Even the savviest observer of the Japanese video-game giant Nintendo couldn’t have predicted that the interactive gaming experience it announced last January would involve not a VR headset or a new Mario game, but perforated cardboard, colorful string, elastic bands, and plastic grommets.
These resolutely low-tech items are the stuff of Labo (short for laboratory), a series of add-ons for the breakout Switch handheld console, which Nintendo introduced in March of 2017. As much maker projects as they are games, Labo’s DIY kits let you fold cardboard parts into smart toys that you can engage using the Switch. The $70 Variety Kit provides the makings of a piano and a fishing rod, along with a house, a motorbike, and two radio-controlled cars. Labo’s second offering, the $80 Robot Kit, contains parts for a visor and backpack that, once built, turn the wearer into a Transformers-style automaton. (Crouch down and your character can zip over terrain like a tank; stand up and raise your arms and it takes flight.)
Much of the technology that brings Labo’s structures to life is found in the Switch’s controllers, which detach from the console’s main touch screen. When placed inside a cardboard car, for example, the controllers’ coordinated vibrations propel it forward. Pop one controller into the handle of the fishing rod and its motion sensor detects whether you’re lowering your bait or reeling in a feisty mackerel, with all of the action depicted on the Switch screen in real time. Inside Labo’s piano, a controller uses its embedded infrared camera to identify which keys you’re pressing.
As gadgetry such as Facebook’s Oculus Rift is making entertainment more virtual, Labo’s joyful physicality represents a back-to-basics move for Nintendo, which was founded in 1889 as a manufacturer of playing cards and expanded to make other playthings in the 1960s. It’s hard to imagine the other console kingpins (Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One) offering anything similar to Labo–and that’s the point. Since its earliest days in the video-game business, “Nintendo has chosen to do it their own way,” says Blake J. Harris, author of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation.
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