Except they weren’t: R.O.B.

The hottest toy of the 1985 Christmas season was an Extraordinary Video Robot that could play games through your television.

Except it wasn’t.

The “robot” in that 1985 commercial was R.O.B. (Robot Operating Buddy), which shipped with early copies of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to test markets in New York and Los Angeles. The NES proved to be a big hit in those test markets, and so the console rolled out throughout the U.S. over the next year – but without R.O.B. Why?

The best way to explain R.O.B. is to show him in action. It’s a collector’s item today, available on eBay for anywhere from $20 to $500 depending on its condition. To use R.O.B., power it on, plug in the second NES controller into the base unit, and load onr of the two games that works with it, Gyromite or Stack-Up.

The youtube channel videogamecollector shows what it looks like running, and it’s very cool:

R.O.B. in action

…but beneath all the spinning and blinking and robot noises, here’s what R.O.B. was really doing: pressing the select button on the second controller. Which means that you could play the same two games much more easily without R.O.B., simply by pressing the select button on the second controller.

Why would Nintendo design something so complicated and so utterly pointless? It wasn’t a robot, it was a trojan horse. R.O.B.’s entire purpose was to hide the fact that the NES was a video game system.

And why would Nintendo of America want to hide the fact that their beautifully designed video game system was a video game system? Remember that this was fall 1985, before the wild success of the NES. But for a full answer, we need to look back even farther into the history of video games.

The first commercially successful video game was Pong, released in 1972 and still bizarrely addictive today. Following Pong, many other of these new “video games” were released to the new video arcades that were springing up all over the United States. As arcades became more and more popular, video game makers began to wonder how to bring the experience into their customers’ homes. After a few false starts, the first massive hit was the Atari 2600, released in 1977.

Manufacturers created hundreds and hundreds of games for the Atari system – and that was the problem. With so many titles clogging store shelves, and with a medium so new that there were not yet any reviews, customers had no way to tell good games from bad games.

The final indignity was the officially licensed E.T. video game, released in time for Christmas 1982. Atari spent millions to acquire the rights to what was at the time the highest-grossing movie of all time, and millions more on marketing, but left the game to a single developer to rush out in six weeks. The results were famously terrible:

A playthrough of the famously terrible E.T. game for the Atari 2600, from J.C.’s Channel on YouTube

Millions of American children woke up on Christmas morning to a shiny new copy of Atari’s E.T., only to have their joy turn to despair within minutes of starting up the boring, bug-filled mess above. Word quickly spread, sales dried up, and retailers were stuck with millions of unsold copies sitting on shelves. They sent the cartridges back to Atari, who had no choice but to take the loss and bury them in a New Mexico landfill.

It wasn’t just E.T.; every other game and even every other video game system completely dried up. Atari nearly went bankrupt, staying in business only by reorganizing and selling off its software division. Industry analysts declared that the fad was over; there was no more consumer demand for video games. That state of affairs continued for years. And that was the situation that Nintendo of America found itself in in fall 1985.

Nintendo had good reason to believe that video games would take off again – there was no video game industry crash in Japan, and their Famicom system had sold steadily there since 1983. And they thought they knew the cause of the crash and what to do about it. They would have strict quality control over all the games on their system, made possible by a licensing agreement and enforced by a lockout chip preventing unlicensed games from playing. They would create an in-house magazine to offer reviews, previews of future games, and strategy information to players. But even with all these efforts in place, they still had a major hurdle to overcome to get their new system to consumers.

This was 1985, years before online shopping was even a dream. To even get the chance to sell to customers, Nintendo knew it first had to sell to retailers who were understandably skeptical of video games after the crash of 1983.

So how do you sell a video game system to people who don’t like video games? Tell them it’s totally not a video game system! It’s an ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM! And R.O.B. was a key part of that strategy. It looked like a toy, so retailers concluded that it must be a toy – and they marketed it like any other toy. Nintendo proved to be absolutely right about the NES. And as you can see below, thirty-five years later: the rest is history.

