Although the taboos of the time prevented talking about it openly, I grew up collecting Barbies with Indians and He-Man dolls thanks to my sister. And of all those things that she had but never saw at my friends’ house, one of the things that fascinated me the most was her collection of scented letters.
That thing of impregnating smells in things did not stop there. Olfactory technology also evolved in the classic “scratch and smell”That permeated stickers from Los Fruitis or The Simpsons and, finally, it would even end up splashing the video game world. A FIFA that smells like grass? A Gran Turismo with a tire scent? They were not the only ones.
The curious invention of the scratch and smell
Although it seems something out of the trifles of the 90s, the truth is that the idea of scratch and smell is older than the Sun. With a technology created by 3M – the company to which we owe the call Post-It to papers with poorly adherent sticker-, the idea of scratch and smell it is actually born from a technology called microencapsulation.
Created with the intention of facilitating documentation copies without using carbon paper, they soon sought other uses for the invention and discovered that it is a good way to preserve aromas. Hand in hand with microcapsules that contain an odor inside, and that break when scratched, releasing the perfume, the aroma can remain intact for long periods of time.
In 1965 the first scratch and smell sticker was created, and from there it was marketed as a way for teachers of the time to reward their students with something special when they have done something well.
We will have to wait until 1972 to see how the idea is introduced into popular culture by the hand of the group The Raspberries, which includes a sticker on its first album – in addition to the best first song on an album. scratch and smell smelling like, well, it’s easy to foresee: raspberry.
A FIFA with the smell of grass
Many years after that, back in 1999 more distant than it seems if you don’t start counting, Kazunori Yamauchi’s hit that nobody saw coming got its longed-for sequel. Gran Turismo 2 It hit the stores in two discs, the Arcade mode and the GT mode focused on simulation.
Beyond the success of that game, we have to focus on the sticker of that second album, where on a blue logo we were invited to rub with our finger or with an item of clothing with great care to experience the pit stop smell. A burnt tire scent meant to get you in tune before starting the game.
The idea must have worked very well – I was 12 years old at the time and I vaguely remember it – so a year later EA would repeat the move with FIFA 2001 and a disc that, after being delicately rubbed, gave off grass smell freshly cut.
FIFA and Gran Turismo weren’t the only ones
Faced with what may seem like a tremendous idea, and the misunderstanding of the decision not to continue with fashion, it is time to stop at a very specific point of that brief fashion. Humans are brutes and cazurros by nature, and few understood that gently rubbing was not requested for pleasure, but for the danger of damaging the disc if you scratched too hard.
Loading a CD to scratch to smell what emanates from it gives for a chapter of my strange addiction, but despite the fact that the problems derived from including the technology in the disc itself stopped its use, it should be noted that others before Sony and EAWithout being so innovative, they knew how to get the best out of it.
In 1986 the adventure Leather Goddesses of Phobos included a page with different scratches and smells intended so that we could capture the aroma of certain parts of the game, an idea that would later recover the SNES game Earthbound in one of its editions and, shortly before that Gran Turismo 2, He too Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail! from 1997. A curious idea with an even more curious journey.
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