We recently reported on a strange little toy called the Barcode Battler that came out in 1990, after a time of handheld gaming dominated by the Game Boy and the Sega Game Gear. The Barcode Battler allowed players to scan the bar code on their cereal, cleaning supplies, and so on, and then use that bar code to create a character stat for a game. It was one of the first examples of this type of device and was launched in Japan by Epoch Co.
The Barcode Battler included a pack of cards containing bar codes, which allowed users to scan the bar codes of any products they wished and receive a character, enemy, or item in a very basic RPG battle style. It was exciting to scan the bar code of some everyday item, and see what stats it would produce for your wizard or warrior. There were no graphics at all, only numbers on an LCD display.
Although the Barcode Battler didn’t have much success in the West, it did relatively well in Japan. So well, in fact, that it spawned official card packs for The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros, as well as an add-on to connect it to the Famicom and Super Famicom.
For those who lived in an era prior to cell phones and being able to connect anywhere, it was a unique spin on the cyberpunk dream, bridging the gap between the real world and the virtual world. In Japan, the fad became so popular that some products sold out because children believed they had special barcodes.
While the idea seemed innovative, the execution of the Barcode Battler was limited in several areas. The LCD screen was simple, the game itself was repetitive, many barcodes did not function as anticipated, and the scanner was unreliable. When comparing the experience to handheld consoles with actual graphics and audio, the experience felt shallow.
Although the Barcode Battler was an original experiment, around the same time, Tiger Electronics, which never met a gimmick it was above ripping off, produced Barcodzz, an attempt to market a western version of the concept using barcoded cards and a creature-collecting mechanism. While the Tiger Barcodzz (image above courtesy of VC&G) did produce a playable product, it was only marginally successful, with very limited depth of gameplay, and a scanner that could be uncooperative at best.
Bandai even experimented with the barcode concept with Barcode Wars, a pre-Battler card-scanner hybrid, which paired manga-styled cards with a simple LCD combat readout. Although the system was basic, it had ambition to it, including themed card sets and some rudimentary RPG elements, and had exclusive games in franchises that would be revisited on their later WonderSwan console, like Mega Man.
Around this time, the Barcode Boy was an accessory for the original Game Boy released under the Namco (Namcot) brand in Japan in 1992. It attached via the Game Boy’s link port and allowed you to scan barcodes from special cards, and yes, even from store-bought packaging, to unlock characters, items, or features in compatible games.
Then, almost a full decade after the Barcode Battler, the Skannerz series from Radica launched around 2000. Skannerz allowed users to scan UPC barcodes to collect creatures, fight with them, create multiplayer games using multiple devices, and even create tribes. Of everything in this article, this was easily the most successful, likely due to a very prominent advertising campaign.
The last gasp occurred years later with stuff like the Game Boy Advance e-Reader and UB Funkeys. Today, barcode gaming is almost entirely a footnote. However, there are echoes of the technology in modern AR games, mobile apps that utilize scanners, and even QR-code interactions. In that respect, the Barcode Battler and its fellow innovators were well ahead of their time.
If you stumble upon a Barcode Battler, Skannerz, or a similar relic at a retro gaming store, pour one out for a device that tried to blur the lines between the supermarket shelf and the gaming world. It looks silly today, like a WinAmp skin, but it reflected the spirit of the times. There was a connection between the packaging, product, and play, and there could be hidden mechanics locked within everyday objects.
What did you think of this article? Check out our retrospectives on the Mega Duck, the Neo Geo X, and the “lost” Nintendo DS model. Let us know in the comments below, and chat with us in our Discord!
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In 2001 there was the Jurassic Park Scan Command game for PC that took off at my school. It took off like crazy and we used to bring our devices to school and share barcodes we cut off products from home.
Check out my (mobile) browser based barcode game!
https://a-scanner-darkly.web.app/
Scan items, collect characters and items. Battle players or the CPU.
Do daily quests, collect bounties and climb the leaderboard.
Just signed up. Looks fun!
