Leave it to Nintendo to psych out fans who are already hyped up about an impending Switch 2 reveal by announcing a fancy alarm clock instead. Alarmo will wake you up to sounds of Mario coins and chirping Pikmin. It costs $100, works best if you sleep alone, and it’s breaking the internet’s collective brain.
It ticks all the boxes: whimsical, eccentric, needlessly expensive, and bizarrely timed. For weeks, ever since Nintendo skipped its traditional September showcase, there has been background chatter suggesting that official news would finally be coming about the Switch 2 any day now. Instead, the company rolled out Alarmo without batting an eye. Pre-orders went live and have already sold out. Naturally, some people are trying to sell Alarmo, which doesn’t ship until 2025, for close to double its standard price on eBay.
But the funniest part about Alarmo is that it doesn’t work well for couples. The sensor that shuts the clock off when you get out of bed has trouble distinguishing when there are two people sleeping together. “Alarmo can’t detect a specific person, so if multiple people are sleeping in the same bed within range of the sensor, the alarm may stop when one person gets out of bed, but restart once it detects there is still someone in bed,” reads the FAQ. “The alarm will stop completely once everyone is out of bed.”
Sounds like fun. The internet agrees, reacting to the clock’s trouble with couples, its name, the timing of the announcement, and more:
There’s even an official Q&A with designers Yosuke Tamori and Tetsuya Akama about how the device came to be. There are four separate parts! Essentially, the experiment began with the goal of finding a new application for the company’s motion sensor technology. And while you might expect a Nintendo clock to include game elements, they ultimately decided against them because they didn’t want to interfere with the normal incentives around sleep by gamifying it.
But there was one Alarmo prototype during the testing phase that apparently had people make a smacking gesture in rhythm with the clock’s chirps. It beeped each time with sounds seemingly from Rhythm Heaven. RIP.
