Bad Ideas Podcast

In 1985, engineers at Nolan Bushnells Axlon company started development on a new type of video game console codenamed NEMO. Bushnell, the creator of Chuck E. Cheese, and founder of Atari had a vision for a new kind of video game console. At this point nearly all consoles used cartridges to store the games. This meant the games could be highly interactive, but lacked realism due to the limitations of computers at the time. NEMO would be different. Inspired by games like Dragon's Lair that used pre-animated footage recorded on a LaserDisc, Axlon began developing a game console that would run on VHS tapes.

The idea was that the tape could be encoded with multiple video tracks that would run simultaneously alongside each other. The player could choose which track to switch to, and that choice could relay information to the game system. Eventually the console was renamed to Control Vision.

Axlon realized it didn't have the resources to develop the Control Vision to its fullest potential so they went looking for partners. They settled on Hasbro. The toy company was dominant in media and merchandising in the 1980's and they seemed like a natural fit for something like the control vision.

It's important to understand exactly what kind of "video games" you could play on the Control Vision. The prototype game created to pitch the idea was called Scene of the Crime, a game where you switched between different video surveillance footage feeds and tried to catch a thief. The "game" was only four minutes long, but it made use of live action video, something no video game had ever done before.

With Hasbro on board, production went ahead on the first game for the system, Night Trap.

Night Trap was originally conceived as a game where killer ninjas break into a billionaire's mansion, and it was the player's responsibility to use his state of the art security system to stop the baddies from killing the gaggle of college girls partying there.

However Hasbro had objections to this idea. Ninja violence was imitatable which meant that Hasbro could be accused of encouraging kids to karate chop their siblings.

So the ninjas were changed to vampires. BUT because biting was also an imitatable act they couldn't have teeth. Hasbro was even concerned about the vampires moving too quickly.

So the game designer, James Riley came up with a workaround. The vampires were sick and toothless, hence the slow movement and lack of biting, but they still needed blood, so they carried around a device that would clamp around their victims neck and drill into their neck with a needle draining them of blood. These vampires were called Augurs.

Despite the fact that this was arguably a FAR more disturbing concept than ninjas karate chopping people to death, it was NOT imitatable, which meant it got the pass from Hasbro.

So Night Trap went into production. It was tricky going because no one had made a game like this before. It was like shooting a movie except the script had to accommodate everything that was going on in each room simultaneously, and the actors had to time their actions perfectly so if they left one room they would appear in the next room at the same moment. There were also challenges with how the film would be shot. James Riley originally envisioned a visually darker game, but because they weren't yet sure how much the video would have to be compressed, he decided to shoot everything brightly lit to make it easier to see even if the video ended up being highly pixelated.

The originals though were shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Don Burgess who would go on to be nominated for an Oscar for his work in Forest Gump.

As Night Trap went into production Hasbro started to get nervous. They had signed on to the project in hopes of developing games, but now they seemed to be in the movie business, and they weren't ready to put in that kind of investment. They pulled out of the deal to make the Control-Vision console shortly after the shooting had been completed leaving Night Trap without a console.

It seemed like Night Trap was dead in the water. But then a new possibility emerged. Sega, home of the Sassy Hedgehog and dedicated to doing what Nintendon't was about to release a peripheral to their smash hit Sega Genesis console called Sega CD.

At a time when floppy disks held 1.44 Mb of data and an entire computers hard drive might not be bigger than a couple gigabytes, CD-Roms with their wopping 800 megabytes of storage were the wave of the future. A game system that used CD Rom could include full motion video, and Night Trap seemed like a natural fit. The footage had to be compressed somewhat, but it could all fit on a single disc.

On October 15, 1992, five years after the footage in the game had been filmed Night Trap was released was the Sega CD.

Initial reviews for the game skewed mostly negative. Although the full motion video elements were seen as revolutionary, the gameplay elements didn't pass muster with most player. Night Trap was stuck conceptually in between being a movie and a game and it represented the worst of both worlds.