I remember the game Monster Rancher for the PS1 that originally had a barcode function that eventually morphed into using different CDs and DVDs in later versions of the game on the PS2. In the later version using CDs and DVDs you would pop the disk in at the appropriate time to revive a new character. In earlier versions of the game if you didn’t have the scanner you could manually enter the barcode to do the same thing. These features lead to early internet forums trying to figure out the best products, cds or dvds, in which to get the best monsters we could get. Playing that game is the only reason I ended up buying multiple copys of a movie I didn’t like because I Loved the monster that came from using that dvd. Yes I could have gotten the same monster since there were only a few different monsters it could have been, but using that particular DVD Scary Movie it not only gave me the rare character I wanted but it also had much higher baseline stats and more special moves even as a newly ‘hatched’ monster. Really miss those Monster Rancher games, spent more time experimenting using any and all CDs and DVDs I could get my hands on all while keeping many different notebooks/journals to track all of the different results. I know I spent way more time experimenting trying to find the best starting monster then I did actually playing the game.
More Americanised arrogance. Presuming because something didn’t end up popular in the US means it wasn’t popular in the West at all. I had the Barcode Battler from a catalogue company, my dad took 3 attempts to get me one because the company sold out there first two batches. Today, nearly 35 years later, there are still about 3 dozen available on UK EBay.
It was enough of a flop outside of Japan that they discontinued it, while in Japan it spawned several related products and tie-ins with popular IPs. It really doesn’t matter that you can find a dozen of them on ebay. You will find a thousand Game Boys on ebay.
Lol! You can find thousands of gameboys because over 100 million sold!
By comparison the Virtual Boy only has 1 on eBay currently in the UK. Which means the BB, apparently not very popular outside Japan clearly sold way more than the Virtual Boy.
Sounds more like a misread of American perspective. The idea was clearly popular in the West if they created a GameBoy peripheral, but that’s not the subject of the article.
Rickey – We are aware of the subject of the article if you read all the comments before it, we are using those as examples.
Funny enough no Digimon D-Scanner Digivice is not mentioned in this article it had the original mechanic before that Scannerz join in this bizzare tech..
In 2000 the US was almost five times as large (population-wise) as the UK.
The total population of the UK was around 60 million people.
While the US had a population of almost 300 million.
Something could be wildly popular throughout the ENTIRETY of the UK and with the same quantitative popularity, barely a regional novelty in the US.
You can’t compare the two 1:1.
There was a small hype for digimon D-Tector scanners, too. It was basically a tomogachi that could scan anything and you’d battle your digimon or collect items for them from scanning barcodes, too.
I thought it was ahead of its time, but at 2005, maybe not I guess after reading this.
One of them caused a noodle shortage.
I’d argue it’s pretty arrogant, as well as borderline insane, to think that anyone would ever be considering UK as The West.
You’re basically the middle east, and damn near irrelevant globally.
If you don’t like what I’m saying, I’ll need to see your disagreement license, as well as your license to produce licenses before we continue.
You’re insane Garfield, Britain is definitively part of the West by in every sense the term is used. That you seem to hate Britain doesn’t change that at all.
License, please?
I had a Scannerz (here in the UK). My poor mother had to put up with my pulling items out one by one during any grocery trip just to see which monsters I could find.
Thankfully it was a short lived novelty. Especially as I realised that the generated monster seemed to be completely random and it didn’t seem to matter one bit what you scanned.
Sure seemed like a good idea on paper.
I had a Scannerz as a kid. Was neat concept, but i think I was the only person in my school with one. Made it a short lived gimmick
As others have said, these things were super popular in the UK.
There were also a bunch of similar things I forget the name of but also used barcodes, I seem to recall a watch having a similar game.
Hi
Well if we learned anything about the uk they are simple minded , unlike Americans.
Chris – the nation that votes a fat orange tw@twaffle, yes, deep and philosophical indeed lol
Oh yeah how’s Brexit going XD
I didn’t vote to leave. But despite the colossal mistake people made by choosing to it’s still not as bad as Chump in charge over there
Guys, guys
Let’s just agree that both countries are absolutely terrible and move on with our day. The uk lets people go to the doctor without fear of being thrown out and left to die horribly should you not have a quarter million dollars, and the US has… I don’t know… legal pot or something. And a propensity for shooting each other.
They’re both just fantastic.
My brother and I had those Scannerz and loved them. Recently found them again too and had fun again lol. I ended up then finding a mobile game app that was sort of similar.
This is crazy, I was literally just thinking about skannerz YESTERDAY, it felt like such a random thought… I didn’t say it out loud.
I didn’t Google search it.
And yet, not 24 hours later I see it in my news feed?
GET OUT OF MY HEAD, GOOGLE