You Can Buy A Real-Life Pacific Rim Mech Suit

When you hear the term “mech suit,” you’re probably thinking of something no taller than yourself–the kind of overpriced nerdery you might stick into a home office as a conversation piece.

In this case, though, that office better have a high ceiling: the suits available from the Japanese startup Tsubame stand at an impressive 15 feet fall. More incredibly, you can actually control the thing from the inside, which might be the closest that some nerds ever come to piloting a Gundam of their very own.

Speaking of anime, a very classic trope is that these giant mech suits are piloted by very young, very talented individuals, a pattern we see repeated in everything from Neon Genesis Evangelion to the earliest episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam.

It’s only fitting, then, that this real-life mech breakthrough comes courtesy of a young genius. The talent behind the startup and the giant suits in question is 25-year-old inventor Ryo Yoshida.

Incidentally, Yoshida is not likely to be offended by any comparisons between his mechanical inventions and his country. Previously, he stated that “Japan is very good at animation, games, robots and automobiles so I thought it would be great if I could create a product that compressed all these elements into one.”

Summing up his thought process, the young pioneer said, “I wanted to create something that says, ‘This is Japan.’”

Certainly, the entire mech suit interface is enough to make users say “this is Japan.” You have to climb a ladder to hop into the suit cockpit, and once you’re inside, you can use the mech’s nine different cameras to serve as your digital eyes.

Joysticks are available to help you control the motion of the mech as well as its arms and hands, allowing you to fulfill your inner dreams of piloting a real-life Metal Gear.

Unlike Metal Gear, though, you shouldn’t expect this mech suit to be very good in combat. It can only move up to six miles per hour, and even its production company admits it is meant more to look “cool” than do anything else (though Yoshida hopes more robust suits may be used in the future for disaster relief, space exploration, and more).

Still, it’s doing that job exceedingly well, and “cool” barely describes how awesome the idea of piloting your own 15-foot tall mech suit that has both a robot and a vehicle mode.

Now that you’re properly drooling over this mech suit, here comes the bad news: you’ll need to fork over a cool $3 million to pre-order one. While that’s more money than we’ve got kicking around the old piggy bank, we must admit that it’s hard to put a price tag on something this awesome.

After forking over that much money for one of these bad boys, we can only assume you won’t need any sunglasses-wearing father figures to guilt you into piloting this mech.

Just in case, though, here’s your Evangelion-inspired morning motivation: get in the mech suit, Shinji,

Source: PopSci