Back when the Nintendo Switch came out with its hybrid approach to video game consoles, folks quickly realized that its portable nature and detachable controllers made it a good candidate for playing games in TATE mode.1 That is to say where the monitor or screen is turned 90º to be more tall than wide.
Why would you want to do this? Well, many games – especially arcade games – were designed with the screen in this orientation! Galaga, 1942 and even more modern games like Ikaruga and Downwell. The vertical orientation is great for shooters or other games where the playing field is taller. 2
In 2019 Jeremy Parish, Mike Choi, and Fangamer created and released the Flip Grip for the Nintendo Switch. It was a nice bit of kit that held the screen or tablet part of the Switch and had rails for the Joy-Con controllers to slide into. I liked the idea so much I backed the original Kickstarter project!
Fast forward to 2025 and the Switch 2 was released. It keeps the same hybrid approach, but this time instead of a rail mechanism uses magnets to attach the Joy-cons. Since the Switch 2 is backwards compatible, you can play all your original Switch games on it. But, as you can imagine, there’s no Flip Grip for the Switch 2.
I saw there were a couple of attempts on the internet to design a vertical, or TATE mode, grip for the Switch 2. Many of them look nice, a few questionable, and like all middle-aged millennial tinkers, I thought, “Why don’t I try to make one!?”. So I did. You can download it over on MakerWorld.
I made a few iterations on this project as you can see in the image above. I first worked on getting the dimensions correct for the main Switch 2 body, then worked on a system for the magnetically attached Joy-Con 2s. My first few iterations were a little off in almost every dimension.
I first modeled the grip to use some small round magnets I had laying around. They were difficult to work with. Hard to grasp and you needed four for each Joy-Con. When you went to glue them into the “rail” they liked to escape and stick to one another. Not to mention they were far too weak to hold the controller in place. Even after a few revisions where I printed the thin inserts to cover the magnets at .40mm thick. I ended up going with much stronger rectangular magnets from K&J Magnetics. They were just the right size, matching the dimensions of the metal buttons on the Joy-cons.
After a few revisions I started to print just the rail part as that was the most tricky. This sped up the process quite a bit. Not sure why I kept printing the main body over and over again without changes. Learning, I suppose.
I wanted to have a thin bit of plastic covering the magnets to give it a nice finish and make sure there was little room for the controller to wiggle. Even with the stronger magnets I had to add a little “wing” behind the controller to help keep it in place.
I eventually got to the final product with cutouts for the buttons on the left side, and the speaker and vent on the right. I even designed a little felt insert to keep the plastic from rubbing.
There’s probably more I can do like make the tolerances tighter or add more ergonomic grips. Maybe someday.
This was also a chance to teach myself (thanks YouTube and wikis!) how to use FreeCAD, an open-source CAD program. It wasn’t the most intuitive bit of software I’ve used, but I learned about how to set constraints, bevels, and the metric system. Ok, that last one was a joke. 🙂
Again, the whole thing can be downloaded over on Makerworld for free. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons license and I even included the source FreeCAD files if you want to see how poorly I used the software. I mean, if you want to make any modifications.