The NES wasn't just a game console. It was a living-room gadget, and my collection includes the stuff that made it a family machine.

The Zapper shelf. The orange light gun powered Duck Hunt (and its smug, laughing dog), Hogan's Alley, Wild Gunman, Gumshoe, To the Earth and Barker Bill's Trick Shooting. The trick behind it is lovely and simple: pull the trigger and the game blanks the screen to black for one frame, then draws a white rectangle where each target is, one frame at a time. The gun is just a photodiode reporting whether it's pointed at light. That's also why a Zapper does nothing on a modern television, since an LCD doesn't paint the picture the way a CRT does and the timing falls apart. Pointing a plastic gun at a tube TV was peak 1988, and it has to stay there.

Game-show night. The whole family could play Jeopardy! (I have three editions), Wheel of Fortune, Hollywood Squares, Double Dare, Remote Control, Win, Lose or Draw and Classic Concentration. These were mostly made by GameTek, and the fixed question banks mean a house that played regularly would eventually memorize the lot, which is its own kind of family tradition.

Edutainment and the weird hardware. Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? and the Sesame Street games taught while you played. The Miracle Piano Teaching System shipped with a full 49-key MIDI keyboard that plugged into the console, and it worked as a teaching tool, which is more than anyone expected.

And then there's the Power Glove. Mattel licensed the underlying idea from a serious research device, the VPL DataGlove, then built it down to a price: flex sensors printed in conductive ink along the fingers, and ultrasonic emitters on the glove picked up by a bar of microphones on your TV so it could triangulate where your hand was in the room. That's real technology. It also needed constant recalibration, only worked if you stood in one spot, and had exactly two games designed for it, Super Glove Ball and Bad Street Brawler.

"It's so bad." It really was. I wouldn't trade it.