Alarmo and 8 other times Nintendo did the unexpected

As one of Nintendo’s most experimental consoles, the Wii was no stranger to unexpected accessories, many of them a big success. The Wii Vitality Sensor was not one of them. In fact, it never even got the chance to be, as the product never even made it to market. Unveiled by the late Satoru Iwata at E3 in 2009, the Vitality Sensor was a peripheral that was intended to measure the pulse of a player during a game and then relay the information back to them, much like smartwatches and other wearables have been doing for the last decade or so. Iwata thought the device could be used to help people relax, but never really managed to elaborate on exactly how it could be integrated into games, and the project was eventually cancelled.

Mario Kart 8 first launched on Wii U in 2014, so by 2020 people were very much ready for a new entry in the enduring kart racing series. What they got instead was Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, which was essentially Nintendo’s crack at Scalextric, with some pretty smart AR functionality key to the experience. You designed the course using the included markers and other miscellaneous objects in your front room, paired your Switch with the remote-controlled kart, and raced it around the course, with the toy vehicle’s built-in camera sending a video feed to your console. While it was certainly novel to see Mario drifting around the dog’s bed rather than the usual Mushroom Kingdom obstacles, Nintendo hasn’t done anything more with Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit since. (And we still don’t have Mario Kart 9.)

While it was home to some truly fantastic games, the enduring story of the Wii was the way it enticed a whole new generation of casual gamers who’d never been near a joystick before. Has any other console had your grandma playing tennis in the front room? We think not. The motion-controlled Wii Remote was the primary reason for the console’s success, but you can’t talk about the Wii without talking about Wii Fit and the Wii Balance Board peripheral on which players stood to do actual physical exercise while playing various fitness-focused minigames. The Balance Board, which looked a lot like bathroom scales, could measure your weight and track your centre of balance, with the latter allowing for a surprisingly wide variety of exercises. Wii Fit was a surprisingly big seller for Nintendo, and without it we’d probably never have got the genuinely great Ring Fit Adventure during the Switch era.

Nobody needs reminding that 2020 was not a banner year for being outside and moving around, so Nintendo surprise dropped a free downloadable skipping game for the Switch, making use of the motion sensors in the Joy-Cons. Holding a controller in each hand, the player jumped while moving their hands, with the only difference from real skipping being that there was no rope for you to embarrassingly trip on. A little on-screen rabbit mirrored your movements, which allowed your jumps to be counted and saved, with Nintendo setting a daily target of 100 to ensure people were getting their daily exercise in while they were stuck indoors. It didn’t change the world, but it was a nice idea at the time.

Nintendo might be known for giving us the virtual worlds of Mario, Zelda and Metroid, but at its heart it’s not a tech or software company, but a toy-maker. And it was definitely that muscle it was flexing when it announced Labo, a now discontinued but at the time pretty innovative range of buildable cardboard accessories that integrated with the Switch hardware to become controllers in games. Thanks to the deceptively tech-loaded Joy-Cons, flat-pack cardboard transformed into motorbike handlebars, a piano, a fishing rod and even a barebones but functional VR headset with a decidedly lower price of entry than what the likes of HTC and Oculus (now Meta) were selling at the time. Sadly we suspect a lot of those cardboard creations are now collecting dust in attics, but Labo was Nintendo at its playful best.

There are countless lightgun controllers out there, and enough steering wheels to fill several warehouses. But as far as we’re aware there is only one controller shaped like a pair of bongo drums. One of Nintendo’s all-time weirdest accessories, the DK Bongos were designed to be used with the rhythm game series, Donkey Konga, on the GameCube, and featured two pads on each barrel-shaped drum for left and right inputs, and a built-in microphone to detect clapping. Sadly, the DK Bongos were never carried forward to subsequent Nintendo consoles and Donkey Konga is a dormant series in 2024. But if you still own a pair today, hang onto them — you never know what those plastic drums will be worth one day.

The Game Boy was a revolutionary handheld device, the home of Tetris — but Nintendo also turned it into a camera. Recognised as the world’s smallest snapper when it first launched, the Game Boy Camera was always pitched as more of a toy than a serious photography tool, but it did let you take charmingly grainy grayscale photos, the likes of which are now aped by countless photo apps on your phone. You could even swivel the camera 180 degrees to take selfies, years before the term was coined. The Game Boy camera could be used to plonk your face into a series of minigames, and you could print pictures out using the Game Boy Printer. Did the Game Boy need a camera? Probably not. But at a time before smartphones, it was a fun little add-on.

These days, a video game hardware manufacturer putting out a virtual reality headset could never be described as much of a shock. Back in 1995, the world was still several decades away from being properly ready for consumer VR (some would argue we’re still not there), but Nintendo decided to have a crack at it anyway with the Virtual Boy, arguably its most spectacular failure to date. Marketed as the first console capable of displaying stereoscopic 3D graphics, the Virtual Boy invited you to press your face against a strangely intimidating helmet on a stand, where you’d be immersed in a virtual gaming world, which could be anything from Wario’s castle to a bowling alley. In reality, the slightly sinister deep-red-on-black display and parallax effect failed to capture the imagination of gamers at time, and barely more than 20 games were released before Nintendo yanked the device off the shelves for good. The Switch it was not, but the Virtual Boy will at least always have its place in the story of Nintendo.