By Chris Nuttall

Tom Anderson has come up with a video-game device that can simulate with unprecedented accuracy how he has been banging his head against a brick wall for the past five years.

The Novint Falcon controller is a strange contraption featuring three motorised arms attached to a ball. The arms create subtle resistance to allow games players to feel three-dimensional objects and be jolted by the impact of explosions, bullets and tight turns on a racing circuit.

But his difficulty in selling the idea of the $150 Falcon to game publishers, hardware manufacturers, console makers, retailers and the public has been a source of great frustration. Until, that is, he came up with a new business model that broke the impasse.

“For the past five years I’ve been telling everybody that we’re going to get games [designed to be played with the controller] but people were sceptical,” he says.

“They said: ‘How are you going to get game support when you don’t have an installed base [of players using Falcon], and how do you get an installed base if you don’t have games that support it?’”

Mr Anderson decided the solution to this conundrum would be to force a breakthrough with the games publishers. “Instead of telling publishers, ‘We want you to support the Falcon,’ we said, ‘We want to buy the 3D touch rights to your game.’

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