Today, Nintendo shocked the world by unveiling brand new hardware… But it’s certainly not the Switch successor we’re all impatiently waiting for. Instead, Nintendo did its thing and zig-zagged than we all expected by announcing Alarmo: a Nintendo Sound Clock that wakes you up with tunes and effects from popular Switch games.

It’s a completely new type of product for Nintendo, but if there’s an itch in the back of your mind telling you you’ve seen this before, then it’s probably because you’ve seen it before. And the person who originally brought it to us was none other than the late, great Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.

I go back to 2014, which was a very different time for Nintendo. It was coming off one of the worst financial years in company history (sorry, the year of Luigi) as it struggled to sell Wii U Shareholders’ meeting in 2014Iwata dropped the first hints at Nintendo’s brand new “Quality of Life” initiative, announcing the development of a “non-wearable technology” that focuses on health and “isn’t necessarily something you use in your living room.”

In October of the same year, Iwata introduced Nintendo’s first Quality of Life product, the The start is planned for 2016. The product was a Non-wearable sleep sensor intended to be placed on a bedside table.

Here is a description of what Iwata had planned at the time: “Inside the QOL sensor is a non-contact radio frequency sensor that measures, for example, your body’s movements, your breathing and your heartbeat without physically touching your body. This automatically collected data is transmitted to the QOL cloud servers, which then analyze the data measured by the sensor and visually display sleep and fatigue results.”

Does this sound familiar? It’s essentially exactly what Nintendo announced today with Alarmo, almost exactly ten years after Iwata originally shared the plans.

Unfortunately, to date these plans have never been realized. After Iwata’s tragic death In 2015, Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima announced in a translated statement at the time that the product had been discontinued indefinitely Wired that “we are not convinced that the sleep and fatigue (device) can enter the phase where it actually becomes a product… We no longer have plans to bring it to market by the end of March 2016 .”

Just a few years later, Japanese news agency Nikkei reported that Nintendo’s “Quality of Life” initiative had been implemented completely canceled. At this point it was 2018, and we were all living in a post-Switch, post-Breath of the Wild era, and one of the last remnants of Nintendo’s least successful generation was quietly disappearing.

Or is it? In 2019, The Pokémon Company revealed Pokémon Sleepwhich raised the question of whether this is exactly what the “Quality of Life” initiative had become. Nintendo denied these claims but shockingly confirmed them own The Quality of Life project was still alive. In 2020 a Patent surfaced for a non-wearable sleep tracking device that looks like an early version of the Alarmo, newly unveiled today, with a description that reads in part: “Included in the base device is a Doppler sensor that detects biological information such as respiration and pulse.” Complementing the user’s body movement.”

While today’s announcement trailer and Ask the Developer series make no mention of President Iwata or the decades-old launch of the Quality of Life initiative, connecting the dots makes it clear that this project is closely tied to Iwata’s enduring legacy.

Blogroll photo credit: Junko Kimura/Getty Images)

Logan Plant is IGN’s database manager, playlist editor and Super-Ninfriendo on Nintendo Voice Chat. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.