Microsoft ActiMates

» see microsoft.com/kids as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

us kids aged four to eight used actimates. that was not my crowd in 1997. i was thirteen, on a 33.6k modem in turkey, and barney was not on the tv channels i was watching. the only way i could have known about these dolls back then was through pc magazine cover photos and the windows magazine kind of coverage that occasionally surfaced at the local kiosk. they did not reach turkish toy stores in any meaningful number.

microsoft kids released the actimates line in september 1997. interactive barney was the first character, a purple plush dinosaur with motors in the head and arms, a small speaker, a sensor pack that listened for a coded signal. the pitch was that the doll could play along with a barney vhs tape if you bought the separately sold tv pack accessory, which clipped on near the television and watched for a barcode on the bottom of the picture frame.

arthur and his sister d.w. were added in 1998 off the back of the pbs cartoon. teletubbies came in 1999 in a tv-only configuration with no pc pack. the line was sold as educational, with positive affirmations when a kid answered a prompt correctly during a tape or cd-rom session. sales held for the barney run but the sequels did not move the same numbers. microsoft discontinued the whole line in 2000.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually did ~

inside the doll was a small motor system, a speaker, and a receiver. the tv pack accessory sat near the television and read a black-and-white barcode pattern that appeared along the bottom edge of the picture during an actimates-compatible barney tape. the barcode encoded cue signals, so the doll could pat its head or say a line at the same moment the show did. the pc pack did a similar trick over a wireless link to the running cd-rom game.

the bill of materials was the problem. by the time you bought the doll, the tv pack, the compatible tapes, the pc pack, the cd-rom titles, the household was a hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars into a single show tie-in. the doll was useless without the accessories. the accessories were useless without the doll. there was a ceiling on how many parents wanted to keep buying into that stack for one kid.

~ how it ended ~

microsoft kids was not the part of the company that anyone defended in a budget meeting. by 1999 the consumer software unit was already shrinking around the windows 2000 launch focus. interactive barney sold for the 1997 and 1998 holidays. arthur and d.w. were softer. teletubbies in 1999 caught a wave that was already cresting. by early 2000 the line was pulled. microsoft kept the patents until 2005 then let them lapse.

~ what got buried ~

the idea of a toy that reacts in real time to a tv show came back in a different form with later furby revisions and with the cloud-connected toys of the 2010s. the actimates approach (barcode on the picture frame, sensor on the floor) was a strange dead-end. the tapes themselves are the lingering artifact, since they kept playing as normal barney episodes on any vcr if you ignored the dotted strip along the bottom. anyone who bought one and kept the box has a small slice of late nineties microsoft-kids ambition sitting in a closet.

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