25 years of the N64: Glover
Imagine, for a moment, that the Hamburger Helper mascot knows magic and can solve environmental platforming puzzles, too.
On September 29, 2021, the Nintendo 64 will turn 25 years old in North America. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be covering the console, its games, its innovations, and its legacy. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Glover is one of those games that escaped me for the longest time, but just the sheer weirdness of the premise meant it was always there as something I’d have to get to someday. You play as a glove. A glove with the ability to act on its own. A glove that can solve environmental puzzles through physics-based gameplay, involving a ball that can be changed into other kinds of balls, through magic cast by the glove. The glove belonged to a wizard, you see, and after some spell-casting gone awry, the glove you play as has to save the world from the glove that is now evil.
Glover, released on both the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation — it is universally agreed-upon that the N64 version is the superior one — is very much an early 3D platformer. In how it looks, in how it plays, in the things about it that frustrate. It’s still quite a bit of fun, though, as long as you have the patience to put up with the elements of it that are extremely 1998 about it. Video games weren’t new by 1998, no, but 3D platformers were still relatively new back then, and many of the most significant problems with them — the camera, the physics, parts of the platforming itself, especially where falling into an abyss was concerned — felt like they were part of something new, because they were. Hell, Nintendo wouldn’t figure out how to get a working camera into a 3D Super Mario game for another decade, so expecting Hasbro Interactive — or anyone — to get there a couple of years into the existence of this particular genre was asking a bit much.
That’s not to put down the fine folks at Interactive Studios, of course. If you’re looking for a seamless 3D platforming experience, well, what are you doing looking in the 90s for it? Glover remains fun because, in spite of the aforementioned issues, there is a distinctiveness to it that keeps it intriguing all these years later. There are two sets of controls to learn: when you are just controlling the titular Glover, and when you are Glover while Glover has a ball in his… hand? I guess he’s all hand, so, uh, in his possession? Yeah, let’s go with that. Things are simple enough when you’re just Glover sans ball, as he can jump into the air and ground pound enemies by slamming his body, in fist shape, into the ground. He can cartwheel, he can double jump — pretty standard 3D platforming behavior, outside of the whole being an anthropomorphic glove thing.
When you control the ball, though, Glover is tougher, but also at its best. The ball is the point: the balls themselves are actually magic crystals that need to be returned to the wizard’s castle in order to reverse a spell gone wrong, but they’ve been transformed into a pretty standard rubber ball, like the kind you’d buy at the grocery store for $1 so your kids have something to play with until they manage to pop the thing. Glover himself cast the spell that transformed them, so the crystals wouldn’t break upon hitting the ground after they fell out of the castle. That isn’t just a plot point, but is also your introduction to something Glover will spend quite a bit of the game doing: transforming the balls into different kinds of balls in order to solve environmental puzzles and defeat enemies.
In its basic, default form, the ball bounces and has moderate durability. Glover can use the ball in this form in multiple ways, such as a way to traverse the environment — bounce the ball so that it also bounces Glover upward with the force of its bounce, allowing you to climb steps and the like. Pick up the ball and throw it, then cross gaps you wouldn’t be able to cross if Glover was still holding the ball. Slap the ball at enemies, or at certain objects, be they targets that help you open gates or make platforms move or the collectible cards, called garibs: you’ll score more points if you collect those garibs with the ball or while holding the ball, and the quicker you collect them, the higher the point bonus, too.
You can also transform the ball into a heavier bowling ball, which is the most durable version of the ball, and is heavy enough to sink in water. It also does more damage to enemies than any other version of the ball, given it’s a bowling ball. There is also the ballbearing, which is magnetic, and since it doesn’t bounce and isn’t overly heavy, is also the easiest of all of the balls to corral and control. Lastly, there is the choice to return the ball to its original crystal form, which has no real benefit outside of further increasing the points you score when you collect garibs. It’s at its most fragile in this form, so it’s best you don’t mess around with the ball in its crystal form unless you’ve already cleared an area of enemies, or are somewhere where there aren’t any kind of dangerous obstacles like traps in your way.
You’ll switch between the different forms of the ball again and again in order to climb, to cross water, to defeat enemies, to make it through the various puzzles and environments the game throws at you. There are three levels in each of the game’s six worlds, and a fourth bonus level in each world opens up if you manage to collect every one of the garibs scattered around these three levels. Collecting 50 garibs nets you an extra life, too, and you will likely need those since, as previously mentioned, this is a very 1998 3D platformer. You will fall off of places you did not know you could fall off of until it’s too late. Your ball will bounce in a way you did not expect it to, and end up falling into the abyss of nothingness below the platforms you’re supposed to be rooted to. Those extra lives will come in handy, is all, so even if you don’t plan on unlocking all of the bonus levels, at least collect all the garibs you see in your path in order to get those extra lives.
If you truly don’t care about the bonus levels, or want to lessen the 1998 of it all a little, there is an easy difficulty you can play on, which makes traversing water a whole lot easier by making it automatic in the areas where you normally would have had to fight against a current and the game’s controls to cross these sections. For some reason, the controls reverse direction when you stand atop the ball and use it for transportation, which can be extremely disorienting in water that’s pushing you along or back from whence you came. The downside is that you can’t access the bonus levels at all, so if you do want to experience Glover in full, then you will just have to learn how to deal with this disorienting experience on the normal difficulty.
