Unique controllers for videogames are all the rage these days now that Guitar Hero and Rock Band have shown that a game can sell profitably despite requiring them. Why stop with music games though? If a game needs a special controller for it then it should have one. Conforming to a platform’s given controller is sooo last year. To hear Kenichiro Imaizmu, one of the Metal Gear Solid producers, such was the thinking of Hideo Kojima when he was first developing MGS4. The dev team tried coming up with a plethora of different ways a person could interact with the controller Imaizmu said in one of a series of videos Microsoft released showcasing developers talking about Natal.
“We tried running electric shock waves, install a pulse reader … we also tried to build a controller that’s receptive to the strength of the [player’s] grip,” he divulged. “We tried a lot, even a transforming controller.” Given the Metal Gear series’ penchant for involving the player in unique ways this isn’t that far off the beaten path, but if Kojima was considering a pulse reader it makes Nintendo sound a whole bunch less crazy. Of course I think their use of the technology would have been/is completely different.
And since I rarely get to combine my love of videogames and my love and James Bond I really must add that Kojima’s theoretical controller would have been shocking. Positively shocking.
