is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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If you’re one of the nearly 3,500 Kickstarter backers paying to give your Lego Game Boy an actual screen and buttons, I have a question: did you expect those buttons to have physical switches underneath?
Because the BrickBoy — not to be confused with Natalie the Nerd’s Build A Boy — is not currently going with physical clicks. Instead, it glues rare earth magnets inside Lego bricks, for what will hopefully be a magical experience.
This came as a surprise to me, because the BrickBoy Kickstarter, ending in three days, barely mentions magnets at all. Every one of the startup’s promo image shows domed switches underneath the buttons, and startup Substance Labs never really explained how the buttons worked until just yesterday — an hour into an AMA video that only has 248 views at the time I type these words.
Those domed switches aren’t really a thing. Image: BrickBoy
When I ask my colleague Andrew Liszewski, who’s covered the company twice, it’s a surprise to him too. He says he assumed they’d be rubber domes.
To be fair, the magnets are a clever idea! Instead of having to hollow out much of the Lego Game Boy to fit a 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 pop out the Start and Select keys (which are rubber tires) to fit a magnet inside; same with the A and B button posts. Here’s a glimpse at where those parts go:
The magnets and the extra magnetometer (center grey 3D printed brick) that BrickBoy didn’t mention. Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
But I’m bringing it up because — so far, with an early prototype — it doesn’t work very well. Like, I keep dying on the very first Goomba in Super Mario Bros, because I can’t stop running, or start jumping, reliably at all.
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