Robo Golf A Robotic golf game that you've never seen.

TrevEB

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Robo Golf A Robotic golf game that you've never seen.

This game was developed by my brother in-law in 1996.

Sadly it never made it past the production prototype.

Robo Golf ran on an intel 386.
It could play itself (very well) and was capable of having the terrain swapped
out for custom layouts which would then be scanned
by the computer.
It took about 4-6 hours to do it for a 4'x8' layout.

This is the marketing video that went out to prospective customers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvcaMLTaROU

I believe the game still sits in storage along with a Robo Hockey and bitter tears
for a lot of hard work and cash for a game that never made it into production.
 
Just watched the video, and Robo Golf actually seems pretty cool! I guess the idea was to revive the electromechanical games of the 60s and 70s.

Fantastic concept; its a shame that the idea ended up failing.
 
That's amazing! And this thing failed?! How much were they trying to sell them for?

Was he backed by venture capital or something? Seems like it must've been extremely expensive to develop that thing.
 
I believe the production prototype cost 16k to build. The target price was 12-14k. True that is pretty expensive for an arcade machine. However those other big games at the time like Ski Champ, Galaxian 3, Race driving with an actual miata, etc were probably in that range too.

Dean was back by family, and a mortgage on the house.

Dean's family was in the nursing home business. The original intent was to give these people something fun to do. As the projected developed, it was easy to see that the game could work in many venues. Ultimately it still proved to be to complex for nursing homes, but by then the homes seemed like a niche market at best. This game belonged in Sports bars and Dave & Busters.
 
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