Excalibur Phantom Force self moving chess robot

[JohnW]

I just saw this for the first time today, it seems like a cheap version of the square off chess computer. It's quite noisy too..

[acase]

I just saw this for the first time today, it seems like a cheap version of the square off chess computer. It's quite noisy too..

This came out WAY BEFORE the Square off chess board was even thought about, and there was a much better one called "Grandmaster" by Milton Bradley that came out in 1983. I seen this one over at Disney world (at the new at the time EPCOT center) at a gift shop (very close to "Spaceship Earth) in Orlando, Florida in 1983, also they were showcasing the Novag Robot Adversary chess computer at the time. They had both of these computers in a glass casing so nobody could touch them, but it was really cool for a teen like me to witness both of these computers playing games by themselves moving the pieces by themselves (and of course it left an impression on me). The original price of the Grandmaster I think was $500 and the Novag robot Adversary chess was $1500+. For either one at the time (1983) it was rather quite expensive.

here is the Milton Bradley Grand master:


And here is the Novag robot adversary:

[JohnW]

Ok..I thought it might be related to the "Grandmaster" one.

[acase]

Ok..I thought it might be related to the "Grandmaster" one.

Well What happened was Fidelity Bought the rights to the (I'm guessing her) "Grandmaster" and made The "Phantom Challenger" at first which was an almost an exact replica of the "Grandmaster" (except that it had a LCD display and probably a much better program) see here: Hegener and Glaser (maker of Mephisto chess computer) ended up buying Fidelity International so the Phantom challenger could no longer be produced because of a no compete clause in the buyout contract, so Sid Samole (the founder of Fidelity international) started Excalibur and produced the Phantom Force model seen in your video.