Stinky Footboard: Hands on at PAX Prime

In an expo floor filled with flashing demos, thumping music, and live-size sculptures of League of Legends champions, the Stinky Footboard would have been an easy booth to miss. Unlike the sexy Oculus Rift and the futuristic Omni the Stinky Footboard is an auxiliary device with a much more mundane function: to provide you with four buttons that your foot can use by depressing a tough board that sits under your computer desk.

With just a humble row of computers playing the latest Battlefield installment, the Stelulu booth almost wants to prove to you that its Stinky Footboard isn’t an exceptional piece of equipment. In fact, it aims to be the opposite: it wants to prove that the Stinky should be a part of your every day gaming experience; that once you try it, you won’t go back. CEO and President of Stelulu Stéphane Rivard was kind enough to give us a run down of the features of the Stinky and give Charles and I hands-on time with it. Did Charles and I feel that the Stinky would help us step up our game? (That’s the first and last pun in this article, I swear.)

The Stinky Footboard

After experiencing broken DDR pads and other nontraditional peripherals, it’s crucial that the Stinky stands the test of time. The moment I saw and touched the Stinky Footboard I understood how beefy it was. Its solid exterior will be able to stand up to any punishment a human foot could give it. To prove the point, Stelulu was showing a lofi and amusing video of them running over a Stinky with an SVU. The Stinky gave so little a shit about being run over that it only suffered a single scratch and worked normally. (The had the run-over Stinky at the con, but they had to put a sticker on it to differentiate it from the other models, that’s how little it was harmed by its run in with a two-ton vehicle.)

The Stinky also comes with three sets of springs that can be changed
by the user to customize the board’s level of resistance. Th product is tough and I can’t imagine it not lasting ten or even twenty years of use. Rivard told us that they don’t actually know how long the foot board will last, they haven’t been able to get it to break yet through regular use. After rigging up a machine to use the device non-stop, he estimated that it’s weathered “a gazillion” depressions and hasn’t shown any sign of reduced responsiveness.

Easy and Obvious

But enough about the design of the Stinky, is it useful as a game controller?

Charles and I sat down with Stelulu’s demo, a normal online game of Battlefield. Neither Charles nor I are very familiar with Battlefield, so we were coming into the experience with little more than a general understanding of FPS games. The Stinky was set up to sprint by pressing forward, crouch by pressing our heel down, and swing a knife or fall prone by pressing left and right respectively.

Even with little knowledge of the game we were playing, it took Charles and I about ten seconds to use the Stinky effortlessly. When I was under fire, it was a natural reaction to crouch by pressing my heel down on the board. There was no delay in pressing forward to sprint. I did accidentally rock my foot to the left to swing my knife at an inopportune moment, but that was due to me not keeping track of my own position on the board that stayed 100% put on the floor.

Charles and I agreed: the experience of playing with the Stinky was effortless and we saw the value of it immediately.

Worth It?

What’s the bottom line with the Stinky Footboard? I can’t wait to own one.

The little time that I spent with it showed me that my brain was ready and willing to use my feet to control video games. The Stinky Footboard feels like a shamefully obvious addition to our gaming, and I can’t believe that someone hasn’t made this exact product before. It’s an entirely new vector to add responsiveness and granular control in games, and not just in obvious genres like driving or FPS games.

The buttons on the Stinky are mappable just like any button on a keyboard, so any game where you have urgent actions that are regularly needed will benefit from it. Need a potion in Diablo 3? Press your foot down. Need to open up a chat window in World of Warcraft? Press your foot down. Need to end the turn in Civilization? Press your foot down. The buttons accept control keys, so you can map up to 16 actions using the Stinky by combining the Control, Alt, and Shift keys.

I can’t wait to get my hands on a Stinky Footboard myself. Its tough design and limitless potential make its $120 price mark seem reasonable. I was ready to write off the board as a novelty, as a cash grab for hardcore gamers that want something new, but now I see that it’s a valuable new piece of equipment that shouldn’t be ignored. Look into it, check out the interviews, and get one for yourself!