This week the world came face to face with Labo, a bizarre and imaginative new Nintendo product that combines homemade cardboard toys and the Switch console to let you experience piano playing, fishing and fighting like you never have before. It's certainly not something anyone was expecting, but this is hardly the first time Nintendo has launched outlandish products, and more often than not they've been very successful. Here's a look back at some classic examples.
1. The Power Glove
Let's start with something that didn't work out and then work our way up to genius. Released in the late 80s and made famous (or perhaps infamous) by the movie Wizard, the Power Glove was an officially licensed third-party peripheral that pretty much is what it sounds like. You donned the Power Glove, and then a range of buttons on forearm and palm, as well as rudimentary motion controls in the fingertips, allowed you to play games with it. Unfortunately the games were terrible and the glove itself made you look like, well, Lucas Barton in Wizard.
2. R.O.B.
Another child of the 80s, as well as the most 80s-looking thing ever, the Robotic Operating Buddy was a weird peripheral for the NES that worked with a couple of exclusive games. R.O.B. wasn't exactly Aibo or Wall-E in terms of popularity as a product, but his lovably quirky appearance - somewhere between a waiter in a Star Wars movie and a high-end coffee machine - gave him a solid future as a mascot in games like Super Smash Bros.
3. Virtual Boy
2017 was the year virtual reality really took off, at least to a greater extent than most people expected, as Sony's PlayStation VR sold over 2m units, and were he alive to see it then Nintendo's legendary inventor Gunpei Yokoi might have enjoyed the sight of players finally engaging with headset-based gameplay. One of Game Boy creator Yokoi's last Nintendo products, the Virtual Boy was a flop in the mid-90s - a low-tech game viewer that felt more like a headache-inducing game prison than a liberating new way of playing games. Some of the games were pretty good, though, and it's become a collector's item in the years since.
4. Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat
This one is a bit of a cheat, because the Namco team behind Donkey Konga had already done similar things with Taiko: Drum Master, but while the GameCube bongos peripheral itself isn't a true Nintendo original, this Nintendo-developed platform game that you controlled using the bongos certainly was a departure. Sure, you can use a GameCube controller, but the real joy comes from banging on the bongos to move DK around the screen and hitting both together to jump. These days we're often left gawping by videos of people using weird peripherals to complete absurdly difficult games, but Nintendo is the only company we can remember that thought to make a drumset the primary means of control.
5. Wii Remote
Your humble correspondent was there, in a quietly respectful Japanese press audience at the Tokyo Game Show in 2005, when the late Satoru Iwata pulled a prototype Wii remote out of his jacket pocket. At that stage Nintendo's next console, which was already expected to be technically inferior to the upcoming PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, was known as "Revolution", but nobody really anticipated such a profound departure from what had come before. That scepticism held firm for many months, but once the Wii hit the market it was clear it was something special. Traditional game critics questioned the depth of products like Wii Sports, but the mass market was enraptured by the opportunity to play games through motions and gestures rather than complex button schematics. The rest is history.
6. Wii Balance Board
Nintendo was already changing perceptions of what it meant to be a gamer with the Wii, one of the most successful consoles ever created, but Wii Fit really doubled down on the firm's new audience. A fitness product featuring yoga, strength training and balance mini-games, the game was famous for its Balance Board peripheral, a white plastic slab that measures a player's weight and center of balance. If you think some of Nintendo's decisions in recent years have been met with core gamer derision, you should have seen the original reaction to Wii Fit, but in keeping with the firm's Midas touch at the time, it went on to sell over 20 million copies. With that said, most of those now seem to be available in job lots on eBay...
7. Nintendo DS
When Sony unveiled the PlayStation Portable at E3 in 2003, the consensus was that Sony was coming for the rest of Nintendo's lunch money. The PlayStation brand had already swept to dominance in the home console arena, and now it looked like Sony would displace Nintendo as the default option for portable gameplay. When the two screens of Nintendo DS were first mooted, nobody thought otherwise, but when the games industry got its hands on a prototype at E3 2004, things changed overnight. We were bewitched en masse by this ingenious combination of multiple screens and touch controls, and clever demos quickly showed its potential. Over the years that followed, the DS' versatility and accessibility helped it surpass Game Boy as the pre-eminent portable games brand, and while PSP was a success as well, it was clear Sony would play second fiddle.
8. Brain Age: Train Your Brain In Minutes a Day!
There were plenty of unusual games on Nintendo DS, but Brain Age: Train Your Brain In Minutes a Day (known as Dr Kawashima's Brain Training in PAL territories) was the most successful and iconic. Nominally a puzzle game, Brain Age featured a mixture of quick-play puzzle problems and Sudoku, but its masterstroke was tying them all together in a "brain training" setup that analysed your "brain age" and then sought to help you improve it day by day. Some dismissed it as faddish pseudoscience, but solving its little maths and logic problems every day was an early example of the kind of appointment gaming that has become such a core part of gaming in the years since, and the stories of elderly gamers using Brain Age to keep their senses sharp - while obvious encouraged by Nintendo PR - were true enough in a lot of cases, and that really was something.