Building Controllers
Hey, I’m back. In the previous blog post I talked about my experiences growing up with smash, but that entire time from when I had my first shitty third party controller, I have been modding controllers as well!
Here is a picture of the first controller I made for my brother:
Okay yeah so I didn’t really know what I was doing but it's honestly held up pretty well considering I spray painted it like a decade ago. I have always loved taking things apart to see how things work and sometimes could even put them back together. I started putting LEDs and adding snapback capacitors in my controller to make it the cleanest it could be. This was the controller I rocked while I went 3-2 at my local scene throughout high school. I probably replaced the insides and components over 5 times during this period:
Right before I went off to college 2017 something new entered the smash scene: the original b0xx controller. Outside of all the drama between the smashbox and b0xx I was instantly fascinated with this controller that looked unlike anything I had ever seen. I wanted to try one hella bad and even ended up reaching out to Hax over twitter to help in any way I could. I never got a response though so rip.
I ended up taking a break from smash during college, but in 2021 I graduated with a BS in electrical engineering and wanted to get back into smash and learn more about these controllers. I wanted to buy one but quickly realized that every vendor was out of stock.I figured that with the tools and knowledge I had gained, I could make my own. A huge shout out to cranes lab and everyone in the DIY community for being so awesome and helpful when I was starting out. I ended up spending a couple weeks building one to try it out, and the first ICEBOX controller was born:
This wasn’t supposed to be a business, but after I shared my controller with some friends and a couple of them asked if I could make them ones. I also had a mentor suggest I look into starting my own business and I thought I would give it a try. A bunch of iterations later, I ended up here with the current version of ICEBOX:
I’m super happy with it and my hope is that I can just design and build controllers all day. My goal is to have someone will a super major with one of my controllers but I’m a ways off from that.
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to my story of controllers and have a nice day!
Regards,
Luca Gacy
About me
Hey what’s up. I’ve never done a blog post before so this will be a little different, but I figured most people don’t know who I am so this would be a nice place to talk about where I come from and my background within the smash community.
I’m Luca Gacy (Lab Rat), founder of ICEBOX Controllers. I grew up in Lafayette Colorado and just graduated with a BS/MS in electrical engineering from DU. I’ve been playing smash since I was about 10 years old. I first learned about it after playing brawl at a friend's house and thought I was a god because I could spam the shit out of tornado with Meta Knight. I also may or may not have thought Samus was a robot… anyways my brother and I got hooked and convinced my parents to buy it for us. We couldn’t afford a Wii so they ended up getting us a gamecube and melee disk from an EZ pawn for $20 each… different times. We didn’t have a memory card so every time we turned it on we would speed run classic mode and 100 man melee to unlock jigs, and falco. My brother, and good friend Anton were the OG squad and we played for years after that. We did end up getting a memory card at one point.
After getting my ass beat by my brother over and over, I wanted to get better so I started looking up strats and tech to give me an edge and watched a video about this thing called wavedashing. I got hooked on learning as much tech in the game and watched pretty much every tutorial on youtube I could find. Yep, I’m a tech skill fiend no fundies fox player and followed the natural progression to box controllers I know. This is where my tag comes from too.
After playing loads of melee three-for-alls we wanted to give brawl another shot at my friend's house. I remember watching some brawl sets on youtube and thinking that they looked similar in speed to melee. Nope it was awful and I got judged for suggesting it. I was confused and ended up going back to the video that I saw and noticed it said SSBPM. Turns out I was watching Project M (rip) not brawl. After thinking we broke my friends wii the first time it booted, we got even more obsessed with smash and my brother and I pretty much went over to Anton’s house every evening to play. Shout outs to Anton’s parents for the hundreds of dinners they gave us. I started out playing Lucario and then ended up switching to Lucas as my main; I promise this has nothing to do with the fact that both of them have my name in theirs. I discovered smashboards when looking for tech and was super active on the Lucas forum and posted any new findings I could. There a player named Miles noticed I was in Colorado and told me I should check a PM tournament called Wavedash Wednesdays in Denver. I convinced my group to go and feeling on top of the world prompt got 3-0d. And that was the first of many tournaments I went to. I was never very good, but my crowning achievement was getting 2nd place at a weekly and winning a clean $17. I even started a smash club at my highschool and convincing a bunch of my friends to pick up the game as well.
I ended up going to University of Denver for electrical engineering and put smash on hold after PM got Nintendo’d, but now I’m back and hope that I give back to the community that means so much to me. Thanks for listening to my progression of my smash experiences. I’ll have another blog post about my experiences with modding controllers through out but this one is long enough. Have a nice day!
Regards,
Luca Gacy