Telepathy

Telepathy is one of two known prototype games that were developed for Atari’s failed Mindlink controller. The Mindlink was a headband that player wore on his head and plugged into the joystick port. The idea was that the Mindlink’s sensors would pick up any facial movements or muscle twitches the player would make. Atari actually said that the Mindlink read the player’s thoughts (sure it did…). The problem was that the Mindlink didn’t work very well in initial test runs, and even when it did work players would complain of headaches and dizziness from twitching their face all day. After disappointing test results, the Mindlink controller was wisely canceled.

Telepathy was actually developed as a demo to show what kind games the Mindlink could do. This “demo” is made up of seven different action screens held together by a loose “mine” theme. Thankfully Telepathy is playable without the Mindlink controller (unlike Bionic Breakthrough) by pressing the joystick button. It’s unknown if Atari was thinking of releasing Telepathy sans Mindlink or if the joystick code was put in the game for playtesting purposes.