They say necessity is the mother of invention, but in the case of Reel Blade, the invention of a transforming video game controller at the National University of Singapore (NUS) came first.
“We talked to [the Singapore University of Technology and Design] and said, ‘can we invent a game that will showcase this interesting device?’,” Ellen Yi-Luen Do of NUS told WIRED. “And so as part of the process, when they designed the game, they also asked us to improve the device.”
The so-called “device” was dubbed the “Ninja Track” and it transforms from a sword to a whip with the flip of a switch. But in Reel Blade, the game on display at the Tokyo Game Show this weekend, the two modes are sword and fishing reel.
In the game, players must fight a giant octopus by switching between the two and waving it in the air according to the situation. The sword can cut the octopus, while the reel can deflect its attacks.
“Right now what we have is a small prototype game and we hope that maybe in the next year or so we could potentially produce a game for the arcade systems,” programmer Wei Kiat Leong said.
The Ninja Track itself is also a prototype—one made using a 3-D printer—so it too will be need to become more “robust.”
