Surprise: This BrickBoy set for the Lego Game Boy uses floating magnets instead of keys

If you’re one of about 3,500 Kickstarter backers who pay to donate Lego Boy game Screen and physical buttons, I have a question: Did you expect these buttons to have physical keys underneath them?

because The Break Boy – Not to be confused With nerd natalie boy build — Actual clicks are not currently used. Instead, she sticks rare earth magnets inside Lego pieces, in what we hope is a magical experience.

This came as a surprise to me, because the BrickBoy Kickstarter, which ends in three days, barely mentions magnets at all. Every promotional photo for the startup shows domed switches underneath the buttons, and Substance Labs had never explained how the buttons worked until just yesterday — An hour in the AMA video Which only has 248 views at the time I’m writing these words.

When I ask my colleague Andrew Liszewski, who covers the company twiceIt’s a surprise for him too. He says he assumed they would be rubber domes.

To be fair, magnets are a smart idea! Instead of having to hollow out a lot of Lego Game Boy to fit the PCB, just 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 (they’re rubber tires) to fit the magnets inside; Same with the A and B button posts. Here’s a glimpse of where those parts go:

When I press the A button, Mario jumps! When I press right on the D-pad, he runs. Some magnetic pistons We are It is detected wirelessly. But I’m writing this story because – so far, with the prototype – it doesn’t work well. For example, I keep dying at the first Goomba appearance Super Mario Brosbecause I can’t stop running, or start jumping, reliably at all. Multi-magnet wireless sensing sounds pretty ambitious from where I sit now!

It may be too early to judge this prototype. But it’s not too early to raise some eyebrows. As another example, he posted a video on YouTube claiming You can create a playable Lego Game Boy in 5 minutes“But I overlooked the extra minutes it takes to plug in the extra magnetometer, remove the extra Lego bricks to put it in, and calibrate each magnet.

Whether you’re angry about any of this probably depends on what you think crowdfunding should be like. Are you funding a specific product you want to have, or are you funding a team to discover it? Thomas Bertani told me his team is figuring it out, building an experience as magical as possible, and they’re willing to go back to wired buttons if magnets don’t work.

“I don’t think people care that it’s magnets or wired buttons,” he told me. “They care that the product works well and that the Lego experience is fun,” he says, adding that magnetometers actually make the product more expensive to produce.

Bertani says an early survey of 800 backers indicated that his customers cared more about the building experience than the playing experience, that “it was clear they were more Lego fans than Game Boy fans,” and that many people were simply planning to demo it.

I can imagine myself being one of those people: I’d enjoy handing over a Lego Game Boy to my friends, challenging them to figure out how it works, and then revealing the magnets cleverly hidden inside. If Substance Labs figures out how to make magnets truly operable, that will be the cherry on top of my investment.

But I think I deserve to know what I’m betting on before I made the deposit, not after seeing a lot of pictures suggesting I’d be getting a physical button and assuming the device was designed for gaming.

Bertani told me he will tell all his supporters this weekend, before the campaign ends, to be more transparent about how the device works. He says the intention was always to be transparent.

Coincidentally, Natalie The Nerd just posted New update for her Build a Boy project todayincluding a picture of the actual keys you’ll use for the buttons. The Lego Game Boy may not be exceptionally playable either. “It’s important for me to reiterate that this is the ultimate Lego toy. I’m not suggesting this should be an everyday carry-on,” she writes.