Gyroscopes exist in a variety of devices today, but Nintendo in particular seems to have a particular love of them given the number of ways it has incorporated the technology into its games.

Though they were not actually gyroscopes, the little spinning things called Gryos were an integral part of Gyromite, that funky NES game that was played with the curvy R.O.B. robot attachment. Or maybe it wasn’t. Truth be told, our neighbor had the game and the robot and he never let us play it, so we never quite figured out why there were pipes and spinning gyros. Would it have hurt our neighbor to let us take it out of the box just once and let us check it out? I mean R.O.B. was just sitting in there! Unused! Lonely! Not that we’re bitter.

Anyhoo, Nintendo went from silly plastic named “Gyros” to actual gyroscopes within a series of gimmicky games for the Game Boy Advance including Kirby Tilt ‘n Tumble and WarioWare: Twisted!, games that incorporated a tilt sensor into an oversized cartridge and did a reasonable job detecting motion.

Little did we know that those were just test runs for what would become the world-dominating controls of the Nintendo Wii, which would later take the gaming scene by storm. Man, those are some good gyros.

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NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH: The doctor who specializes in vaginas.