On July 15th, 2024, I got the opportunity to speak to one of the most interesting people in the Retro Gaming world, a hardware hacker, modder, inventor, Guinness World Record holder bona fide genius, Dr Tom Tilley. No doubt many of you will have seen his work creating the world’s biggest Game & Watch handheld, and others may know him from his recent creation of the spherical AiAi controller that you can actually tilt to play Super Monkey Ball with.
Tom’s creations and ideas go back further than both of those amazing inventions, however, with many smaller yet no less significant gadgets made from next to nothing to help him and his family enjoy gaming together by building the peripherals that he didn’t have access to. From creating guitar hero controllers out of bug zappers for his children to use to building a bamboo car that hooks up to a games console and taking it to an orphanage for children diagnosed with HIV to play with, Tom’s work and indeed his whole world revolves around creating and spreading joy to others, something that we can definitely all take note from and hopefully mirror in our own lives.
Tom kindly took time out of his busy schedule to talk to us from his hometown of Adelaide on the Retrospect podcast so we could find out more about the man who has become a cult figure in the Retro Gaming world, to see what makes him tick, and to ask him all the questions (and more besides) that we had been dying to ask him about his work.
Table of Contents
Introduce Yourself To The Retro Dodo Community, Dr Tom Tilley!
By day, I’m a software developer. I was an academic for about 10 years or so and before that, I was a facsimile and analog mobile phone technician for a couple of years. I picked up some basic electronics at that time and that’s back in the days of the old analogue mobile phones. I’ve got a bit of a mixture of a little bit of electronics, a little bit of hardware, and a software background, and I love putting those together to have some geeky fun and to build things that sometimes seem a bit obvious to me or things that I’m surprised people haven’t already done.
I grew up in a little country town here in South Australia. I was this wimpy asthmatic kid, and I’m not sure whether that instantly destined me for a path of computing. I talked to someone who was babysitting us into buying a VIC-20 at the time, and then when I managed to get a little bit of money myself I bought myself a Commodore SX-64. Here’s something where you can understand what’s going on to a large extent and you can control this box – it’s sort of like a magic box. And so, I was just programming sprites and trying to write games, and all those sorts of things as well as playing games during that era. I was planning to go to university to go to computer science out of high school but fell into a facsimile technician job like you do and ended up doing that for 8 years.
At 25 I reapplied to go back to university to do computer science, got a PhD in software engineering, and worked overseas in northern Thailand as an academic, an amazing and creative time, and then I’ve been back in Australia for around 9 years and the creativity has continued.
Finding A Love Of Creativity
It was around Tom’s 30th birthday and with two young kids in the family that he remembers finding this love of creativity, a time when he was playing lots of Wonderboy with an old keyboard from a garage sale and a quick shot joystick. He modded them both together in order to play, and while it didn’t work very well at the time, the idea was there.
Tom then went on to make a bug zapper into a Guitar Hero controller too. While living in Northern Thailand, bug-zapping tennis rackets were very common, much more readily available than proper peripherals for game consoles, in fact.
‘When you bought a PS2 in Northern Thailand it came pre-mod chipped’, says Tom, ‘that was just the nature of the industry back then. I wanted to play Guitar Hero but I didn’t have access to a plastic guitar. And so I thought I would make one out of a bug zapper. I thought what am I going to do for star power, so we went to this place that had a device that’s for driving. You hang it over your ear, and when your head nods off, it makes this scream to make you keep your eyes on the road. There’s obviously a tilt mechanism in it, so I was able to use the mercury switch inside to get star power working on my bug-zapper guitar. It had a cheap Chinese dual-shock controller as the basis of it that I built into the body of it. My son was very wary of using it at first as he was aware of what it does to mosquitos.’
I’ve seen Tom’s son using a motorcycle controller made from bars that he’s used while leaning over a table, a Dance Dance Revolution mat made out of wood, and so many other inventions, and he’s also turned an arcade cabinet into a fish tank (although someone has since converted that back into an arcade cabinet which Tom was keen to make sure we knew about!).
The World’s Largest Game & Watch Controller
This was something Brandon and I were definitely keen to talk to Tom about in length and something that you should listen back to the podcast to get the full feel of. The project, while just as huge in the undertaking to some of us as the end product itself, took Tom around 6 months. With a firm vision, an old TV with a pink line down it, some old curtains, and a love of Octopus born from a Game and Watch a family member brought back from a trip away, Tom created this incredible structure, an homage to Retro Gaming past and an interactive piece that everyone could enjoy.
As Tom says, everyone loves big and giant things. There’s a sense of childish fun to something oversized, a sense of awe that makes us stop and go ‘woah’ which is probably why the big kids among us still love dragons and robots so much. To be fair, it’s also why we love Godzilla, Kong, and those huge Toblerones that you can get from an airport (all equally as impressive).
The Super Monkey Ball Controller
If you’ve been watching Tom’s Twitter or checked out the recent article on our website, then you’ll no doubt have seen his famous Super Monkey Ball controller complete with AiAi inside. Everybody’s adding AI to things these days, so he’s decided to add AiAi into the mix instead.
When we were in Thailand, outside of a cinema there were two linked armadillo racing cabinets. They had a small bowling ball in them and they were very fun, steering armadillos around a track. I thought it would be a lot of fun to try and recreate this controller. I was teaching at one of the local universities in Thailand and got to run a game controller hacking elective a couple of times, and one of the project ideas I gave to some of the students was to use a basketball with some deodorant roller bearings to play marble madness using an optical mouse underneath.
I had had that earlier idea, and I thought I could do the same thing with a soccer ball. Once that got online, people told me to play Katamari Demacy with it and Super Monkey Ball. It felt so intuitive to play that way, to see a character rolling around a screen and you controlling them using a ball. I shot a little bit of footage playing Super Monkey Ball aswell and photoshopped the soccer ball out and used a Super Monkey Ball, and that’s how I actually got the idea to make the real thing. When Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble came out I thought there would be interest around the time that it’s released so I’d try and do something in time. I’ve eventually got AiAi’s legs working now and am really pleased with the result.
A Truly Creative Mind
Where most people might give up and choose another path, Tom finds the ways and means to succeed, and that’s one of the things that I and many others love the most about him. While he might refute this opinion, it feels to me as though nothing is impossible in his world; there’s always a solution to be found when an obstacle presents itself. Sometimes when I’m recording or trying to do something like putting up a piece of furniture, I feel like throwing the laptop or the Allen key out into the middle of the road in a Tasmanian Devil-style rage, but Tom just seems so level-headed and has a thought process that allows him to think on his feet and to see the bigger picture.
As I’ve said above, Tom’s creations bring joy to all of those who see them. Whether it’s making a little 3D printer monkey in a ball or giving orphaned children a reason to laugh and immerse themselves in a different world, his creations make the world a more fun, more exciting, and more wholesome place. I’m looking forward to following Tom’s future closely and documenting the many new inventions he comes up with in his secret laboratory over the years, and thank you once again Tom for chatting with us!
