A homemade arcade cabinet starts a game when a rectangular concrete cartridge is inserted. The cartridge does not contain the game itself: an NFC sticker provides an ID that tells the cabinet which game to launch from its internal computer.
Maker Asger Kjærholm cast the concrete cartridges using 3D-printed molds. He also built a wooden cabinet with a cartridge slot and a drawer for storing the blocks.
Each concrete cartridge contains little more than an ID, but you still have to slot a solid block into the machine to pick a game. That's a remarkably literal way to give digital games some weight.
DinoBOY is a one-button dinosaur-jumping handheld designed to replace phone scrolling. Opening its lid wakes it up. The creator says its hidden NFC tag switches a phone to airplane mode. It also works as a clock and Bluetooth keyboard.
To avoid one screen, you carry another one that can shut off your phone's connection.
Jonathan turned the programming board game Robot Turtles into a version played with a real robot. A secondhand Dash robot moves across an alphabet foam-mat grid that serves as the physical game board.
NFC tags are attached to cards from the original game. Scanning them on a custom reader sends commands such as forward, left and right to the robot, and players can queue a sequence before running it.
The game was already called Robot Turtles, but it contained no actual robot. This build takes the name literally and scales the board up around a real moving machine.
PicoDMG rebuilds the original Game Boy experience with modern microcontrollers while preserving the original shell, controls, and AA-battery feel. Game files live on microSD, and a game can be selected by holding a cartridge fitted with an NFC tag near the system.
On the original Game Boy, changing games meant inserting a cartridge into the console. PicoDMG modernizes that interaction too: the open-source project by dodger-one can associate an NFC tag in a cartridge or other object with a corresponding ROM and launch it when scanned.
Even the old clunk of inserting a cartridge has been modernized into a tap. The Game Boy makeover reaches all the way to how the cartridge is used.
Each concrete cartridge contains little more than an ID, but you still have to slot a solid block into the machine to pick a game. That's a remarkably literal way to give digital games some weight.