Photo credit: inb4ohnoes
Sophia Tung spent a year turning Nintendo’s orange boombox-on-wheels into a street-legal machine she could actually ride. The YouTuber and engineer, already known for deep dives into robotaxis and emerging tech, became so hooked on Mario Kart World that she decided the Tune Thumper had to exist in real life at full size. Everything on it works: speakers play music, buttons click and pause tracks, headlights and taillights fire up, the antenna stands tall, and a Nintendo Switch 2 dock sits inside the cassette-door section so you can play the game on the very bike it came from.
Game screenshots and photogrammetry provided her with a starting point for creating a 3D reference, but when she attempted to scale the in-game model 1:1, it proved to be far too long and high for someone to sit comfortably and ride securely.Instead, she installed the body on an old FTO frame, which proved to be an excellent choice, and flipped the front fork to reduce the wheelbase from 84 cm to 77 cm, making it more manageable.
- The next evolution of Nintendo Switch
- One system, three play modes: TV, Tabletop, and Handheld
- Larger, vivid, 7.9” LCD touch screen with support for HDR and up to 120 fps
That way, she could preserve the cartoon-like proportions while also making it safe for people to sit and steer. A friend suggested going with wood after they received a price for a $10,000 3D print, which is a lot of money for a print that takes ages to complete. So cabinet builder Joe DiMaio spent weeks working with her to build the speaker shell out of MDF sheets, stacking and cutting them into the curved shape before hand-applying all the features such as the black grilles, colored buttons, volume knob, and cassette embellishments. She had her partner handle the most of the late nites and frustrations that followed.
An 84-volt battery pack provides power to the motors via a unique speed controller, with a top speed of approximately 65 mph on 13-inch wheels. A MOSFET switch and DC converters handle the illumination, so the head and tail lights appear to belong on a real vehicle, which they now do. The speakers are positioned where the game’s black speaker cones would be, and they are actually playing audio, which is a really great touch. And you can see the cassette door, which hides the Switch 2 dock internals as well as some extra ports, not to mention Apple CarPlay. The whole weight came to roughly 70 pounds.
Halloween night proved to be the first real-world test, and let me tell you… the dashboard reset on every bump, a printed tail piece flew off, and one of the tires ran flat, but folks on the street just stopped and stared when they saw it, which provided plenty of Instagram worthy moments. After that ride, she was able to replace a shorted controller by hand, secure the electronics against vibration, and eventually resolve the dock integration issue.
Later, she took the bike to a Nintendo store and demonstrated that the buttons functioned, the music played, and the dock could power up a screen. The entire endeavor took her a year of evenings, splinters, and 4 a.m. sessions, but the end product is a wooden radio bike that appears to have stepped straight out of the game and onto the pavement.
