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ScreenToyz Screensavers: $10 Million Failure from 1994 🎃 An LGR Halloween Thing

LGR

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Taking a look at Creative Insights ScreenToyz! Gimmicky mid 90s peripherals that plug into a computer keyboard port letting you control "interactive screensavers"... so, a game then, right? Ha. Yeah they sure tried something, charged $50 for it, failed spectacularly, and that's how you end up on LGR 30 years later.

● LGR things elsewhere:
Patreon Patreon: LazyGameReviews
Bsky https://bsky.app/profile/lgr-yt.bsky....

● Archive of the Screen Toyz software CD-ROM:
https://archive.org/details/screentoy...

● Background music licensed from Epidemic Sound:
https://www.epidemicsound.com

● Halloween stock footage licensed from Storyblocks:
https://www.storyblocks.com/

00:00 spooky 90s e-waste
01:08 intro to ScreenToyz
02:36 oddly fascinating history
06:30 unboxing the box
09:33 setup in Windows 98
12:17 first test!
14:27 ...it's a thing
19:08 can't imagine why this failed lulz

#LGR #computer #retro

20 Comments

@LGR Creator 11 months ago Pinned

A dev from Creative Insights, Roy Eltham, has chimed in on this! Quote:

Paul White and Bill Cawthorne were the hardware guys I worked with on the PDS (Piano Discovery System) and ScreenToyz. The actual screen savers and animations were done by others and somewhat rushed and bad as you saw. Some of them don't have any interaction, just initiation of them via the device.

The hardware inside all 3 devices is identical they just have different codes they send so you could plug in all 3 at the same time and it would work. It's literally just 2 pressure switches and 2 LEDs in there, so it's not much of a controller.

I believe they had hoped this would sell better to carry the company longer to get the PDS and its planned sequels/related products out. Also, the money was mostly spent on the PDS development.

I was working for a small dev house called Ybarra Productions (Shadows of Yserbius, Fates of Twinion, Alien Legacy), when we joined up with some hardware folks and some investment from Creative Labs to form Creative Insights. The hardware guys were the ones that had done the Miracle Piano stuff for the Nintendo. Our first and main project was the Piano Discovery System which was a spiritual successor to the Miracle Piano. The rest of us were game devs.

I honestly don't know why they decided to make ScreenToyz, but the company was intended to make mixed hardware software products, and it died shortly after ScreenToyz shipped and flopped.

I was one of the few game devs that crossed over to work on firmware and driver stuff for the hardware projects. I did the MCU firmware for the MIDI keyboard for the PDS, and firmware for the test fixture for the factory line where they tested the Piano boards as they were made. For ScreenToyz, I had to learn how to make a low level windows driver (*.386 file on old school windows) that could intercept the keyboard port before the normal keyboard driver, because the device sent custom invalid keycodes, so that it would not collide with any valid keycodes. The normal keyboard driver would just ignore the invalid codes.

That driver could also send out special codes to control the LEDs in the devices, again those codes were ignored by the keyboard. It was all so long ago, I don't recall what the invalid codes actually were. -Roy Eltham

@JKevinCarrier 11 months ago

It's wild when you think about how much work must've gone into this...the animations, the programming, manufacturing the mechanical switch, etc. And nobody, at any point in the process, took a step back and asked "Is this actually any fun at all?"

@CloudedByKatana 11 months ago

Somewhere out there, the worlds only screentoyz collector is lamenting the resale value after you opened that box

@CitizenKanevideos 11 months ago

Picturing myself in a cubical in 1994, hearing my coworker one place over having a mental breakdown while cartoon sound effects and the screaming of a Frankenstein Ape blast over his PC speakers at max volume.

@killerpimp01 11 months ago

This unlocked a memory.. My first IT job back in 1995, my boss had the TNT plunger on his desk. He said his kids got him it as a present. I never saw him ever use it, and it disappeared off his desk in a couple of weeks because his boss told him to get rid of it. Something about "unauthorized equipment", and it could "damage the network" or something stupid.

@Tyneras 11 months ago (edited)

My friend had the toilet, we used it as a prop for our toy army man war games since his dad could never get it to work. It definitely wouldn't work after all the times we forgot it in the yard and it got rained on. It meshed pretty well with my Ninja Turtles sewer set.

@Strelnikov10 11 months ago

This was definitely desk flare. Mid-90's... you're 25 years old... you're working in a cubicle.... you feel uncomfortable in your collared shirt and tie... you think you're Chandler Bing.... so you passive aggressively throw the knife switch while Shelly is filling you in on the morning staff meeting minutes. You want everyone to know that the adult world just isn't for you, even if you have to be there. SOLD. I'd definitely have the toilet at my desk.

@sadierobotics 11 months ago

As a little girl I had something similar that was made by Nickelodeon and I loved it. It mysteriously disappeared after a few days, and I now wonder if my parents couldn't stand the noise it made.

@Jumbleman5 11 months ago

The only way it could have been useful was if the switch instantly activated the screen saver. That way it could cover your screen as soon as you left your desk instead of waiting for the timer to trigger.

@marioavossa 11 months ago

Out of all the things destroyed in the hurricane, this survived. Is that some kind of punishment?

@newq 11 months ago

This is the kind of tech product that gets made during the first phase of a boom/bust cycle. This was marketable to venture capitalists and literally no one else. Like you said, everyone involved made out just fine in the end. That's all that matters.

"As you know, screensavers are the hot new thing in Q3, 1993. Well, we've assembled a dream team to create a product that's not only a screensaver, but it's an interactive desk toy, too!!!" Bam. Ten million dollars.

@durindeplays3704 11 months ago (edited)

Latrina and Stitch is my favorite Dosney movie.

@NateTheGnat 11 months ago

This cost 50 dollars in 1994 money. That's about 110 dollars now.

@redkf 11 months ago

To quote a certain Australian youtuber: "can you believe noone bought this?"

@richardsmith4992 11 months ago

It's hard to comprehend just how huge screensavers were for a while back in the 90's.

@AndrewWukusick 11 months ago

There's gotta be someone out there who sees this and has Vietnam flashbacks to hearing these sounds from the cubicle next to theirs and nearly having a mental breakdown.

@Remixx161 11 months ago

I imagine if I went trick-or-treating at LGR's house, he'd give out shareware/edutainment floppys lol and I would love it

@MOdirtfarm 11 months ago (edited)

Please do not stop doing videos like this. Whatever reason it always reminds me of the quirky stuff from my childhood that we always just had to have.

@menhirmike 11 months ago

$50 in 1994 would be like $109 in 2025. Even considering anything computer-related was much more expensive in the early 90s, that's more than just a little bit optimistic.