Nintendo of America’s Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang are joined by Yoshiaki Koizumi and Scot Ritchey in this week’s Nintendo Minute episode.
Koizumi has worked as the producer on Nintendo Switch and, therefore, chooses to reveal five things that you may not know about the console.
1. The Joy-Con Weren’t Originally Parallel In The Joy-Con Grip
“Thanks for mentioning the Joy-Con Grip. Let’s take a look at the Joy-Con here. When we slide them into the Grip, this actually was not the first design that we had intended. We actually had them arranged a little bit angled, sort of like a V-shape, but we made some adjustments so that it would be a little bit easier to play and have them now in parallel mode which you see here.
“Now, it’s not something that really was apparent to us when these were arranged in a V-shape but once we started to put them parallel to each other we noticed that it looks a little bit like a face.”
2. Each Joy-Con Weighs Half A Banana
“Each Joy-Con is only about 50g. So 50g, what’s that equivalent to? That’s only about half a banana! But despite the fact that it’s only 50g it contains a lot of really interesting and sophisticated technology like the HD Rumble and the motion IR camera. Things that I think a lot of people haven’t seen before. That’s a lot of magic from a lot of hardware developers at Nintendo.”
3. What Joy-Con Means
“Well, that’s an interesting story because we wanted to take the word ‘joy’ from ‘enjoy,’ because we want everyone to enjoy these controllers. But we also wanted to mix that with the idea that you are joining it to the Grip, because it slides in there and clicks into a joint. But you can also hand the controller to someone else and share the joy, and you are joined together.”
4. Joy-Con Once Attached To Nintendo Switch With Magnets
“We tried a lot of different things in terms of connecting the Joy-Con to the console, and one that I was particularly excited about at the time was using magnets where you can just like snap it right to the console. But as you would play, sometimes [the console] would just fall into your lap [laughs]
“But because we still wanted to have something that was sturdy enough for you to hold on to the console, but also gave you that satisfying snap that the magnets did, that’s how we came up with the mechanical rails that give you the click.”
5. Alternate Joy-Con Colours Was A Happy Accident
“We actually weren’t thinking about having two different colours on the same console at the same time in the beginning. We had laid out a bunch of different Joy-Con of different colours thinking about what our options were, but they were all matched up in same colour sets. Until someone slipped on one of each colour onto a single console, and suddenly everybody gathered around and said ‘Oh, that looks great!’ so that’s how it was decided. First, it was Red and Red or Blue and Blue, but sometimes mistakes happen and they end up being the right mistakes.”
