Switch 2 might have been officially revealed, but there’s still a whole lot we don’t know about it. And while Nintendo is staying stubbornly tightlipped until April, a newly surfaced patent appears to confirm at least a few previously reported details the company has so far only teased.
Mostly, we’re talking Joy-Cons here, with early reports having claimed Switch 2’s detachable controllers would include a few new tricks not seen in those of the original console. That starts with magnets, with Switch 2’s Joy-Cons have long been rumoured to use magnets to attach to the console instead of the finicky rails system used previously.
Which brings us to Nintendo’s newly unearthed game controller patent, initially filed in August 2023 and published today. “This game controller is detachably mounted to a body device that has a recess,” it reads, “that comprises a first magnet and a second magnet at the bottom of the recess, and that can execute game processing.”
Furthermore, the patent gives some additional insight into how the magnets have been implemented to avoid randomly dropping off at inconvenient intervals. “The first button and the second button are provided in the longitudinal direction in the top surface of the protrusion,” Nintendo writes. “The first button and the second button are to be pressed by a user. The first button is attracted to the first magnet by a magnetic force. The second button is attracted to the second magnet by a magnetic force.”