Nintendo NX Controller Was a Fake – Here’s How It Was Done

Earlier this week, a programmer, claiming to be in possession of the Nintendo NX dev kit, revealed photos purporting to be the controller for the new console (above), the design of which certainly matched a patent Nintendo filed last year, and the object itself appeared of a high build quality. The leaker – Frank Sandqvist, posting under the name kankki, Senior Project Lead, NX Hardware Design at Nintendo of Europe –  has subsequently revealed on Friday morning that the controller is a fake, writing on NeoGAF:

“I made this fake. Let’s see if I just got myself banned.”

He then posted a link to a YouTube video, exposing how he created the fake controller:

Sandqvist – inspired by a similar hoax the previous week – created the black, button-less gamepad using a copy of the Nintendo controller patent, some nifty CAD skill, and a 3D printing lab. The printed body of the controller was then primed, painted, and decorated with a shiny front plate, shoulder wheels, and a ‘confidential property’ sticker. It sure seems like a lot of work for a hoax that lasted little more than a few days, but it certainly had some fooled.

“When I saw that Photoshopped/rendered white fake, I thought it looked quite easy to reproduce, albeit with a switched-off display,” Sandqvist told Digital Trends. “So that same night I started modeling it up in Autodesk Fusion 360. And I thought it would be interesting to see if I could fool the Internet. At the same time, I guess it could stand as a reminder to people that you can’t really believe these kind of leaks nowadays with the rise of 3D printing.”