Tokyo Thrift is a new column on The Verge where Sam Byford, news editor for Asia, trawls the second-hand market to explore the history, design, and culture of Japanese gadgets. It runs on the last Sunday of each month.

What was Sony thinking? Well, I can’t imagine the company expected the Rolly to be a massive hit — it was just too wild and expensive. Instead, it’s of a piece with AIBO and Sony’s other more outlandish creations that showed the company flex its engineering muscle. It is, after all, pretty cool, at least if you let go of any reasonable preconceptions you may have about sane product planning. And if you squint, the Rolly was almost ahead of its time — is it really all that different to the BB-8 Sphero every Star Wars geek wanted under their Christmas tree last year?

"Ahead of its time" does not mean anything close to "is a viable product in 2016," however, thanks to the notoriously backwards approach to software espoused by Sony in the 2000s. The Rolly only works with the proprietary Sonic Stage application to transfer music in the right format, and in the case of my Rolly — which I should point out I bought used for about $80 — only works with the Japanese version of Windows XP. This should have been less of a problem for me than most, but after a fruitless search for the power cable to my 2008 Toshiba netbook and a couple of hours attempting to create virtual installations, I had to admit defeat ahead of deadline.

'80s hits with sony rolly A video posted by sam byford (@345triangle) on Jun 24, 2016 at 9:20pm PDT

No matter, I thought — the Rolly uses Bluetooth, so I could at least use it to play music and dance with its canned routines. Except I couldn’t get any device, including a Sony PSP from 2009, to pair with it. That left me with the music loaded by the Rolly’s previous owner, which is to say that I now have a dancing light-up music player that is exclusively capable of playing "Africa" by Toto, "Eternal Flame" by the Bangles, "Let’s Groove" by Earth, Wind & Fire, and nothing else. Cool. (It also isn’t a very good speaker, in case you were wondering.)