For years now, Nintendo fans have been waiting for news on the successor to the Nintendo Switch. Excitedly, anxiously, we’ve waited. Finally, in October 2024, Nintendo announced some new hardware ābut it’s not the successor to the Switch. No, it’s an alarm clock.
On October 9, 2024, Nintendo announced the release of Alarmo, a “sound clock” that helps to wake you up by playing music and sound effects to form various “scenes” from Nintendo games like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Pikmin 4.
Alarmo uses motion capture technology to read your body’s movements, meaning this isn’t an alarm you can just roll over and shut off. You have to physically get out of bed, and then it will automatically shut off. But as skeptical as one might be about how relaxing it would actually be to start your day with Mario coin sounds over and over, you have to admit it looks pretty handy.
As random as Alarmo feels, especially as we’re all biting our nails clean off waiting for the Switch 2, reporting from IGN shows that this project has actually been in the works for over a decade. The late Satoru Iwada hinted at a product very similar to Alarmo in 2014. But after his tragic death in 2015, the project was put on hold and subsequently canceled – at least until 2020, when Nintendo filed a patent for a sleep-tracking device.
Still, to most of us, it feels like a very out-of-the-blue idea, and social media has treated the news with all the silly Nintendo in-jokes you could hope for.
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Oh yeah, and the motion capture technology “works best” when there’s only one person in the bed, according to the Q&A on Nintendo’s site. Sorry, couples and people with pets.
Alarmo is currently purchasable for those who have a paid Nintendo Switch Online account, with a wide release in the coming months.
Published: Oct 10, 2024 07:27 am