Hinged Joy-Cons could be a thing pretty soon

According to an official patent filed by Nintendo, the company is looking at creating Joycons with top-halves that can bend. For some reason.

It’s perhaps the biggest complaint I have about the Switch: Its ability to stifle the blood flow to any good set of hands gripping it on either end is infuriating. It’s something that plagues me a lot considering I almost exclusively play in hand-held mode, the Joycons are a great set of controllers but they’re incredibly unergonomic, especially over prolonged periods of time. Now, I’m not saying that this latest patent for hinged Joycons, filed officially by Nintendo, will solve the problem of numb hands in the middle of a heated Mario Kart race, but I’m hoping that it might at least be a step in the right direction.

The patent itself shows how the hinged Joycon would work with the left analogue stick and the right face buttons being tilted away from the user. The rest of the Joycon seems to be unchanged and functioning the same way; having the top sections of the Joycons on a moveable hinge means that they should still slot into the actual screen in exactly the same way as before. While this improvement will likely never appeal to players to exclusively use the Switch in its docked mode, having the more important buttons at an angle to the screen should make things a lot more comfortable in hand-held mode. It’s almost possible to see the outline of the Dualshock controller in this suggested addition.

Despite how exciting this news could be for fans of non-numb hands, I wouldn’t get my hopes up for the Hingetendo. It’s just a patent after all, it could have been filed by Nintendo just in case they wanted to make something like this in the future. I’m not saying don’t be hopeful, I’m just saying to also prepare for disappointment.

Last Updated: September 9, 2019