Nintendo on the struggles of using magnets for Switch 2’s Joy-Con, & implementing metal buttons
A quick look at the Joy-Con on Switch 2 and you might mistake them for Switch 1 Joy-Con. While the controllers certainly look similar upon first glance, a closer inspection reveals a host of changes, tweaks and adjustments, and they didn’t come easy.
In an interview with MobileSyrup, Switch 2 director Takuhiro Dohta, producer Kouichi Kawamoto and technical director Tetsuya Sasaki spoke once again on a topic they’ve covered before; the use of magnets in connecting the Switch 2 Joy-Con rather than a plastic/metal rail like on Switch 1.
In particular, Kawamoto talked about the team’s worries about how people would attach and detach the Joy-Con on Switch 2, with directives within the company asking for some sort of mechanism while at the same time allowing players to simply pull the Joy-Con off.
Originally, we didn’t have the button that would release the magnet. And so you had to pull. And then we discussed, “Well, wouldn’t the kids pull it apart?” So my first request was, “Please use a strong magnet.” And the second was, “Okay, if you want to be able to pull it, please make sure you can pull it.” So I gave that conflicting request to the hardware experts. [laughs] And to take this request and bring it into realization, we had several ideas using magnets, but for some of them, the technology wasn’t quite available to us yet. So again, we just went through so many iterations before we arrived at the solution.
[producer Kouichi Kawamoto]
While the situation with magnets is very well known with Switch 2, one thing you might not know is how the SL/SR buttons have been tweaked in a notable way. According to Sasaki, these buttons have been completely reworked and are metal now, which isn’t something you really ever see on game controllers.
A notable feature, I think, is for example, the SL/SR buttons, because they’re on the inside – the buttons themselves are made of metal because they need to stick to the magnet on the inside. And actually, in console development, it is incredibly rare for buttons to use metal. And so it was an idea that really didn’t come up very naturally for us in development. So initially, we had a bunch of other ideas on how to make this work. There were many advancements made in the world of technology and we were finally able to get to a place where we could use metal in the buttons. But it took a lot of trial and error until we got there. When you look at the final result itself, it feels like such an obvious answer, but the truth is, when the standard doesn’t exist already, it’s one of those ideas that doesn’t isn’t actually that simple to come up with.
[Technical director Tetsuya Sasaki ]
