Despite what some may think, Nintendo doesn’t just make a product, put it on the market and hope everything works. The company has a reputation for making stuff that doesn’t break easily, and these images show how that reputation is maintained.
They give a rare glimpse behind the curtain at Nintendo, showing the various stress tests a piece of hardware is subjected to in order to ensure it’s sturdy enough to sell to the public.
The seven stages of mechanical hell do things like open and close a handheld’s hinges, rub a robot finger over the surface, spin the cables, vibrate the packaging and press all the buttons.
There are a few more tests not pictured, like sticking a handheld somewhere really hot, or really cold, or really humid.
It looks like torture. Lucky, then, that only a doomed few units are condemned to such a fate, selected to represent the bulk of a manufacturing run. If every unit had to go through this they’d fall apart the second you took it out of the box.
You can see the seven stages of Nintendo Hell below.
Consumer Relations [Nintendo, via Tiny Cartridge]
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