Night Trap might have simply fizzled out and died as a largely forgotten footnote in the history of gaming. But the early 90's were a time when video games were using more and more graphic violence and the moral panic about what this kind of content might be doing to the children of America made its way straight to the halls of Congress.

The Sentate held a hearing into the dangers of video game violence. Featured were the games Mortal Combat and Night Trap.

Night Trap was singled out because of a scene in which a woman in a nightgown was captured and killed by the Augurs. The senators at the hearing argued that this and other elements in the game promoted violence against women.

Sega, responded to the controversy by creating the Video Game Rating Council to judge whether games contained objectionable content and marking the box with a clear indication of their rating. This would later be replaced by the industry wide Entertainment Software Rating Board.

The other result of the hearing was that sales of Night Trap went through the roof.

Night Trap went on to be released for a variety of other consoles with increasing quality of video as storage quality expanded.

And that should have been the end of the story.

But in 2014, the Night Trap team put together a Kickstarter, trying to raise the money to re-release the game. The kickstarter saw initial enthusiasm, but eventually fizzled out without reaching it's goal. But the idea was out there. Night Trap. In HIGH DEFINITION. It was possible with the original footage recorded.

So in 2016, a programmer named Tyler Hogle created a mobile version of Night Trap just for fun, and released footage of the game anonymously. Excitement about the footage led to Hogle getting in touch with James Riley. Riley gave Hogle the HD master footage he had, and together they put together an HD Re-release of Night Trap.

Falcon Heene's wild ride across the foothills of Colorado captivated the world for a few short hours, but was it a hoax? Let's take a deeper look at the Balloon Boy adventure in what truly is a Bad Idea. Was Richard Heene a fraud or did he actually think he lost his kid to a home made UFO test gone wrong?

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Shark Fin Soup is a traditional dish often served at Chinese weddings to indicate the bride is marrying into a wealthy family. Unfortunately, shark fin soup brings high costs for more than just wedding planners. This week Bad Ideas explores the history of shark fin soup, the dangers it poses to our future.

Sources:

Shocking Graphic Shows Just How Many Sharks Are Killed EVERY HOUR

Dominique Mosbergen - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/sharks-killed-per-hour-infographic_n_2965775.html

Krista Mahr - http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2021071-2,00.html

Caty Fairclough - https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/sharks-rays/shark-finning-sharks-turned-prey

Never underestimate the power of a man with a lot of time on his hands and a VCR. Michael Larson was looking for gameshows to play where he could maximize his winnings. After months of studying, he went on Press Your Luck and proceeded to trounce their supposedly random game.

Was he cheating? Or was he just too good? Let us know @HumanEchoes.

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The Lost Cause of the Confederacy was a tool in the shape of a history lesson. The American Civil War had just ended, but war is a bitter and terrible thing, and so the country that had so nearly been split in two by war tried to find a way to mend the terrible wounds they had inflicted on each other. The South needed a way to pick themselves up and go forward with pride despite their loss, and the North needed a way to see their Southern members as brethren once again. And so the Lost Cause of the Confederacy came to be, a lie with enough truth to make it palatable, used to paint over the bitter truths of the war.

Joanna Southcott was a millenarian cult leader who happens to share a last name with one of our hosts. During the 1800s she predicted the doom of the world and species, sold seals to save souls, and managed to get "pregnant" at the ripe old age of 63 while still being a virgin. Al and Tony dive deep into Southcottism and the English UK cult headed up by Joanna Southcott.

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In 1915 World War I was in full swing. Trench warfare had locked all sides into bloody fruitless seeming unending conflict. Russia had been struck especially hard by the brutal breakout of the war, in part because they weren't prepared militarily to face the German military's machine-like precision. And so it was that a Russian Military engineer Nikolay Lebedenko decided to try to build a solution to problem of trench warfare.

