Konami made about six or so sports games under the "Exciting" title for both the Famicom and Disk System. Most of them were pretty early 80's, and few were released in the US (Exciting Basketball was released in the US as Double Dribble). Still, some cool things came out of the Exciting series, not the least of which is this.

The coolest thing about this release is shown by this scan from the manual - the game came with an inflatable bop bag thingie mounted on a donut-shaped air anchor, which attached to the Famicom's front expansion port. The player had to hit this bop bag in order to register hits against the computer opponent. God knows how well this worked - I imagine that the bop bag broke fairly often, what with hyperactive Japanese kids hitting them all the time. Still, it's one of the most original control methods I've seen, although it's not exactly "virtual reality".

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