A recent world speed record for completing Super Mario Brothers, 4 minutes 55.64 seconds, by YouTube’s Kosmic.

Except they weren’t: The Tree Lobster

An 8-inch-long red creature that looks like a huge cockroach combined with a small lobter
A specimen tree lobster (Dryococelus australis) from the Melbourne Museum. Click for a larger version.
Credit: Peter Halasz (Wikipedia user Pengo)

The Lord Howe Island Stick Insect (Dryococelus australis) was one of the strangest animals ever to walk the earth.

It lived only on Lord Howe Island, a tiny island of 300 people about halfway between Australia and New Zealand. It was eight inches (20 cm) long. It looked like a weird cross between a cockroach and a lobster, and so it was nicknamed the Tree Lobster. It had no natural predators. It was completely harmless, living in and munching on trees.

In 1918, the SS Makambo ran aground on Lord Howe Island, and thousands of rats escaped like, uh, rats from a sinking ship. The rats ate and bred, and the tree lobster never stood a chance. Within two years, the Lord Howe Island stick insect was extinct.

Except it wasn’t.

The Discovery

Thirteen miles (20 km) southwest of Lord Howe Island is Ball’s Pyramid, an extinct volcano that juts 1,800 feet (560 meters) up from the remote Pacific Ocean. It’s one of the world’s truly beautiful places, and one that very few people ever get to see. But you can see it in this photo:

Panorama of Ball’s Pyramid
Image Credit: Jon Clark (CC BY 2.0 license)

…and you can go there yourself with on Google Earth, embedded below. Be sure to zoom out until you can see Lord Howe Island, and then a looooooooong way farther until you can see the coast of Australia.

Scientists guessed – hoped, really – that some tree lobsters might have floated the 13 miles from Lord Howe Island to Ball’s Pyramid and established a sustainable population there. There are no trees on Ball’s Pyramid, but there are enough small bushes to provide a food and shelter for some stick insects. And so, two of them (scientists, not stick insects) decided to have a look for themselves.

In February 2001, David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile traveled to Ball’s Pyramid to search. They climbed the rock, hundreds of feet above shark-infested waters, to search. And after a few searches, they found some sign of tree lobsters. And by “sign,” I mean “poop.”

But of course a few piles of poop isn’t enough evidence to conclude that a species has apparently risen from the dead. And the stick insect is nocturnal, so to find live animals, they knew they had to go back at night.

And so on the night of February 26, 2001, Priddel and Carlile went back to look again. “Went back” meaning “climbed up a sheer rock face above shark-infested waters in complete darkness.” Yes, they had safety equipment, but it must have still been terrifying.

And they found it: under a single tea tree plant (Melaleuca howeana) was the world’s entire population of Lord Howe Island Stick Insects. Twenty-four of them. The scientific paper Priddel and Carlile wrote uses detached academic prose, which completely fails to hide their excitement:

Two members of the survey team (N.C. and D.H.) ascended the Pyramid at night to conduct a nocturnal search of the area surrounding the shrub… Reaching this site at approximately [10 PM], they found, observed and photographed two adult female D. australis on the outer edges of the shrub (Figure 2).

These specimens, the first to be seen alive in more than 70 years, were highly conspicuous, their glossy bodies strongly reflecting the [flashlight]…

(Priddle, Carlile, Humphrey, Fellenberg, & Hiscox, 2003)

The Current Situation

A black-and-white photo of a stick insect seen in 2001. It looks like a giant cockroach crossed with a small lobster. It's sitting on some tea tree leaves.
This is it: the discovery photo of the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect (Priddle, Carlile, Humphrey, Fellenberg, & Hiscox, 2003, Figure 2, page 1395)

Two years later in 2003, scientists returned to Ball’s Pyramid to collect specimens. They returned with two males and two females, which they sent to the Melbourne Zoo to start a captive breeding program.

