Sophia Tung Constructed a Rideable Mario Kart Bike With a Nintendo Switch 2 Inside

Someone appeared on the cartoon orange radio bike from Mario Kart World — speaker cones for sides, cassette deck for a dashboard, antenna sticking up prefer it’s pulling in AM stations from 1987 — and determined it wanted to exist on precise pavement, at precise pace. That somebody is Sophia Tung, software program engineer, YouTuber, and robotaxi investigator. She spent roughly a 12 months of late nights turning a online game asset right into a 65 mph electrical bike devices fanatic’s dream, with a Nintendo Switch 2 docked contained in the cassette door. This isn’t cosplay. This is engineering.

From Game Asset to Street-Legal Hardware

A cartoon bike and a human physique have very completely different opinions about proportion.

Tung began with photogrammetry — 3D reconstruction from sport screenshots — to mannequin the Tune Thumper‘s exact geometry. The 1:1 scale version was immediately impractical: too long, too tall for a real rider to sit and steer safely. Think of the gap between Fast & Furious stunt physics and an actual crash reconstruction report. She mounted the MDF shell onto a reused FTO motorcycle frame, then reversed the front fork to shrink the wheelbase from 84 cm to 77 cm. This kind of real-world recreation of fictional objects has become a passion project genre of its own.

A 3D-printed shell quoted at roughly $10,000 got scrapped fast. Cabinet builder Joe DiMaio spent weeks stacking and carving MDF sheets into the boombox curves you’d acknowledge from the sport — splinters and 4 a.m. periods included.

Key specs on the completed machine:

• 84-volt battery pack; prime pace roughly 65 mph on 13-inch wheels
• Weight: roughly 70 kilos
• Functional speaker drivers put in at game-accurate positions
• MOSFET swap and DC converters deal with lights and auxiliary energy
• Apple CarPlay and further ports hidden behind the cassette door

The first real-world take a look at was Halloween night time. The dashboard reset on each bump. A 3D-printed tail piece flew off mid-ride. A tire went flat.

People stopped and stared anyway.

The Cassette Door Hides a Nintendo Switch 2

Behind the retro facade, there’s a working sport console dock powered by the bike itself.

Open the cassette door and also you’ll discover a Nintendo Switch 2 dock working off the bike’s personal DC converters — no exterior energy wanted. A devoted swap controls dock energy; a USB-C monitor connects and runs without having something plugged into the wall. Front-panel buttons bodily click on and management audio playback, and at a Nintendo retailer demo, the music performed, the dock powered a display screen, and nothing fell off.

Tung constructed her viewers investigating autonomous automobiles. Her 2024 Waymo parking zone livestream — lo-fi music, honking robotaxis, zero sleep — went viral and reportedly prompted Waymo to deal with the conduct. The Tune Thumper follows the identical intuition: take one thing individuals expertise passively and make it inconceivable to disregard.

After Halloween, Tung changed a shorted controller by hand, bolstered the electronics towards vibration, and stored using. The bike isn’t commercially out there and sure by no means might be. But as proof {that a} purely digital asset can grow to be a purposeful, rideable machine — one which hits 65 mph and runs your Nintendo Switch — it’s troublesome to argue with the outcome.