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When you hear the words “gaming chair,” your mind probably leaps to companies like SecretLab. Gaming chairs have great ergonomics that keep your back steady during long gameplay sessions (although smart money buys cheaper office chairs instead), but one company tried to make the term “gaming chair” synonymous with alternative control schemes. It didn’t work.
In 1991, the company Simulator Technologies started selling a device known as the Sega Action Chair. Well, it was originally known as the Simulator 1 Action Chair and was sold in the US. When the peripheral eventually made its way to Europe, it adopted the name “Sega Action Chair” (also known as the Sega Simulator II Action Chair) after Sega Europe acquired distribution rights. This version was released in 1992. The only difference was that while the Simulator 1 could connect to either the NES or the Sega Genesis, the Sega Action Chair only worked with the Sega Master System (the European name for the Genesis).
If you have any experience with early gaming peripherals that turned your body into a controller, such as the Roll & Rocker, you probably know how the Sega Action Chair controlled: Poorly. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Sega Action Chair relied on four microswitches that surrounded a central stem. As players leaned their body in the chair, the stem touched the microswitch prongs, which translated into equivalent d-pad inputs. The handles on either side of the chair, meanwhile, were static and only served to provide button inputs.
Obscure for a reason
The company Simulator Technologies invented the Sega Action Chair/Simulator 1 Action Chair in 1990. Since Simulator Technologies was based in Missouri, the peripheral was released stateside first. While the chair eventually found its way overseas, Simulator Technologies voluntarily closed its doors in 1992 — the same year the Sega Action Chair was released. If you are familiar with the wild world of retro game peripherals, you can probably guess why.
It goes without saying that the Sega Action Chair was not a good peripheral. Controls were sloppy — a running theme with devices that ask users to move their bodies to control games. Granted, leaning in a chair to make characters move back and forth was immersive, but it lacked the fine control users got from the standard Sega Genesis/Master System controller (one of the most beloved retro controllers of all time).
To make matters worse, the Sega Action Chair didn’t sell well, and this was before people learned it was just a Roll & Rocker for the Sega. Retailers were reluctant to sell the Sega Action Chair because it was so large and heavy; boxes took up way too much space and were a pain to move and bring home. While consoles such as the Sega Saturn and games like “Shenmue” were Sega’s most expensive failures (and why the company stopped making consoles), the Sega Action Chair was the company’s biggest failure in the most literal sense.