Seventeen years and fifteen tree lobster generations later, a healthy population of 14,000 tree lobsters lives in captivity – mostly in Melbourne, with some pairs in zoos all over the world. Once rats are eliminated from Lord Howe Island (which they’re also working on), the plan is to reintroduce the tree lobster to its original habitat.

It’s a rare success story in a world full of creatures we are driving to extinction. But let’s take our success stories when we can. There’s hope.

More information

If you’d like to learn more about this fascinating story, check out these resources:

How you can help

The captive breeding program is expensive, so if this story is calling to you through a world full of need, the Melbourne Zoo is accepting donations to continue their work. Here is a two-page fundraising brochure explaining the program. If you feel called to donate to conservation biology more generally, a good place to start is the World Wildlife Fund. Obviously no pressure to donate during these trying times. I have no affiliation with either entity, so no conflict of interest.

Postscript

This has been super-fun, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Here’s that animated film, embedded via Vimeo.

Sticky from jilli rose on Vimeo
.

Be sure to check out the rest of my series on Things That Are Not What They Seem, Except They Weren’t.

Except They Weren’t: The Grass Mud Horse

A photo of an alpaca standing next to a man in Bolivia
The Grass Mud Horse is its natural habitat. Except it isn’t.
Source: Flickr user Patrick Furlong via Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia is banned in the People’s Republic of China. You can imagine what the country’s notoriously repressive and information-controlling  government might think of a “free encyclopedia anyone can edit.”

Instead, China offers Baidu Baike, an editable encyclopedia site that is like Wikipedia, except that all entries are reviewed and approved by one of China’s many, many full-time Internet censors. In other words, not like Wikipedia at all.

You won’t find a Baidu Baike article on ???? (the “June Fourth Incident,” their name for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests), and the article on ?? (Democracy) is underwhelming. But these curious omissions notwithstanding, Baidu Baike has more than 15 million articles covering all aspects of life in the People’s Republic of China.

In early 2009, a series of new articles appeared called the Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures (??????), profiling some of the legendary creatures of Chinese folklore. The most famous of these was the famous grass mud horse, one of the most beloved creatures of Chinese mythology.

Except it wasn’t – the whole thing was an adolescent joke.

Chinese is a a tonal language, in which words are built up from simple components and vocally distinguished by the relative pitch of your voice. Thus the opportunity for puns are endless – and grass mud horse (???, pronounced “C?o Ní M?,” which sounds very similar to the Chinese words for “f*ck your mother” (not providing the translation so I don’t get down-ranked by search engines that know Chinese).

The Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures articles didn’t last long. Although they were perhaps mildly amused, the authorities were Not Impressed, and took down each article soon after it appeared, with little fanfare – and, as far as I can tell, no repercussions for the anonymous editors who posted them. But sometimes, a thing on the Internet becomes A THING ON THE INTERNET, and the 10 mythical creatures became such a thing. And none was a greater THING than the grass mud horse. It’s not immediately obvious how to depict an imaginary pun-based animal, but the Internet quickly decided that the grass mud horse looked like an alpaca.

A crab wearing three wristwatches
The river crab reminds you to promote a harmonious society

As the grass mud horse became more and more popular, in One Of Those Bizarre Things That Happens Sometimes, it quickly took on an additional significance: as the unofficial mascot of the fight against internet censorship in China. It soon acquired an elaborate pun-based mythology: the only natural enemy of the grass mud horse is the river crab (??, héxiè), whose name sounds like the Chinese government’s “harmonious society” policy, of which Internet censorship is a part. The river crab is usually depicted as “wearing three wristwatches” (????, dài s?n ge bi?o), which sounds like the “Three Represents” interpretation of communism promoted by former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. It all came together in the Song of the Grass Mud Horse video, widely viewed on YouTube – except in China, which bans YouTube. Watch it below, with English subtitles:

Eventually, the censors caught on and banned the grass mud horse too. But it was fun while it lasted, and it has lived on as a symbol of the Chinese resistance. Sadly, that resistance has been powerless to stop censorship, particularly with the government’s new social credit system. But it was fun while it lasted. Because:

If your friend sent you a photo of an alpaca, at least you knew you weren’t alone.

