At some point in the past 10 years or so — opinions differ as to exactly when it was — people working in the toy industry began to notice something troubling. Toy marketers, perhaps to counterbalance the idea that they spend their days playing, pride themselves on their keen business sense. But now the figures weren’t adding up: children were getting less and less interested in toys. Chrissie Cheshire, a boys’ toys buyer for Woolworths, started receiving research reports showing that ‘kids don’t really have toys on the top of their Christmas list from the age of about six these daysâ€. They wanted mobile phones and PlayStations instead. ‘A few years ago, Barbie was sold up to the ages of 10, 11 or 12,†remembers Andy Myall, editor of the industry magazine Toys ‘n’ Playthings. ‘Today, the surveys show that Barbie dolls create massively negative feelings among 10-year-old girls. They think they’re childish.†In the United States, where the phenomenon has gone the furthest, it is known by the clunky acronym ‘kagoyâ€: Kids Are Getting Older Younger.
To invent a new toy in this climate, you need a peculiar combination of adult commercial savvy and insight into the child brain. Thanks to kagoy, you really need a toy that isn’t a toy: something that can slip through the defences of resistant children while preferably also appealing to grown-ups. And you need an idea solid enough to withstand the decidedly unplayful environment of toy retailing. By November last year, Mark Tilden had no way of being certain that he had any of these, but by that time things had gone too far to turn back. At the headquarters of Shing Yue Tooling, a plastic moulding company in Hong Kong, employees were already repeatedly dropping his robotic dinosaur Roboraptor from a height of exactly 80cm to see if it conformed to safety standards.
‘Robotics is usually too serious,†Tilden says today in his company’s showroom, in a Hong Kong office complex called Energy Plaza. ‘I wanted to make a robot that can kick, walk, fart and burp and do any disgusting things you want, yet still be cute.†Tilden, a bearded giant of a man with an Indiana Jones hat, a mischievous expression and a passion for self-publicity, is a former Nasa scientist who describes himself on his business cards as a robotic physicist (‘there are only six of us on the planet. It makes for very small conferencesâ€), and so he was well-placed to design Robosapien, a small humanoid capable of walking, picking up objects and throwing them, as well as burping and farting. Robosapien put Tilden’s small company, WowWee Toys, on the industry’s map and, in 2004, Hamleys awarded the robot its prestigious Toy of the Year prize.
‘In the 1960s, we were promised that we would one day have flying cars, honeymoons in orbit and robots in our homes. I can’t do much about A and B, but I can do C,†Tilden says. Nasa ‘used to give me a million dollars to build one robot to crash on Mars … Instead, I now make toys for a million children in the hope that they will play with them by themselves.†He went to China in 2002, he is fond of saying, ‘to work for Santa … This is the only place in the world where you can build this kind of stuff so that it can be sold for just $120.â€
Of course, $120 is not that cheap for a toy, and during the first few seconds of an initial encounter with Robo- raptor — which is selling in South Africa this Christmas for up to R600 — it is hard not to keep thinking about the price tag. The dinosaur certainly looks striking, its sleek head and bony tail supported by two huge clawed feet, and when you switch it on, it roars impressively. Use the remote control with too much beginner’s gusto, though, and it is liable to hobble tentatively before tipping forward onto its chin. Tilden’s contribution to robotics is known as ‘biomorphicsâ€, which involves borrowing the principles of natural evolution to optimise the survivability of his machines. Meeting Roboraptor, though, you begin to wonder how much more quickly real dinosaurs would have become extinct if they had had to contend with carpets.
But then, after maybe half an hour, something changes: you figure out how to put Roboraptor into ‘guard†mode (in which it will lash out at people who stray too close) and into ‘playful†mode (in which it will wiggle its tail if you touch it). You discover that if you place something in its mouth, it will try to wrest it away from you, and if you leave it unattended for three minutes, it will spontaneously begin to explore its environment, trundling across the floor until it hits a wall — which it sometimes, though not always, takes as a reason to start reversing.
The urge to anthropomorphise becomes irresistible, which means that when Roboraptor behaves ‘intelligently†you catch yourself feeling impressed, and when it doesn’t, you catch yourself responding as you would to a clumsy toddler, rather than as you ought to respond to an assemblage of 132 plastic parts, 235 metal ones and 191 electrical components.
But Roboraptor is not, primarily, intended to be cute. ‘This is the first robot that really has the ability to scare small children,†Tilden says proudly. ‘Our previous robots could annoy your cat. Roboraptor can hunt him.†All this is achieved with a radically simple design: the toy’s decision-making circuits are modelled on the chip in a musical Christmas card.
The research and development programme that finished with Roboraptor occupied Tilden and his team of 15 inventors from January to May 2004 and cost $1-million. By the end of the first quarter of last year, the first prototype was ready to be assessed by engineers at Wah Shing Toys, the Chinese company that would become the main manufacturer. A working prototype was completed by September, ready for the Hong Kong toy fair in January, a fiercely competitive event at which toy-makers try to seduce potential distributors and retailers and at which, this time round, Tilden was to discover whether his gamble would pay off.
Roboraptor, buyers could see, had ‘play†— a noun used to describe the capacity of a product to absorb the attention. One crucial facet of play demonstrated by WowWee’s products is what has happened online: the web is full of forums where enthusiasts discuss how to ‘hack†Robosapien and Roboraptor, unscrewing body parts to add cameras or heat sensors or headlights. There is a book, The Official Robosapien Hacker’s Guide. Tilden calls his product line ‘the world’s first open-source robo-familyâ€.
Orders began pouring in to Wah Shing from around the world. ‘April to August was the toughest time,†says Mark Ng, WowWee’s operations manager. ‘In the end, we made enough toolings to produce 60 000 Roboraptors per day.â€
Because nobody has ever figured out for certain what makes a toy successful, the toy world operates — much like Hollywood and the music industry — on the assumption that more than half the potential winners it backs will actually turn out to be losers. Rumours of terrible failures abound, like the one about the major American manufacturer recently forced to commit thousands of action figures to landfill sites, when the film they tied in with was not the success that was forecast.
By Sunday evening, Tilden’s invention will doubtless have been the subject of much rapt attention in living-rooms across the world. First, though, anyone who receives a Roboraptor will have to figure out how to get it opened. Because of Roboraptor’s sensitive moving parts, it must be attached to its thick cardboard base by four screws and numerous plastic bindings. Batteries, needless to say, are not included. —