Artist turns 100 classic controllers into alarm clocks

by JC Fletcher on Jul 15th 2010 12:30PM

Artist Roger Ibars wired one hundred different game controllers -- from the familiar to the obscure -- to travel alarm clocks, creating a series of wonderfully impractical devices. While we can't buy our own (it used to be possible to buy a similar device, but they're hard to find now), we can all enjoy the beautiful photographs Ibars took. It's a collection not only of his art, but of the collected works of game and peripheral companies over 30 years.

Ibars granted Joystiq (the natural home for art about joysticks) permission to share a selection of high-resolution images with you, which you can find in our gallery below. It's going to be really sad if Kinect makes controllers obsolete, because future galleries will just include blank spaces with tiny alarm clocks in the background.

HWD Corporation (by Roger Ibars)

Source: Roger Ibars

Tags: Art, Controllers, HWD-Corporation, Joysticks, Retro, Roger-Ibars

Reader Comments (38)

Do not want

So he took a controller and attached a tiny clock at the end of the cord.....

Am I missing something?

In a world where people do amazing things with modifying existing hardware and turning it into something new, this seems pretty pretentious. Just because he took some stylish photos of it doesn't make it amazing.

@(Unverified)

To be fair, almost all people outside the sphere of modern art find pretty much all modern art to be "pretentious."

And, of course, it is pretentious - and is intended to be such. Pretension - " claim made, esp. indirectly or by implication, to some quality, merit, or the like" - is not inherently bad. Every video game, for instance, is pretentious by virtue of its marketing. It's only "bad" if the pretension is viewed as unearned (which seems to be your implication).

@(Unverified)

I don't get this either. It isn't like he incorporated the alarm clock in the controller itself which would have been impressive. Hooking something up to a tiny alarm clock with a tiny display isn't that special. Even wiring them together so you control the alarm clock with the controller isn't hard. I think this guy went with quantity over quality.

@(Unverified) As always, hipsters always ruin nice things like controllers.

@(Unverified)
I still find the collection to be pretty damn impressive. That's a lot of controllers.

Maybe it's less impressive from technological standpoint, but it is supposed to be artistic in other ways? Maybe it's a message to the modders out there, challenging the convention (which is to incorporate the second device into the frame of the first)? It's still very pretty to look at.

I have a hard enough time transporting my Guitar Hero controllers to my friends house for Rock Band. I don't even want to know what it'd be like taking one on a business trip.

Pretty sure you set the alarm with the controller.

Also, it wouldn't be an empty space the Kinect clock would wire into, it would be hooked into bloated, cardiac-arrested corpse of the first Dance Central fatality. :)

@onan
And do you turn off the alarm with the Konami Code?

What a waste. The Advantage is probably the best stick controller ever.

don't care about the miniscule "alarm clock" there, but i would love me some nes advantage. the joystiq was wonderfully responsive, and the buttons had great feedback. i remember back in gradeschool when i got one. my friends all chuckled about how oversized it was. after a few gorounds with it though, we were all arguing about who got to use it, and eventually they all got one as well.
it was a great controller, and i could tear me up some streetfighter with one today...if there were more buttons...and sf4 was available on an nes....and it were 1991. what was this article about again? where am I? what's going on?

@pkpk523

I had a friend that had SF2 for the NES as well. I believe it was an import with only 4 characters (Ryu, Zangief, Chun-Li, and Guile).

Wasn't terrible for an NES port of an arcade game.

Not sure how a guitar hero (not even the original at that) controller, qualifies as 'classic'.

@MrAlex Agreed.

Also, where's my Steel Battalion 40-Button alarm clock?

Adding a clock attached by a cord isn't really "turning it into" an alarm clock. It's attaching an alarm clock.

Should include a tiny display to play Tetris.

More accurate title:

"Artist" ruins 100 classic controllers

@(Unverified)
Even more accurate title:
"some guy" ruins 100 classic controllers

Fail.

Wow. Until this I never realized how phallic controllers have been. Everywhere I look is penis in these pictures.

@Punkrawk Bbob

You're looking at your chatroulette window. The Joystiq window is over here <---.

No Dreamcast controller? Mega fail.

It was bad enough seeing all these wasted old school controllers, but the lack of love for the DC is preposterous.

@zero2dash

Not to be an ass, but the title says "Artist turns 100 classic controllers into alarm clocks". Seeing as they are only 6 pictures in the gallery (and the fact that the post says the artist gave joystiq "permission to share a selection" of the pics with us) any rational person would come to the conclusion that there are 94 controllers that aren't shown of which one would hopefully assume is a Dreamcast controller...

@Grey http://charstring.com/grabs/Artist_turns_100_classic_controllers_into_alarm_clocks_%7C_Joystiq-20100715-141428.jpg

I checked the whole gallery. He did 100 controllers including the Power Glove, but not the Dreamcast pad. He gets an "honorable mention" for the NiGHTS into Dreams pad, which is what the DC pad was based on.

@zero2dash

For a split-second when I saw the Sega Saturn controller I thought it was an off-brand Dreamcast controller. I forgot exactly what the controller looked like, I am used to the black one. That grey one really does show how they refined it for the Dreamcast.

@Drakkenfyre

It really is a monster of a controller, but it laid groundwork for later controllers. I wonder what it was like to play and hold.

@captplut9465

I remember it feeling similiar to the Dreamcast controller, but a bit bigger, and a bit rounder. You could buy it separately, but it primarly came with NIGHTS, the first game to use it.

Ahh, the NES advantage, the single greatest controller ever made.

I had an obsession with getting all the alternate controllers for the NES when I was a kid. Owned most, if not all of them. Now I really wish I had saved them all.

@Courtney

You ever get the "Mothership" controller? I was a shell that let you slide the original NES controller into it, and it turned it into a joystick with a button ontop. All the buttons on the original controller were connected with mechanical levelr that moved when you moved the joystick. And the buttons were directly connected to the buttons underneath.

@Drakkenfyre

I didn't have the Mothership, but I did have another shell that did something similar. Put an analog style stick over the d-pad. I don't think this is the one I had, but it was really similar:

http://www.nesplayer.com/database/accessories/supercontroller.htm

I had the Max, which I remember not being good:

http://www.nesplayer.com/database/accessories/images/nesmax.jpg

Can't find another one I had. It had a little built in screen that would display stats and had a really simple game built into the controller itself.

Really should be:
"Artist" ruins 100 classic controllers

They are not saying Boo-urns...

Where di the KONIX joystick come from? I thought the multisystem never came out.

So is this like saying I can turn my house into a car by shutting the end of the garden hose in the trunk?

I liked the Atari 2600 paddles. One should control on/off and volume, the other the AM/FM and radio tuner.

Personally, I like this one: http://makezine.com/08/alarmgun/

I had that shell, too.

The Max sucked. The disc "D" pad was terrible.

The Mothership made it look like an entirely new controller. It was good for shooter games.

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Artist turns 100 classic controllers into alarm clocks

HWD Corporation (by Roger Ibars)

Reader Comments (38)

Posted: Jul 15th 2010 12:34PM butaneko said

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