Except they weren’t: Count Victor Lustig

Photo of Robert V. Miller
Robert V. Miller, aka
Count Victor Lustig

Count Victor Lustig (1890-1947) was an Austro-Hungarian nobleman in the early 1900s. A brilliant businessman who was fluent in several languages, he lived a life of leisure on ocean liners, traveling back and forth between France and the United States. He made his fortune on these ships, selling his most famous invention: the money box. It was a device, the size of a large suitcase, that printed out a fresh new $100 bill each and every day – and Lustig was its proud inventor.

Do I even need to say it this time? Except he wasn’t.

There is no such thing as a money box, and Lustig wasn’t even a real Count. He was born as Robert V. Miller in Hostinné, Austria-Hungary (now part of the Czech Republic). Lustig was just one of his many aliases, but it was his favorite, and is the name by which he has gone down in history – as the greatest con man who ever lived.

First class on a transatlantic ocean liner is the perfect place to run a confidence trick, or con. Fabulously wealthy complete strangers were thrown together for exactly one week, with nothing to do but try to impress each other with their fabulous wealth – and then they were almost sure to never see each other again.

A photo of a suitcase, not a money box
Not a money box. Will not print money.

And the money box was the perfect con to run in such a setting. It looked complicated, full of gears and levers and whirring noises, but its secret was its simplicity. In an unassuming unmarked box on the side of the machine, Lustig has pre-loaded around ten $100 bills, on top of a stack of bill-sized blank paper. Each day, on schedule, the money box printed out a $100 bill with great fanfare (corrected for inflation, that would be about $1,200 today).

Lustig would make small talk with marks (the con artist’s term for the person they are in the process of swindling) at the beginning of the voyage. He would gain their trust, then swear them to secrecy while showing his greatest invention.

When the mark inevitably asked where they could get their own money box, Lustig would initially refuse to disclose anything more. But as the week went on, he would relent, and say, well maybe I could sell this money box, if the price were right. Sometimes he would get two or more marks to engage in a bidding war, driving up the price.

Ultimately, he would sell the machine for $10,000 or more. He would wish a fond farewell to the mark, promising to write and to totally look them up next time he was in America. By the time the mark noticed that the money box was now a blank paper box, Lustig would be on the return voyage, running the same con on a new mark.

His record sale came in the 1920s, when he sold a money box to New York City gambling ring for $46,000. Subtracting the $1,000 in preloaded bills and corrected for inflation into 2018 dollars, he made a nice profit of half a million dollars.

But this is just part one of the story of Victor Lustig. We haven’t even gotten to the part where he vanished a jail cell on the third floor in Manhattan, in broad daylight. Or the time Al Capone called him the most honest man he ever met, while handing him a check for $5,000. Or his most famous con.

Count Victor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower. Twice.

Photo of the Eiffel Tower
Not for sale

In 1925, he moved to Paris, set up an office in the city’s most expensive hotel, and announced that the Eiffel Tower was being sold for scrap.

Except it wasn’t.

This of course sounds completely ridiculous today, but in 1925, it was just believable enough to work. The Eiffel Tower then was not the beloved Paris institution that it is today. It had been built as a temporary exhibit for the 1889 World’s Fair, intended to be dismantled at the end of the event. They just never got around to tearing it down, and 36 years later it was starting to show its age. The French Government had no long-term plan, and rumors were swirling about what would happen to the ugly-but-not-yet-so-ugly-it’s-beautiful monument.

