Billed as part of Exus’ Family Fun & Fitness system, the Foot Craz Activity Pad was developed by “Exus Corporation, the revolutionary high-technology company based in California’s world-famous Silicon Valley”, as the instruction manual tells us. It’s essentially a precursor to Bandai’s 1986 NES Power Pad (known as Family Trainer in Japan), which was a mat with pressure sensors embedded in a layer of flexible plastic. Later, the concept would be recycled again for the various dance mats released with console versions of games like Dance Dance Revolution.
The Foot Craz is a foam cushion pad measuring 30x24-inches, and at 1-inch thick, it’s much bulkier than later dance mats. The five coloured buttons on the pad map to the with your feet. The peripheral came bundled with two games, and , and seems to have been sold at $69, according to a 1984 article in the magazine . presents two oval tracks on the screen, with a pace symbol circling around each one, and the idea is to keep your jogger character level with the pace symbol as it moves around the track. You jog on the orange and blue buttons, but can press the yellow button to switch from the upper, slower track to the lower, faster track at any time, then press the red button to switch back. , meanwhile, presents you with five on-screen squares that correspond to the five Foot Craz buttons, and the idea is to stomp any bugs that appear in the squares by stamping on the correct button – but if you accidentally stamp on a butterfly, you lose a life.
