In Japan, NIntendo has been operating in-store gachapon machines, but I’ve got a particular focus on a series of keychains they started in 2021 called the “controller button collection”.
2021 brought series 1, featuring Famicom and NES controller segments as hangable keychains:
Fast forward to summer 2024, though, and we have series 2, featuring the following six keychains:
- Super Famicom buttons
- Super Nintendo buttons
- Nintendo GameCube buttons
- Nintendo 64 buttons
- Nintendo GameCube C-Stick
- Nintendo 64 analogue stick
Now the cool thing is these are the actual controller parts underneath the plastic shell. Which means Nintendo is still very much producing generations of controller parts, likely due to the NSO controllers and the Smash Bros GameCube controller. Indeed, the N64 stick keychain looks like a match for the NSO N64 stick, since it’s missing the little hole in the middle.
Someone who has disassembled their keychain and swapped the stick with their N64 controller:
I was just wondering…how easy is this to do? Disassembly videos aren’t giving me a good feel for it, but would salvaging the stick from an N64 keychain potentially be a worthwhile fix for a well-loved N64 controller?