Surprise: The BrickBoy kit for the Lego Game Boy uses floating magnets instead of switches

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 images 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.

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:

When I press the A button, Mario jumps! When I press right on the D-pad, he runs. Some magnetic presses are being wirelessly detected. But I’m writing this story 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. Wireless multi-magnet sensing seems pretty ambitious from where I’m sitting right now!

It’s probably too early to judge that prototype. But it’s not too early to raise some eyebrows. As another example, the published a video to YouTube that claims you can build a “playable Lego Game Boy in 5 minutes” but omitted the extra minutes it takes to wire up that extra magnetometer, remove extra Lego bricks to stuff it inside, and calibrate each and every magnet.

Whether you’re angry about any of this probably depends on what you believe crowdfunding should be about. Are you funding an exact product that you want to exist, or are you funding a team to figure it out? Thomas Bertani tells me his team is figuring it out, building the most magical experience they can, and they’re ready to fall back to wired buttons if the magnets don’t work.

“I don’t think people care about it being magnets or wired buttons,” he tells me. “They do care about it working well and about the Lego experience being enjoyable,” he says, adding that the magnetometers actually make the product more expensive to produce.

Bertani says an early 800-backer survey suggested his customers care more about the building experience than the playing experience, that it “was clear they were Lego fans more than Game Boy fans,” and that many people were simply planning to put it on display.

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

But I believe I deserve to know what I’m betting on before I put money down, not after seeing lots of images suggesting I’ll be getting a physical button and assuming the device is built for play.

Bertani tells me he’ll update all his backers 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 a new update on her Build a Boy project today, including a photo of the actual switches she’ll be using for the buttons. That Lego Game Boy may not be exceptionally playable either, mind. She writes: “It’s important for me to reinstate that at the end of the day it is Lego. I wouldn’t suggest this being an everyday carry item.”