I keep mentioning that this game/all of 3D platforming in the 90s is very much behind the kind of 3D platforming trends you have learned to expect from games in the more recent era of the genre, but there are elements to it that are ahead of its time, too. For one, building an entire game around this idea of protecting an essential object while also utilizing it for platforming isn’t exactly one you see a lot of even now. It’s the kind of thing you see more in specific missions instead of an entire game’s concept, and I promise Glover feels much more fun platformer while you play it then it does annoying escort mission of some kind.
And second, Glover has an easy to access method for always locating the ball that you’re currently supposed to be protecting, as well as whichever ball you’re supposed to find next. All you have to do is hold down the B button for a moment, and a thought bubble containing the ball will appear over Glover, while he points at where you’re supposed to go. There are modern open-world games with maps that don’t even let you do that kind of thing! It’s not a unique touch now by any means, but it was still something of a shock to see it in a game as old as Glover.
A welcome shock, at least: this is the kind of thing you would hope would be added to a platformer from this era in a modern re-release, since it would help ease some of the camera and navigation issues that are inherent to the time period’s design strategies and technical limitations. This lets you leave the ball behind so you can go around platforming as just Glover without fear of losing track of the thing you’re supposed to successfully carry throughout each level, and also makes it so you always know where you’re supposed to go next, even in an overworld limited both by its camera and the fog that covers everything that isn’t directly in front of you. It’s good stuff.
So, if Glover was fun to play, and somewhat unique, why was it never revisited or turned into a series? Well, that’s a fun story, unless you were one of the people responsible for there being a story to tell, anyway. Less than a year after the release of Glover, Interactive Studios announced that they were working on a sequel to the game. There were supposed to be improvements to the various aspects of the game — puzzle design, ball physics, and so on — but we never ended up getting a chance to see if those promises would be fulfilled, as the sequel was canceled. It wasn’t because of anything the sequel was doing, either: the game was canceled because of a poor decision made by a Hasbro employee in charge of ordering cartridges for their Nintendo 64 games.
While the original blog post no longer exists, a quoted version of it still does at Unseen 64. The since-deleted post was written by a former employee of Interactive Studios, James Steele:
“…as far as we were told, Glover 2 had been canned because of Glover 1. Now this seems strange, because the first Glover has sold fairly well for a non-Nintendo N64 title. And it was on the back of those sales that Glover 2 had been given the go-ahead at Hasbro in the first place.
But Hasbro had messed up. They had screwed the pooch big time. You see, when ordering the carts for the first game, the standard production run was something like 150,000 units. And this is what the management at ISL had advised Hasbro to order – because the N64 wasn’t really fairing that well compared to the PS1 at the time and non Nintendo titles tended to sell poorly. They thought that Glover was a good game in its own right, and a moderate 3rd party success would sell around 150,000 units. And that is exactly what happened. Hence the go ahead for the sequel.
So Glover was a money maker for Hasbro, right? Right? Nuh-uh. As it happened, Nintendo had a special on N64 carts at the time the game was being schedule for production. Some bright spark at Hasbro thought it would just be absolutely SUPER to order double the normal amount – so they put in an order 300,000 units at a slightly reduced cost.
The problem was that none of the retailers wanted to take that stock off Hasbro’s hands. The game had been moderately successful, but the demand just wasn’t there. And thus Hasbro was left with 150,000 or so copies of Glover for the N64 that nobody wanted. That’s something like half-a-million dollars worth of stock that they can’t shift. And with Hasbro Interactive not being in the best of financial shape Glover became a dirty word around the company, as it became apparent over the course of Glover 2 development that they were stuck with all those carts.
Of course, the blame was put on the game and brand itself rather than the idiot who ordered the extra 150,000 carts from Nintendo. And that ladies and gentlemen, is why Glover 2 had been cancelled.”
Hasbro Interactive was having, as Steele referred to, some financial issues at the time, so Glover being “responsible” for about half-a-million bucks worth of loss despite doing exactly what it was otherwise budgeted and projected to do ended up stigmatizing the sequel. So, the sequel was dropped, even though it was already 80-85 percent complete at the time of its cancellation, per Steele.
There’s still hope for Glover 2, however. Piko Interactive, a developer that focuses on physical releases of older games and digital ports to modern systems, has acquired not just the rights to the original Glover, but Glover 2 and that game’s unfinished code, as well, and they plan to release both on modern platforms at some point. They specialize in some mostly forgotten games, and it’s tough to be more forgotten about than a game that never saw the light of day to begin with. Glover was something of a lost relic of the N64 for years, thanks to Hasbro Interactive’s foibles and the rights to the game changing hands over time, but it’s now in the hands of a publisher that plans to do something with it, and we might even get a chance to see if the improvements to the original formula that were promised in the sequel were actually there, or if it now just looks and feels like Banjo-Kazooie, only starring a glove.
Glover isn’t my favorite N64 game by any means, but it managed to stand out during an era where seemingly everything was either a new 3D platformer series or a transition of a 2D platformer into 3D, and I had fun playing it in the present-day despite my general stance of only being so impressed by early 3D platformers. It never truly got the shot to succeed that it deserved, since the N64 wasn’t nearly the success that the Playstation was and the version of the game released on the latter system was infuriatingly inferior to the former’s edition. Maybe a re-release and a decades-later release of Glover 2 can change that, though, and move Glover into being something more than a curiosity from the past and a title that allows for the telling of a tragic story in game development.
And hey, if you want to play right now and don’t feel like waiting for Piko to deliver on a promise they made three years ago, you can get an N64 copy of Glover off of Ebay for $15-20. There are certainly worse ways to spend $20, and you only have to buy one cartridge instead of 300,000 of them, to boot.
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