Count Victor Lustig read about some of those rumors in the newspaper, and came up with a CUNNING PLAN. He looked up the city’s most prominent scrap metal dealers and wrote them letters posing as Deputy Director of the Ministère de Postes et Télégraphes (a French government agency, now split into La Poste and Orange S.A.). When dealers came to visit, he told them of the city’s plan (which existed only in his head). When one dealer was ready to sign up, Lustig casually mentioned that, hey, it’s tough to live on a civil servant salary.

That last part was a stroke of genius. The scrap dealer got the message and offered some extra cash as a bribe – both giving him some extra money and ensuring that the mark didn’t try to work with anyone else, like someone in the real ministry. As soon as he had the cash in hand, Lustig got the hell out of Paris.

The next week, the mark showed up at the Ministry to collect the Eiffel Tower scrap iron permit, and was laughed out of the office – and he was too embarrassed to go to the police.

And so, the next year, Count Victor Lustig returned to Paris and did it all again.

Except they weren’t: Major William Martin

The grave of Major William Martin
(Wikipedia user Rufito)

April 30, 1943, off the coast of Spain.

World War II had been raging for nearly five years, but the Allies were finally starting to gain the upper hand. Both sides knew that the next logical battlefront would be an Allied invasion of somewhere in Southern Europe. The Germans were on high alert for any advance knowledge of the Allies’ plans. Late that night, a Spanish fisherman found a body floating in shallow water – wearing a British Royal Marines uniform with a locked a briefcase chained around its waist – and reported it to local police. Spain was officially neutral but informally allied with Germany, so the find soon ended up in the hands of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency.

The briefcase contained documents identifying the late soldier as Major William Martin. Martin’s briefcase also contained a letter from a high-ranking British army officer, addressed to another, with instructions to Martin to hand-deliver. The letter covered a number of topics, but most importantly for the story, described in detail the planned Allied invasion of Greece. When Hitler read the letter, he ordered more than 5,000 German troops to Greece to repel the invasion, along with fighters and U-boats to support them.

Thanks to this move, the Allies encountered little resistance in their invasion of Sicily.

Which of course was the plan all along.

And thus, presenting the man who saved Europe: Major William Martin.

Except he wasn’t.

He really did save Europe, but he really wasn’t Major William Martin. He was really Glyndwr Michael (first name pronounced GLIN-dor), a homeless man from Wales who died from eating rat poison. It was either a tragic accident or a suicide – we’ll never know for sure. Either way, he had no living relatives, so he was perfect for the plan; no living relatives means no one to ask where the body went.

British intelligence agents dressed Michael in a Major’s uniform, provided him with fake documents (including fake love letters from a fake fiancée), and published a fake obituary in the London Times. They included the all-important letter, which contained a mix of easily-verifiable truths and completely fictional invasion plans. Then they loaded Michael/Martin’s body onto the submarine HMS Seraph. At 4:15 AM on April 30th, the Seraph surfaced, its commanding officer led a service of burial at sea, and the crew lowered the body into the water. The fisherman found the body the same day, and the rest is history.

After the war ended, the body of Michael/Martin was returned to the British and buried in the British section of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad Cemetery in Huelva, Spain, not far from where it was first found.

There the story remained until 1953, when the British decided to reveal the truth. The commanding officer of the intelligence operation wrote The Man Who Never Was, which became a movie of the same name. But even in those works, the identity of “the man who never was” was not revealed. Finally, in 1996, an amateur historian identified the body as Michael’s. And in 1997, the British took the unprecedented step of carving a new message into the gravestone:

Glyndwr Michael; Served as Major William Martin, RM

And soon after, this man who would have likely been forgotten got a memorial in his hometown, reading:

Carved text in a war memorial

THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS
In recognition of services
to the allied war effort
by
GLYNDWR MICHAEL
of
Aberbargoed

4 February 1909 – 24 April 1943

Postscript

Thanks to one of my Internet Heroes, Tom Scott, for introducing me to this story thanks to his Things You Might Not Know video series: