Arcade oddity of the day: Walk the Dog by Sega

Shaggy April 7, 2010 0

(Thanks to Rjay on the forums for bringing this up)

As news has been a tad slow, why not do a post about another arcade oddity again? Today I’ll cover something I have heard of before (unlike last time with Sega’s Flash Beats) although I have never actually seen one in person (as it was a Japan-only release) – Walk The Dog by Sega. This came out in 2000, a little while before the whole exergaming craze really hit the mainstream culture but I do seriously wonder if something like this could get some play again in the post-Wii Sports world. In the game you walk or run on a treadmill while holding a dogleash as you walk a virtual dog along to keep it happy. By pulling the leash you can move the dog left or right as it strolls along, picking up objects and avoiding other dogs during play. It’s a bit goofy but they at least figured out how to turn something like this into a game.

Even if Sega revamped this concept for today’s market, if it didn’t sell well in arcades,  they could easily sell these to gyms.  Here is one of the clearer videos I could find of this in action.

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  1. dan perkins April 7, 2010 at 1:23 pm - Reply

    u obviousely havent seen boonga boonga

    we distributed this machine and sold only one lol
    the machine was delivered and came back five times

    only then did we realise the reason why

    most people do not find it funny to smack a backside pretending u are hitting a child molestor..yes the idea of this game was to smack a backside as a skill stop which in turn would hit a character on the screen but the manufacturers went a bit too far with the image of a child molestor on screen

    weve still got it in the warehouse if anyone wants it

    • Shaggy April 7, 2010 at 1:50 pm - Reply

      I have seen that actually – bit too creepy really. At least Walk The Dog tries to turn something normal into a game.

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