Part 2
Kindergarten love, switches and Karate
I’ve been working on this project for more than 10 years now. It’s been a long and difficult journey so far, and I hope it’s far from over. Writing about it and collecting my thoughts about the past made me think about the first time I became fascinated by gaming and game peripherals in the first place. This part will be a bit nostalgic as we take a walk down memory lane…
The earliest memory of my first encounter with any computer game is from my kindergarten days. Like most people, I had a childhood girlfriend. Her name was Berni. She had long blond hair and a lovely smile. I was madly in love with her. She lived one block away from us, so of course, I pressed my mother to visit her as much as possible. One time my mom and I went over to their house for a visit, and I met his father Miklós, a super smart, odd-ball type dad. He was good with electronics and programming among a lot of other things. He was the sort of guy who could get lost for hours in his world, always fiddling with something or writing lines of code. Though the original reason for our visit was to see my love, my focus quickly shifted from romance to a more peculiar target, the desktop/workstation of his dad in the living room. Upon approaching it, he showed me what he was working on: It was a rudimental gamepad made with household items attached to a plywood board. He made a working controller for his C64 with simple light switches. It had big square-shaped plastic rockers for each direction plus the fire button. It was all secured on a thin plywood that was about the size of an A4 sheet of paper. The switches were stripped off their covers, screwed to the board with cables dangling left and right. It was bulky but worked just fine*. When he booted the Commodore my jaw dropped. The game that loaded up was International Karate. It was the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen during my 5 years of existence. I played the game for hours, and it was a day I’ll never forget. I wish I had a photo of this proto-gamepad setup. Later it just dawned on me that perhaps this encounter with technology and computer games made a core impression on me. Sadly, Miklós passed away years ago, but this is a tribute to him. Wherever he may be, I know he’s delighted that he played a part in showing me this amazing world. Thank you Miklós!
*Ergonomics apart, it wasn’t any different than modern arcade-style fighting game controllers. It’s important to mention that, it all happened in Hungary around 1986, right at the end of the communist era. Western electronics, like a Commodore 64 were extremely scarce and very hard to get. Usually, they were smuggled across the border by adventurous blokes who risked the danger just to get one for themselves or a nice profit by reselling. The only way of playing games on it was with Joysticks, and the main brand around that time was ‘Quickshot’. They were very prone to break down, the microswitches inside them couldn’t handle the heavy-duty play that a child could unleash on them. So I guess, Miklós’ work was created out of necessity in the first place as the joysticks were always faulty so he made a set of more sturdy gamepads instead.
The first real prototype
With the funding secured, we jumped right into work. The first thing I did was make the shape of the housing out of plasticine. It’s a type of oily clay, that doesn’t dry out easily. It takes a bit of heat to make it pliable, but once it’s soft it can be shaped with ease. I wanted the center joint to be as seamless as possible. I assumed that the best connection would be a spherical shape just like in a shoulder joint. As the center joint mimicked a human part I thought why not go even further and shape it like a scapula? Here’s what the first version looked like:
After the shape was more or less done it was 3D scanned. Here’s how the raw scan showed up:
This digitalized shape became the guide for parametric modeling. Gyula started creating a definite 3D model based on this irregular blob. It was a real challenge because the connection between the two halves had to be a perfect semi-sphere and its negative counterpart. Making the transition between a perfect geometric shape and an irregular one was a real head-scratcher, but we finally managed to work it out. The first test 3D prints were made with SLA resin printers.
We had a hard time deciding what kind of resin to use. During that time (2019) Formlabs already had a couple to choose from, but they were less reliable than they are today. We tried a couple of those, like ‘tough’ and ‘rigid’ formulas but they were either too brittle, or they were not very precise. During the curing process, they often warped a bit, which made the assembly and adjusting the tolerance for the moving parts a nightmare. More about this in the next part…
Stay tuned…
