Years ago, when I worked in retail in a long gone Blockbuster store, Easter was an awkward time of year. Not because seemingly everyone on the face of the Earth wanted a copy of Slumdog Millionaire or Taken and didn’t understand the concept of limited stock, but because of Creme Eggs. I’m no fan of Creme Eggs, admittedly. They’re cloyingly sweet. But it was the packaging that was the real problem. Their small yet vital barcode was wrapped around the egg-shaped chocolate and that made it impossible to scan easily. In time, I ended up memorising the barcode number (known as an EAN) while still cursing quietly about the Creme Egg design.
And yet, I was the one who so desperately wanted a Barcode Battler when I was about 7. But, hey, kids rarely know what’s best for them, right?
The Barcode Battler took the concept of the humble barcode and turned it into an ‘amazing’ game of exciting combat and thrills and spills. I say ‘amazing’ because that’s how the instruction manual describes it. It’s wrong. Very wrong.
The barcode was invented back in the 1950s to automate supermarket checkout systems and they’re incredibly useful. Combined with the EAN, they speed up scanning items in a way that, presumably, people could only dream of beforehand. They’re immensely handy little things yet as tedious as anything made up of a bunch of black stripes could be. Except for Zebras, of course. Somehow, in 1991, Epoch decided to turn the barcode into a gaming phenomenon. Well, a short-lived gaming phenomenon in the UK.