It was only on day two of introducing Nintendo’s new alarm clock to my household that my girlfriend began to crack. As we woke up one morning to the chaotic sounds of Splatoon 3, she turned to me in a morning daze. “I don’t like the Alarmo,” she sadly squeaked with tired sincerity. “It’s aggressive.”
As if on cue, the sound of an army of Inklings firing their weapons blared from the nightstand.
Part of the territory that comes with a video game writing job is that you occasionally have to subject the people you live with to very silly things. Sometimes you take over the living room for a week and wander around in a VR headset. Other times you end up poisoning your home with an AI-powered gadget that hooks up to your TV and leaks putrid scents based on the sounds in the game you’re playing. I live for that eclectic aspect of the job, but it has its casualties.
So, I knew exactly what was going to happen the moment Nintendo announced the Alarmo. The oddball motion-sensor alarm clock would no doubt turn my home into a battlefield once again, with my girlfriend forced to endure another piece of stunt tech journalism. It would be our most challenging trial to date, turning the most peaceful part of our day into our most hectic for a week. But it’s through that process that I could come to embrace who the Alarmo, and Nintendo’s projects at large, are really meant for.
Wake up, superstar
It was a random Wednesday morning when Nintendo dropped a video showcasing a new piece of hardware. If you just read that sentence divorced from context, you might reasonably assume that the company finally revealed its next console, which is due to be shown any day now. That wasn’t the case. Instead, the gaming giant unveiled the Alarmo. The five-minute clip showcased an interactive alarm clock that would prompt users to get up by playing the sounds of Switch games and utilizing a motion sensor.
It was a bizarre announcement, but the kind that instantly served as a reminder of Nintendo’s signature creative spirit. After the initial confusion wore off, social media commentators seemed to slowly warm up to the idea of a Nintendo-fied lifestyle gadget. After all, its ad showcased adults waking up to the clock, signaling that the Alarmo might be a good bit of handy wellness tech meant to encourage better sleeping habits in its older fans. As someone who has been snoozing to Pokémon Sleep ever since its release, I was willing to try it out … but I wasn’t the only person who’d have to participate.
With an Alarmo set to arrive at my apartment the next morning, I called my girlfriend in and explained what was about to happen: Nintendo made an alarm clock and I planned to test it out for a full week. She’s always a great sport about these kinds of things, though I could sense a little bit of terrified resignation this time. And that was before either or us really understood the full extent of what we were in for.
As I unboxed the cute red device and began the setup process, I quickly began to realize that the Alarmo wouldn’t just be an alarm clock that woke us up with Nintendo sounds. With my head hung in preemptive shame, I explained exactly what we’d be doing every morning for the next week. I’d have to shake my body around if we wanted to stay in bed longer and quiet the alarm. The real catch, though, was that the Alarmo would only fully shut off when we both fully got out of bed. If I got up and she stayed, it would eventually trigger an aggressive “hurry up!” state that would ratchet up the noise.
This would be our life for the next week. I prayed we would still be living together by the end of it.
Cohabitating with the Alarmo
Despite my melodramatic retelling, my girlfriend and I were both excited to give the Alarmo a whirl. It was silly, sure, but it was so absurd that it would make for another great relationship anecdote, like the time we tested the GameScent together and came out of it with headaches. The first morning quickly reinforced our assumption, because the Alarmo is far more bizarre than even its trailer reveals.
Rather than picking an alarm myself, I set the device to random shuffle mode throughout the week. On the first day, we were not woken up by the gentle twinkle of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s piano score or Mario’s chipper voice; the sounds of Ring Fit Adventure flooded the room instead. I say “sounds” instead of music because the Alarmo doesn’t just play game tunes as a scene plays out on the round clock face. It plays jarring sound effects too. We woke to a high-pitched voice telling us it was time to row a boat. Neither of us had any idea what was going on as we came to. I turned my head to my girlfriend to say, “What is going on?” but the motion sensor tracked that as a movement, and the Ring Fit trainer yelled “Great!” before I could speak.
I waved the sounds off after a chaotic moment and we both caught our breath. As we discussed it, the alarm would start back up every five minutes or so, and I’d have to stop to wave my arms like an inflatable tube man in a car lot. After a few rounds of that, the Alarmo entered its loud “hurry up!” state. I got out of bed in a panic, but it didn’t stop. I reminded my girlfriend that she’d have to get out of bed too. I watched the light leave her eyes in that moment as she rolled out of bed with a guttural grunt.
