The GameCube controller has long been recognized by video game fans as one of the best controllers ever made. After the success of Super Smash Bros. Melee – and its continued success as an esport for over a decade – the GameCube controller quickly became many fans' preferred method when playing any Smash Bros. game. The GameCube controller was such a success that Nintendo has supported the controller’s use for every Smash Bros. game since Melee, including being supported by Smash Ultimate which was announced to during E3 2018.

Unfortunately, the controller is not yet compatible with every game on the Switch, as it is currently only supported by a small pool of Switch games. However, that hasn’t stopped many fans' desperate pleas for full controller support for the GameCube. In fact, someone recently made a fully functioning set of GameCube joy-cons for the Nintendo Switch and they are a sight to behold.

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There have been knock-off GameCube joy-cons made by third-party developers on the market for Switch for a while now, but none of them have every quite lived up to the magic that fans imagine when they think of such a controller. Controller compatibility has been a feature that would greatly benefit ease of use for new console generations, and thankfully its rumored that the PS5 will be fully backward compatible with its previous controllers. Yet, the modder who’s made these GameCube joy-cons managed to make them perfectly.

The joy-cons were made by the popular YouTube channel Shank Mods, using the classic purple GameCube controller. Shank Mods has a video that goes over the whole process he used to create these joy-cons, and it’s quite impressive. He started by taking all of the necessary components out of a pair of joy-cons and then took a wavebird controller and essentially split it down the middle. Unlike many 3rd party controller companies, like HORI and Switch GameCube controllers, the wavebird was a 1st party wireless GameCube controller.

Conveniently, the wavebird controller is the exact height of the Switch in handheld mode. However, the project was far from smooth sailing. Switch joy-cons have a few more buttons than a standard GameCube controller, meaning that Shank Mods had to add a few buttons to the wavebird controller to make it fully compatible with the Switch. He ended up reaching out to several different members of the controller modding and building community to achieve these fully functioning joy-cons.

gamecube joycons mod purple

After months of prototypes, scrapping, and testing, he built the purple GameCube joy-cons that are the finished product shown in the video. Naturally, the controller is not for sale. It makes sense, because the amount of work and technical know-how to produce just a single set of GameCube joy-cons took months of work. So those looking to purchase a set of these snazzy controllers are sadly out of luck. However, normal GameCube controllers are still in circulation, as Nintendo is re-releasing the Smash GameCube controller in 2020.

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Source: Kotaku