Tsubasa Sakaguchi is beaming at two Bafta awards arranged neatly on a table in front of him. As the project director of Nintendo’s Labo series, he’s rightly delighted. The ingenious mashup of video game and cardboard scooped the family and game innovation categories at last week’s Bafta games awards.
“It was a very great honour to receive two awards,” he says. “And especially to receive awards in completely different categories. That made me very happy … We always wanted to make a widely accepted game, but at the same time something new, something which has never been seen. It’s a symbolic achievement for Labo.”
Innovative games often exist on the fringes of popular culture, exploring challenging themes, testing game design convention, or prodding mischievously at the definition of what a video game is. But for Sakaguchi, Labo’s ambition is to deliver this kind of innovation to the living rooms of young families.
“At the end of last year, sales of the Labo kits reached 1.4m,” he says. “We think that this product isn’t something that you play with for a while and then forget about. We expect we will welcome many more players in the coming years.”
The latest Labo offering, a virtual-reality kit that encourages players to construct cardboard VR viewers and use them to play a gallery of weird and interesting games, is out on 12 April.
Sakaguchi and his team designed all of the Labo cardboard controllers – or “Toy-Cons” – through a process of tinkering and play. “The first prototype of this Toy-Con elephant was made by me, as a DIY project,” says Sakaguchi, as he starts to flex and extend a cardboard trunk that connects to an assembled Labo VR headset. “I came up with the idea of using the [Switch’s] infrared cameras to track reflective tape on something, so you can move that thing about and paint in 3D.”
Sakaguchi then passed his idea to a programmer, and a painting game was developed in virtual space. The Labo team wants to users to have the same kind of creative process: the Labo VR kit lets players design virtual reality games from scratch, using dozens of mini-games, which are included, as a starting point.
Sakaguchi hopes that Labo’s silliness – one of the cardboard constructions takes the form of a bird, controlled by flapping its cardboard wings as you hold it up to your face – endears it to the families it hopes to reach. “Of course, as professionals we are very serious,” he says, with a playful glint in his eye. “But my team members are my first customers. We always showcase what we have made, and we really want to make each other laugh and have fun.”
Nintendo Labo VR is out on 12 April; £34.99-£69.99.
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