That night, as I was resetting the alarm, we agreed that Ring Fit was a weird first introduction. We hoped the next morning would be a bit gentler, so I knocked down the alarm intensity a peg. There are three options in the settings menu, from lively to gentle. When exploring the menu, I did discover that the Alarmo has a more traditional shutoff option, which only asks users to hit its white plastic topper to shut it off. Naturally, I withheld this information from her. I could not jeopardize the experiment by giving us a tempting, but easy way out.
Our next few mornings were just as strange. Splatoon’s teenage energy jolted us out of bed on day two, while another Ring Fit alarm really took us off guard when our day started with a voice yelling “Your muscles look so happy!” What’s most strange about it all is the early execution. Had the Alarmo simply played some music and showed a bit of pleasant gameplay on the screen, it would be a slam dunk. I’d love to wake up to the opening theme of Kirby and the Forgotten Land as a car-shaped Kirby drove around. Instead, even the most pleasant scenes are interrupted by the sound of Link slaughtering a Bokoblin camp.
After a few days, we learned to fear the Alarmo. Every morning threatened to bring another cacophonous soundscape that would launch us out of bed. And things only got weirder in our household as we discovered new features. When I put on a “soothing sounds” option one night, which plays five minutes of ambiance after your set bedtime, we had a playful argument over the sheets as a discordant hum loomed in the background. One morning, I checked our recorded sleep stats and realized that the Alarmo wasn’t just tracking our movements while we slept, but it was recording them through the entire day.
“It’s watching … everything?” she asked with a slow realization of horror. Yes … yes, it was.
Embracing the audience
Midway through our test week, my girlfriend caught a break. I had to head to Massachusetts for an overnight trip to visit my family. That meant I would have to pack up the Alarmo and take it with me. She was thrilled, excited to lounge in bed on a Sunday morning rather than rolling out to make Yoshi stop shouting at her. I tossed it in my backpack and unpacked it later at my parents’ house, a Cape Cod home that I spent countless hours in as a kid. As I did, I had to explain it all to my mother.
“You should give it to your niece!” she said, further plunging the knife of embarrassment in.
I set it up on the nightstand next to my bed in the front guest room when I noticed some artifacts right behind it. On one side, there was a Beanie Baby that I treasured dearly as a kid. On the other, there was a small school picture of me, smiling and wearing a green Lion King T-shirt. I looked back at the Alarmo, as Captain Olimar ran across the display in sync with my body movements, and suddenly it all made more sense. That third grader would have been so excited to have a toy like this growing up. And my mother was right: My seven year-old niece would get a kick out of it too. That’s who the Alarmo is actually meant for, even if its misleading ad doesn’t feature a single kid.
I had to bring the Alarmo on vacation lmao pic.twitter.com/WHy7ooBXJ4
— Giovanni Colantonio (@MarioPrime) October 13, 2024
Upon waking up alone in my parent’s house the next morning, my experience with the Alarmo made much more sense. I was roused by a bit of Pikmin noise, and I turned to find a neon green monster staring back at me. I let out a little smile before smacking the cute top button to turn it off (at this point, I realized that I was only refusing to use the feature at home more for the comedic torment than whatever justification I wrote about earlier). I felt like a kid again.
When talking about Nintendo as an adult who still engages with its products, it can be easy to forget who the company’s target audience really is. For every older player who complains about the quality of Pokémon or a lack of innovation in Yoshi games, there’s a little kid who’s having the time of their life playing a game made by some of the industry’s best designers. I was that kid growing up, and it’s exactly how I came to love games as much as I do today.
I’ve grown since then and Nintendo fits into my life a bit differently than it used to. My living room isn’t constantly filled with high school friends yelling over rounds of Super Smash Bros. Melee. The Alarmo became a symbol of that during the week. A rambunctious toy meant to start my day with a bit of play isn’t the neatest fit for an adult life where I’m sharing a home with a partner. Instead, my relationship to Nintendo happens in joyful spurts when I’m curled up on the couch with my Switch while football takes over the TV. Games like Super Mario Bros. Wonder become personal moments of comfort that I savor, rather than the center of my universe. I’ve outgrown the Alarmo, but it’s not a sad realization that leaves me yearning for my lost youth. I’m just in a different phase of my life and am happy to see the baton passed down.
Maybe I really should mail it to my niece, after all. Lord knows my household will thank me for the epiphany.
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