If you’re one of the roughly 3,500 Kickstarter backers paying to give your Lego Game Boy a real screen and buttons, I have a question: Did you expect there to be physical switches underneath those buttons?
Because BrickBoy – not to be confused with Natalie the Nerd’s Build a Boy – is not currently going with physical clicks. Instead, it sticks rare earth magnets inside Lego bricks in hopes it will be a magical experience.
This was a surprise to me, as magnets are barely mentioned in the BrickBoy Kickstarter, which ends in three days. Every promo image from the startup shows the domed switch below the button, and the startup Substance Labs never actually explained how the buttons worked until yesterday — an hour-long AMA video that had only 248 views as I typed these words.
When I asked my colleague Andrew Liszewski, who has covered the company twice, it was a surprise to him too. He says he assumed they would be rubber domes.
To be fair, magnets are a clever idea! Instead of hollowing out a lot of the LEGO Game Boy to fit the PCB, you only need to remove a few extra bricks here and there to fit a second magnetometer between the D-pad and face buttons. It’s easy to take out the Start and Select keys (which have rubber tires) to fit the magnet inside; Same with the A and B button posts. Here’s a peek at where those parts go:
When I press the A button, Mario jumps! When I press right on the D-pad, he runs. some magnetic press Are Being detected wirelessly. But I’m writing this story because – so far, with early prototypes – it doesn’t work very well. Like, I keep dying in the first Goomba Super Mario BrosBecause I can’t stop running, or start jumping, reliably. Wireless multi-magnet sensing sounds quite ambitious from where I sit now!
Perhaps it is too early to assess that prototype. But it’s not too early to raise some eyebrows. As another example, a video has been published on YouTube that claims you can build a “playable Lego Game Boy in 5 minutes”, but omits the extra minutes it takes to wire up the magnetometer, remove extra Lego bricks to fill it inside, and calibrate each magnet.
Whether you’re angry about any of this probably depends on what you believe crowdfunding should be about. Are you funding an exact product that you want to bring into existence, or are you funding a team to create it? Thomas Bertani tells me his team is figuring it out, creating the most magical experience possible, and they’re ready to go back to wired buttons if the magnets don’t work.
“I don’t think people care about magnets or wired buttons,” he told me. “They care about it working well and the Lego experience being enjoyable,” he says, adding that the magnetometer actually makes the product more expensive to produce.
Bertani says that an initial 800-backer survey showed that their customers cared more about the building experience than the playing experience, it was “clear that they were more Lego fans than Game Boy fans,” and many were simply planning to put it on display.
I can imagine being one of those people: I would enjoy handing out the Lego Game Boy to my friends, challenging them to figure out how it worked, and then cleverly revealing the hidden magnets. If Substance Labs could figure out how to make magnets actually playable, that would be the cherry on top of my investment.
But I believe I deserve to know what I’m betting on First I put the money down, not least after seeing a lot of images suggesting I’d get a physical button and assuming the device was built for play.
Bertani told me he’ll be updating all of his backers later this week before the campaign ends, to be more transparent about how the device works. He says the intention was always to be transparent.
Coincidentally, Natalie the Nerd just posted a new update on her Build a Boy project today, including a photo of the actual switches she’ll be using for the buttons. That Lego Game Boy might not even be exceptionally playable, mind. She writes: “It’s important for me to restate that at the end of the day it is Lego. I wouldn’t suggest it being an everyday carry-on item.”
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