Lebdenko reasoned that a vehicle with large enough wheels would simply be able to roll over the trenches and fortifications. He built a prototype of his vehicle and brought it before Nicholas II the Tsar of Russia at the time. Nicholas was fascinated by the vehicle. He and Lebedenko spent hours that day playing with the wind-up model, running it over obstacles like piles of books with ease. Nicholas was so excited by the design that he immediately commissioned Lebedenko to begin work on a full scale prototype of what would eventually become known as the Tsar Tank.

The construction of the prototype took place under incredible secrecy. The parts for the vehicle were sourced from various factories that produced battle ships and other large machines for Russia, but no single factory knew what the parts they were making were for. The budget for the project was 250,000 rubles, an astronomical sum at the time.

Lebedenko and his men assembled the tank in the solitude of the Russian wilderness.

The prototype looked a little like a child's tricycle in reverse. There were two wheels on the front of the Tsar Tank that rose thirty feet off the ground. The wheels were spoked like bicycle wheels. Each wheel was driven by engines the Russians had salvaged from a downed German Zeppelin. The rear of the vehicle was supported by a single, much smaller wheel about five feet in diameter. Mounted on the vehicle's chassis was the body of the tank, a kind of armoured pod that stuck out of the top and bottom of the tricycle body bristling with machine guns that could be used to clear the enemy from the field.

The Tsar tank powered up and began it's maiden trek across the Russian countryside. The 60 ton behemoth rolled easily over the uneven ground, it's huge wheels rolling over a tree in its path and snapping it like a matchstick. The tank then thundered onto what was known as a corduroy road, a road made of logs that had been tied together to keep travelers from sinking into swampy ground. The tank rolled to the end of the corduroy road and off into the swamp.

But once it was off a solid surface the tank ran into trouble. It got stuck in the mud, and when a 60 ton giant tricycle gets stuck in the mud it REALLY gets stuck in the mud. The Russians tried to retrieve the vehicle, but to no avail. The Tsar Tank was dead.

What went wrong? The idea of using two large wheels to cross uneven terrain is not misguided. It's the reason why mountain bikes can go places that skateboards can't. But the Tsar tank's problem was that third wheel. The third wheel rear was much smaller, and there was only one of it, and yet the weight of the Tsar Tank was distributed so that a large portion of the vehicles mass was resting on that single wheel. And when you're talking about 60 tons of tank that's going to be a problem.

Needless to say, the Tsar Tank never made it into combat, but even if it had there likely would have been another problem. The big spoked wheels in the front would have probably been vulnerable to artillery fire, meaning that even if you could work out the weight distribution problem, the vehicle likely wouldn't have survived very long on the battlefield.

Unfortunately the Tsar who commissioned the Tsar Tank didn't survive much longer either. In February of 1917 the Russian people revolted against Nicholas II and killed him and his entire family. In the years that followed Nikolay Lebedenko, the man who engineered the tank would disappear in the chaotic upheaval of the revolution. In 1923 his creating, the single largest military land vehicle ever constructed would be pulled apart and melted down for scrap.

He Will Not Divide Us, however he will inspire a legion of trolls to take on Shia Labeouf's Trump inspired art project. The unified force of trolls from 4chan would work together using technology, astronomy, and slurs to bring down the He Will Not Divide Us flag.

Set in New York, Albequerque, Tennessee, Liverpool, France, and Poland, this international tale of resistance to resistance is surely trolling on a scale never before seen.

Listen to find out who wins between the battle of 4chan and Shia Labeouf.

