milton Bradley Playmate was first conceived by Alex Cartwright, a student of engineering at Harvard in the mid-60s. Cartwright was a board-game enthusiast but often found it difficult to find others to play with due to the lack of free time afforded by his major and the odd hours at which he had to take classes.
Inspired by The Turk, Cartwright decided to create a robot that could be programmed to play board games, and by 1968 had developed a large-scale prototype that could play, with relative accuracy, a full game of Battleship. He presented this prototype to the Milton Bradley Company, who were intrigued by the possibilities. The company gave Cartwright funding to pursue further research. The robot, dubbed the Playmate, would undergo several changes during this time, including a general streamlining in its parts and size, and the introduction of programmable cards to give the robot additional flexibility.
Despite working for well over 6 years on the project, Cartwright could never get the size of the device small enough to make it practical for home sales, and Milton Bradley pulled Cartwright's funding in 1975. Cartwright would attempt to convince other board game manufacturers to give him funding but met little success, and, despondent, killed himself in 1977.
Development and Technical Specifications
The original Battleship-prototype of the Playmate, presented by Cartwright to Milton Bradley in 1968, was characterized by a robotic claw-arm, similar to what one would find in a claw game, with rubber tips to allow the claw to more accurately grasp game pieces. This claw was mounted to a large cabinet measuring 20'x10'x3'. A red light on the front of the machine would blink to signal which coordinates on the board it would play. Four separate "games" were hard-coded into the robot's hardware. Its size and the lack of variety in play modes would have made it rather inconvenient for sales and would have cost tens of thousands of dollars.
After receiving the Milton Bradley funding, Cartwright added a programmable punchcard setup to the robot. This not only enabled the size of the robot to be decreased, it allowed the addition of multiple games to the robot's repertoire. Among the games that Cartwright eventually programmed the Playmate to learn were chess, checkers, Connect Four, Stratego, Candyland, and Mouse Trap.
Due to the large servo motors required to operate the claw arm and the primitive state of computing at this time, Cartwright was unable to get the Playmate to an acceptable size and cost before Milton Bradley pulled his funding. The final version of the Playmate was around the size of a filing cabinet and would have cost an estimated $5000 USD.
Game Compatibility
The Playmate would have been compatible with roughly 20 of Milton Bradley's board and card games. Punchcard packs for each game would have needed to be purchased, and would have come with instructions regarding how to set up the board game precisely beneath the Playmate's claw arm.
The punchcard packs would have contained several pre-programmed movesets for the playmate, allowing the player to play a variety of games against the Playmate, and would have allowed the Playmate to simulate a variety of different skill levels to grant the player varying levels of challenge. Being pre-programmed, it would have been possible to eventually memorize the exact moves of the Playmate for each card, but the number of cards featured per pack (estimated to be at least one hundred) would have dissuaded this behavior, as would the release of follow-up card packs.
External links
Categories:- Entertainment robots
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
