VAPORWARE- The Disk Fellow- by Floppe
The Belgians are notable for many things: Easy access to France for the Wehrmacht and some other things I’m sure. But they aren’t well known in terms of originating truly great gaming hardware. That almost changed in the early 90′s with the release of the world’s first portable disk based gaming device, the Disk Fellow by Floppe, formerly a manufacturer of nappies and diapers and latterly a manufacturer of nappies, diapers and incontinence pads. As I said almost, but not quite.
The Disk Fellow was a IBM PC compatible Laptop with an early CD ROM drive mounted vertically, rather than horizontally due to a design flaw. This left 40% of the disc area exposed to the elements at any one time and obscured the bottom centre of the screen from the user. Floppe maintains the decision was made ‘on a dare” rather than aesthetic, practical or indeed, sober reasons. The LCD screen was the same sort of panel as used in some electronic typewriters of the day, meaning it could display images of 100X15 pixels and makes ASCII art look like 1200 dpi by comparison. To say the graphics were crude is an insult to oil rigs.
The system came with a number of games. Due to the dimensions and limited system specs, many games could not be ported very well. Space Invaders didn’t work very well so new games were made specially for the system including a spiritual forerunner to games like Space Giraffe, Space Iguana (screenshot below). No other games have been recorded as having been released on the platform.
The original title in French “cum l’utilisateur phallique gargling de perforateur de poteau,” translates rather poorly as “cum gargling pole puncher phallic user” was obviously changed as Floppe prepared for a worldwide simultaneous launch in both Brussels and Antwerp to receive the machines on June 12 1991 and the rest of the world in May 1997. Their strategy of hiring a former Head of Marketing from Sega as their CEO proved disastrous and soon Floppe’s baby had flopped harder than an Xbox1 falling onto a small child’s head. The Disk Fellow was quietly removed from the market and the small child is learning how to speak again.
