Object of the exercise
Inside the six-month creation of Labo Fit Adventure Kart Kit
Inside one Nintendo-loving engineer’s six-month development of Labo Fit Adventure Kart Kit
Let yourself forget the practicalities – and the intentionally ridiculous compound name – for a moment, and it could almost be real. A mock Nintendo Direct, hosted by YouTuber Mike Choi,
introducing a brand-new product, complete with its own mascot and matching Amiibo. And it is real, in a sense – the Labo Fit Adventure Kart Kit does exist, and is fully functional. It’s just that there is only one in the world, currently being stored in Choi’s San Francisco apartment.
As the name suggests, this project connects the dots between a few existing Nintendo products. It’s a peripheral-driven fitness game, in the tradition of Wii Fit,
utilising the Ring-Con from the publisher’s most recent foray into that arena along with an exercise bike, clad in Labo-styled cardboard, in order to play an especially sweaty game of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Surprisingly, though, the concept didn’t originate from any of these games, but from a round of Tetris 99.
“I’m not a very fit person or, like, a very functional adult,” Choi says. “I don’t really find the time to exercise.” Exactly the kind of person, then, that Nintendo was targeting with Ring Fit Adventure – but even that couldn’t get Choi to commit to an exercise regimen for long. Instead, he found himself mounting the exercise bike while playing Tetris 99 and trying to pedal for the duration of a match. A feat that seemed achievable, he says, “because I’m not very good at Tetris 99.”
“I thought, ‘wow, this would be really cool if this was somehow integrated into the game’,” he says. Stewing on that concept a little longer, he arrived at Mario Kart. What if you could use the Ring-con as a steering wheel, squeezing to fire off a shell or banana skin, and power your kart by foot? “Which is not a new idea,” Choi admits. “Other people have done that before – but I wanted to do a very unique take on it.”
After six months of development, what makes Choi’s approach unique is how thorough it is. The final product looks like one you could imagine Nintendo releasing, right down to its packaging and the graphics in Choi’s Direct-style video. “I think a lot of people will look at this, and they’ll sort of scratch their head and think: ‘Wait, this is obviously fake – but it looks sort of real?’ And I like that. There’s something about that that I find very funny.”
Beneath the familiar Nintendo presentation and hardware is something entirely of Choi’s own construction: the TAPBO module. It combines a wireless chip, microcontroller and two motorised arms to create, as Choi puts it, “a small robot that hugs your Joy-Con”. It connects to a flex sensor Choi added to the Ring-Con and an infrared tachometer that detects the speed of the exercise bike’s pedals – when it receives the correct signal, the arms tap the corresponding buttons. It’s a solution that’s as ingenious as it is circuitous.
Choi is a self-described “hardware hacker” – not in the “movie mainframe” sense, but the “I have an axe and I’m hacking at things” sense – who has previously turned two Switch models into an oversized DS and co-created the
FlipGrip, a commercial product that enables vertical-mode handheld play on Switch. The latter inspired his approach to this project, he says, having given him a taste of everything from packaging design to marketing. “For me, there is something very creatively fulfilling about trying to push myself in every dimension of what it means to create something.”
With that in mind, Choi allowed himself to give in to “scope creep” (something he has to keep under control in his day job as a product developer and engineer), indulging every idea that excited him and letting Labo Fit Adventure Kart Kit become a “monster project”. This is how you end up with TAPBO’s mascot, which Choi designed. It’s how that mascot becomes a 3D-printed Amiibo, with custom packaging and a tiny Joy-Con accessory that attaches via magnets. And how, although an initial working prototype was created in one “very intense weekend”, the project took six months from conception to completion. For Choi, though, that was the joy of it. “Oftentimes you have to compromise on these things,” he says. “For this, I really did try to be uncompromising.”
So, we ask, what’s next? Choi built up a long list of ideas while he was working on this but, for now, “I’m still in rest mode.” After half a year spent squeezing this project into his spare time, we’re almost relieved to hear it. And on the topic of his health: did Labo Fit Adventure Kart Kit succeed where Ring Fit failed? Did Choi stick with it? “I’ve done a stream of me playing it,” he says – but since then, nothing. Choi pans the webcam down to reveal the ‘Bike-Con’ squeezed into the office behind him. “At this point, it’s a giant cardboard exercise-bike coat rack. I need to make better use of it, because obviously I worked really hard on it.”
What if you could use the Ring-Con as a steering wheel, squeezing to fire off a shell or banana skin?