Enth Creations is an Italian studio that creates artisan arcade sticks for fighting games. With arcade sticks seen as a form of expression, the design of a stick says just as much about the creator as it does the player using it. I had the pleasure of asking Enth questions about their craft, the expansion into creating individual parts, and more.
You can check out Enth and their products at https://www.enthcreations.com
What inspired you to start making fightsticks?
Fightsticks are magical objects, they have something unexplainable in them, they are metaphorically a weapon, a talisman, a magic wand with which to face the world. If they are “custom made”, they are even more magical, forged by artisan-alchemists who infuse style and power into them.
From a personal point of view, I think I started because I didn’t want to lose the memory of my 17 years, when in my room I was playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 with my friends on the first Playstation. Fighting games allow me not to grow old, they allow me to tell myself that there was something right in what we were doing, in the lightheartedness, in the friendship, in the Shoryukens. Today is also a way to stay in touch with the world to come, the root is an arcade one, while the future is to be written.
You say that Ergonomics and Simplicity are central to your design philosophy on your website. Ergonomics being important is obvious, but why focus on simplicity?
Simplicity is both a starting point and an end point. We come from the world of design and logo-design. A logo full of ornaments and highly chiselled is not necessarily a good logo. In its simplicity, a logo is one of the most difficult things to design. It takes months to get a good one. We try to arrive at the same synthesis in products as well. The structure and the harmony of the shape must first be achieved in a minimal way. Making product design is like making a logo in 3 dimensions, using matter. The final image-shape must be concise, balanced, compelling, solid. We don’t use graphic fillers in order to figure out what we are really doing in terms of structure and proportion.
Creative pursuits often have a lot of twists and turns, what are some of the unexpected lessons creating fightsticks has taught you?
Good question. What we learned is that there is a difference between the initial sketch and the final product and that the road between them is lined with an infinite number of revisions that you have to be ready to deal with. Revisions can be 10, 15, 30, each separated by days, weeks. It can be exhausting and not everyone is willing to go through such an ordeal. Facing the revisions makes you more zen. You must then be prepared to face personal sacrifices. The world, your peers, probably live very different lives from yours, more regular lives, with more economic stability. Creative people make radical bets, even in economic terms.
Today artificial intelligence makes everything look easy, whereas real “creatives” are a guild of highly trained people who share, though not publicly, a very specific set of knowledge that is gained through work and experience. If you are creative you end up defending creative people.
There’s been a gradual transition in the materials used in your fightsticks, from working with wood to 3d printing and now acrylic. Was this a natural evolution of the creative process or inspired by some other factor?
On the one hand, it’s a natural evolution. On the other hand, it’s a need for materials and production methods. As you go along you have to figure out how to make the objects you design. A certain type of material, like wood for example, requires a lot of processing. It may be suitable for limited production, but not mass production. The choice of materials and production needs go hand in hand.
In any case, it is interesting to work with different materials, since each material imposes certain limitations and design possibilities. With 3d printing for example you can get organic, one-piece shapes that you cannot get with plexiglass, while with plexiglass you can play with transparency and show the wiring, which other materials do not allow you to do.
Any knowledge gained then stays, and the next time (model) you get better and more synthetic, you can mix the two technologies and materials together. We proceed by layering our knowledge, we do not forget what we have done and we love to come back to it. “What is dead may never die”, as the ironborn acted in Game of Thrones.
You’ve begun making more than just fightsticks to now creating custom buttons and fighting boards. Why develop entirely unique hardware like this and how does it make Enth fightsticks different from the competition?
Last May we found ourselves without sticks to sell because we had stopped making the sticks in 3d and still had not developed the NE series. We started working on the board and then on the buttons. A need then, but it opened up a world for us. We learned how to design and produce circuit boards and how to work on software. We took a leap forward in terms of technical awareness.
The development of the KRMs, our buttons, was very complex, took 9 months, and we developed them completely from scratch. The tolerances for the threads are under 2-tenths of a millimetre. Working with tolerances like that is not easy, just a variation of a tenth of a millimetre and the button no longer fits correctly. Developing the KRMs really required a lot of revisions, more than we showed on social media. We modified the threads to increase the tensile strength and breaking strength, the button caps we revised lately as a result of feedbacks received from the BLITZ team. (@blitzteamgg)
As written above revisions are a mountain a designer has to climb to get to a final product, but at the end of the journey, you end up with something that didn’t exist before, something unique and yours. Invest in development and your products will become more unique.
Stickless fightsticks have become very popular in the past few years and we now see new designs with more and more buttons, like the NE-KRCK. Is Enth interested in pushing the limit to finding use with those extra buttons or is that a movement that you’re watching from a distance?
We are interested in developing layouts that make sense and have a style. We don’t just produce whatever we get or get asked. If the design is innovative, tournament legal and not produced by others, then we consider it and work with the client (if we like them as a person). The KRCK for example is a design that Krackatoa (@Koryuken) thought of and that we initially realized for him. Since it was innovative and able to unlock new game logic, we made it available for other players as well (specifying that he thought of it and referring to him in the name of the model).
Same goes for other particular designs. (like the Matoshiro –@mato_shiro) We grow and work with clients. We put in design and ergonomics to make a real object that is not just a prototype. We don’t release the product that the client asks us for, but an Enth product, which is based, some times, on the client’s specifications. All the layouts we propose, in terms of button layout, spacing, ergonomics, are designed and tested by us.
Does the future of Enth have anything surprising in store for us?
We continue to do research on materials and technologies and we won’t stop, because that’s what we love to do. We will probably look even more into partnerships with professional players.
In the near future we will definitely continue to finalize KRMs to really, if we can, make them top-of-the-line buttons. We will probably introduce limited editions with the plexiglass printed windowpane. We will continue to collaborate with BLITZ (@blitzteamgg) and maybe even Arcade Press (@aradepress –@ramcpux) for a stick dedicated to them. Perhaps we will reintroduce the #000000.
Shoutouts
A special thanks goes out to everyone who has put their trust in us and to Dante, who constitutes besides me, half of the entire ENTH team, and who has spent the last year, together with me, day after day designing, assembling and developing all the components and models you see