Stack-Up



Stack-Up is the rarer of only two titles that were developed to be used in conjunction with the Nintendo R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy) toy. R.O.B. was essentially a marketing trojan horse that convinced retailers to stock the NES in the United States where video games were seen as a passing fad. Without the toy connection, stores would not consider purchasing another video game system that they believed was doomed to failure.

In Stack-Up, the player uses Professor Hector (along with second player Professor Vector) to direct R.O.B. The player's goal is to move the blocks arranged on the block trays from the current state to the goal state depicted on the screen. The player does this by getting the Professor to jump on buttons that correspond to commands that R.O.B. interprets and executes. There is very little oversight done by the game as to whether the player's plan actually succeeds in creating the goal state, and as such, the player is the only one who determines if the stage was completed or not.

A complete Stack-Up comes packaged with two foam hands for R.O.B., five block trays that are arranged around R.O.B.'s base, and five colored blocks (red, blue, yellow, green, and white). In the United States, R.O.B. was packaged with Gyromite, but in Japan, he was actually included with Stack-up, which was known as Block Set. As a result, Stack-Up is a harder to come by than Gyromite. The Stack-up cartridge also contains one of the highly sought after Famicom-to-NES converters since the ROM was never converted to the NES cartridge format.