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World's Largest NES Controller Built by Students

Engineering students at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands unveiled the world's largest Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) controller on Thursday as part of a promotion for the 2012 Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition book. Ben Allen, Stephen van't Hof, and Michel Verhulst built the fully functional controller to celebrate the 105th anniversary of their electrical engineering student association.

The NES controller is an exact 30:1 scale replica of the controller from Nintendo's video game console. It measures about 13 feet long and weighs more than 260 pounds. The students claim that the controller cost about 4,000 pounds sterling (about US$6,200) to construct.

Nintendo launched the NES console (known as Famicom in Japan) in 1983 and released it in North America in 1985, Europe in 1986, and Australia in 1987. Nintendo had sold 61.91 million NES systems by 2010.

Sources: CNET, Gizmodo (link 2) via Hachima Kikō

Update: The controller's scale corrected. Thanks, Twilightmaster.