Holding a GameCube controller again for the first time in years brings back a rush of memories.

While it’s a pretty safe bet that most video game enthusiasts have held a Nintendo controller at some point in their life, there’s also a pretty big chance that they haven’t held every Nintendo controller. No other company has been in the video game console business as long as Nintendo has, and with the company’s penchant for reinvention, for every new hardware generation it’s designed a very different new controller.

So if you’re a gamer in your early 20s, or maybe someone who didn’t get into video games until recent years when Nintendo’s mainstream popularity skyrocketed, you might never have had a chance to grip the smooth sides of the SNES pad or explore the unorthodox face button layout of the GameCube’s controller. On the other hand (quite literally), if you’re a veteran fan who did grow up playing games on Nintendo’s earlier consoles, just the feel of those retro controllers in your hand again may trigger a flood of nostalgic memories.

So for fans new and old, Nintendo recently released a second set of its Controller Button Collection capsule toys, and in the process of snapping some up, we found out that even the machine you buy them from contains an audio love letter to old-school Nintendo games.

You can find the machines at Nintendo’s specialty shops in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Our Japanese-language reporter Haruka Takagi stopped by the Osaka branch, where she quickly spotted two machines, one for the new second series, saluting the controllers of the Super NES, Super Famicom (the Japanese domestic market-version of the Super NES), and GameCube.

A second machine is still stocked with the first Controller Button Collection items, representing the controllers of the NES and the Famicom, the NES’ Japanese counterpart.

There are six possible items in each series (plus a mysterious “secret” item for the Famicom/NES series). At 600 yen (US$4), these are on the expensive side for capsule toys, but on the plus side, as you’re feeding those coins into the machine, it rewards you by playing a recording of Nintendo’s iconic “coin” sound effect, that audio-endorphin -PING!- that plays whenever you pick up a coin in the Super Mario series. That’s not the only nod to Nintendo’s mascot, either. Turning the machine’s crank produces the same series of notes that plays when you hit a block and a power-up item appears in Super Mario Bros., and once you’ve turned the crank enough and your capsule drops into the prize retrieval slot, the sound effect of Mario collecting the power-up and transforming plays too!

Haruka decided to get three Controller Button Collection capsules from the new batch and one from the first. She had two hopes as she turned the crank, that she wouldn’t have any duplicates, and that she’d get at least one part of the GameCube controller, for a reason we’ll talk about in a second.

So, after four tries, how did Haruka do?

Perfect!

Not only had she avoided any duplicates, she’d snagged the Japanese versions of the 8 and 16-bit controllers, with the Super Famicom’s buttons being colorful and uniformly convex, unlike the more subdued two-tone of the U.S.-spec Super NES pad where half of the buttons were concave.

An especially cool aspect of the Controller Button Collection is that the buttons, D-pads, and sticks all actually move – you can press, push, and pull them to your heart’s content!

Being built to the same size and shape as the original controllers were they felt just like Haruka remembered, especially the GameCube.

Remember how we said Haruka had her heart set on getting a GameCube capsule? That’s because when she was in elementary school, she played a ton of Super Smash Bros. Melee.

However, Haruka didn’t own a GameCube of her own.

Instead, she played Melee when she visited her friend, who we’ll call M-chan. Since M-chan actually owned the game, she was a more experienced and better fighter than Haruka, but Haruka still remembers trying her best to win a round, before they’d switch gears and fight as a team, 2-on-2, against the game’s AI.

Eventually, Haruka’s family moved to a new neighborhood and she had to change schools, but she’s still go fond memories of all her time spent playing Smash with M-chan after school, and those memories came flooding in with full force as she held a GameCube controller for the first time in years.

In addition to the Nintendo Tokyo, Nintendo Osaka, and Nintendo Kyoto stores, the Controller Button Collection capsule toys can also be purchased at the Nintendo Check In kiosk at Narita Airport. On Haruka’s visit, they were limiting customers to five capsule purchases per each time waited in line for the machines, and considering how popular the controllers are, some sort of bulk purchasing limitation is probably to be expected at most peak shopping times, though if the line is too long, Nintendo’s specialty shops have other extremely cool little souvenirs as well.

Related: Nintendo Tokyo/Osaka./Kyoto, Nintendo Check In
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[ Read in Japanese ]