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Dogecoin started life as a joke. Jackson Palmer, Tweeted "Investing in Dogecoin, pretty sure it's the next big thing." This was a reference to a popular meme featuring a breed of dog called a Shiba Inu adorned with Comic Sans text. Jackson was poking fun at the rapid proliferation of so-called "altcoins" cryptocurrencies that hoped to rival the success of Bitcoin. But the response to Palmer's joke was enthusiastic and positive. Still, the joke might have ended there if not for a programmer named Billy Markus. Markus had dabbled with creating his own cryptocurrency in the past and he contacted Palmer to offer his services. Together the two men cooked up Dogecoin, an altcoin cryptocurrency inspired by a joke about how there were too many altcoin cryptocurrencies being created. Naturally it featured the clueless face of a Shiba Inu dog. The cryptocurrency launched on December 6, 2013. By December 19, the value of the joke currency had skyrocketed, quadrupling it's value in just a few days of trading. The money based on a meme seemed to have a memetic appeal all it's own. Three days later the currency would lose 80% of its value, but by now it was at the very least being talked about in serious cryptocurrency circles. However three days after THAT on December 25, a hacker managed to manupulate a popular Dogecoin storage solution called Dogewallet and stole $12,000 worth of Dogecoin. As if that wasn't enough drama for the cryptocurrency that was still less than a month old, the Dogecoin community, led by the makers of Dogewallet launched an initiative called "Save Dogemas" to make whole those who had had their Dogecoin stolen. This generosity of the early Doge community was not a one-off. In 2014 they led a Dogecoin fundraiser to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics, and then they helped build a well in Kenya. But the happygolucky Dogecoin community hadn't seen the last of its share of troubles. Throughout 2014 a user in the Dogecoin reddit subreddit who called himself _Moolah started engratiating himself to community by generously tipping other community members in Dogecoin seemingly for no reason. And once he had their trust he asked them to invest in his new business venture, an online Dogecoin exchange called Moolah. But after accepting investment from the community to get the site up and running and then accepting deposits of Dogecoin into his newly created exchange, Moolah experienced a "critical bug" and many users lost the ability to withdraw their Dogecoin. The man behind Moolah was eventually identified as Ryan Kennedy, a man with a history of cons and scams. And because of the nature of Dogecoin it was difficult to know what could be done about it. Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies aren't "money" in the legal sense, so people who had been scammed had no clear legal recourse. Dogecoin also suffered price manipulation at the hands of cryptocurrency "investors" looking to make a quick buck in the largely unregulated market. By 2015 the shine had worn off of Dogecoin, and even creator Jackson Palmer said he wanted to take a step back from the cryptocurrency community. Why? Because he didn't care for the kind of people he saw taking an interest in cryptocurrency. "All in all, the cryptocurrency space increasingly feels like a bunch of white libertarian bros sitting around hoping to get rich and coming up with half-baked, buzzword-filled business ideas which often fail," Palmer told coindesk.com. He had also become dissallusioned with the lack of security in the world of cryptocurrency. He had created a version of cryptocurrency that had made regular people feel comfortable investing in this new kind of financial market, and the result was that many of those people had lost significant amounts of money and there was no recourse for them. The irony is that Palmer had CREATED dogecoin to point at the flaws in the altcoin market. Even back in 2013 new cryptocurrencies were being created all the time. They were presented as investement opportunities, but they were often the tools of what are called "pump and dump" schemes where the creator of a cryptocurrency artifically inflates the price of that currency and then sells off their holdings to gullible investors. And the process shows no signs of slowing. As of March 16, 2018 there were 1,638 different cryptocurrencies. In the end Dogecoin itself isn't the bad idea here. But it's entire history has been a lens through which we can view the problems with cryptocurrency in general and alt-coins in particular. Cryptocurrency isn't even a good idea as an investment. At the beginning of the year the market capitalization of Dogecoin was 1.5 billion dollars. Today it has plunged along with the rest of the cryptocurrency market to where it is today at 386 million dollars.

This week on Bad Ideas we dive headlong into the rapids, waves, and speedy death traps at Action Park in Vernon, New Jersey. Action Park was an adventure and water park that featured some of the most dangerous attractions seen in the united states. It even included a full loop water slide that only survived full operation for one summer.

|| More Human Echoes stuff: http://humanechoes.com || Become a member for BONUS PODCASTS: http://bit.ly/1NkSWnQ || Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HumanEchoes

Bad Ideas Podcast on iTunes: http://apple.co/2yrDfyx

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Follow us on Mixer for all of our live streams:: https://Mixer.com/HumanEchoes

Listen to Bad Ideas: https://youtu.be/8RDb6jlY_4A

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You can also follow the Human Echoes Peeps on Twitter!

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@josephdevon