 I first met Eiji Morikawa at Tokyo Game Show 2005, where he was demonstrating his "Periborg" ("Peripheral Cyborg") line of game gadgets at the Hori booth. He works for Hori. You know that famous Dragon Quest Slime Controller by Hori? Yeah, that's Morikawa. See, Hori always makes bizarre theme controllers, and they're normally just laughed at. Well, the Slime Controller was a huge hit of pop-culture proportions.
Morikawa is concerned that people are growing out of touch with the very essence of games. He claims that gamers are becoming "game fetishists." He agrees that controllers are growing scary. He thinks fourteen buttons is too many buttons. He's very excited about the Nintendo Revolution.
His Periborg products are designed to bring the excitement "outside" of a game. His first device in the soon-to-become-legendary series is the "Ore Commander." "Ore" is a Japanese masculine pronoun for "I." "Hori Commander" was the name of Hori's first successful product -- a replacement controller for the Nintendo Famicom, which included auto-fire. He says that the prevelance of auto-fire even today is curious, because it indicates game designers have yet to understand "the true element of physical love" between gamer, game, and controller. Putting the auto-fire inside the controller removes the magic. Morikawa, noting players' laziness about pounding buttons, decided to make an auto-fire function that "allows the game to require rapid pressing, allows the controller to remain a controller, and allows the player to feel that he has changed."
In other words, the Ore Commander consists of a rubber-band-equipped finger clip attached to a wrist-mountable battery pack by a cyborg-looking wire. There are two motors in the finger cover. One motor sits above your finger (or thumb)'s first knuckle, one over the second. They are timed quite precisely, so that if you let the (fully exposed) tip of your thumb hover over a Sony DUALSHOCK 2 controller button and then flex it ever so slightly, your thumb tip will begin to vibrate. You will feel your finger pressing the button thirty times a second. The speed is variable, and can be set as slow as five times a second.
The best part of the Ore Commander is that, every time you use it, you think, "I don't really need this." You realize that thirty times a second is not really that fast. (Hudson's Takahashi Meijin can do 80 times a second without any peripherals.) Morikawa says that it's "Not even really a game peripheral." When asked what it is, then, he says "It's a Periborg."
Future Periborg inventions include the Electric Wang Show, a USB-compatible shoulder-band which displays one of 100 user-input messages, allowing you to communicate with people, without speaking, while playing a game. As with the Ore Commander, which can also be used to massage your temples or whatever else you want (a warning on the box says "FOR USERS OVER 18 ONLY"), the Electric Wang Show, inspired by the handwritten, dry-erase message bands worn by Japanese construction workers, is positioned in the world of games while simultaneously reaching out of it.
Tomorrow sees the release of the Shock-C, the second Periborg to go on sale. The Shock-C involves no batteries at all; rather, designed and originally built by Morikawa himself, it is a pair of scissoring, knuckle-mounted plastic eating utensils, positioned so that you can hold something in your hands (like a game controller) while also eating out of, say, a bag of potato chips. The utensils themselves are a plastic fork and spoon, though they can be replaced with wooden (or plastic) chopsticks. I received mine yesterday, and they are gorgeously impressive. I would call them the "best game peripheral ever," and then probably get laughed at by someone, because "you don't need to eat while playing a videogame." Statements like that are the thing Morikawa's works aim to make us stop and reconsider.
Morikawa's friends include Tetsuya Mizuguchi (of Rez fame); his fans include Toshihiro Nagoshi (of F-Zero GX). His peers include Keita Takahashi (of Katamari Damacy). His favorite game-makers include Yasumi Matsuno and Fumito Ueda. He studied engineering in college; he is a graphic designer and a skilled amateur electrician. He is twenty-eight-years old. He is well-versed in games. He's also a really nice guy.
I wrote an article about Mr. Morikawa for WIRED magazine; that issue (with LEGO men on the cover) is on sale now. Do check it out. Following the interview, Morikawa and I became rather good friends. We have curry every once in a while, and then play arcade games like Midnight Resistance in Akihabara; we comment on joysticks; we press buttons.
If videogame controllers were videogame reviews, Periborg would be insertcredit.com.
In Japan, on Valentine's Day, girls in the office give "chocolate of honor and humility" to male co-workers. Well, Morikawa's secret laboratory (oddly not an exaggeration) employs no ladies (he's mostly alone), so I hereby gladly seize this opportunity to wish Eiji Morikawa well. We offer him the first-annual insertcredit.com valentine for 2006. Warning, ladies: he is married.
You can see his products here, and you can buy them here. To commemorate the launch of the Shock-C, they're selling the Ore Commander and the Shock-C in one package, for 3,500 yen.
The picture at the top of this post, by the way, contains the slogan "Games move into the hi-def era," which sounds a lot more pretentious in Japanese than in English. Morikawa lifted it from the Xbox 360 advertisements running all over Tokyo back in December; like Hideo Kojima, he understands that "natural" is more important than "real," and the picture is a sly reminder that our own bodies are more high-definition than the most expensive television. It kind of reminds me of what Keita Takahashi said about how he'd rather design parks than videogames. Except less of an "apocalyptic artist" thing and more of a "this guy's funny" thing.
Morikawa will be on Japanese TV Saturday night showing off his various kooky things. I'm not sure which channel.
As a final note, if you wish to celebrate the Konami Week that's going on on the forums, be sure to play responsibly: play with Hori brand controllers. Please.
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