Know Your Mimobots
I’m a big proponent of making practical things interesting. Why have a regular Apple keyboard when you can have an Iron Man keyboard? Why drive a car without a Batman steering wheel cover? Why eat a sandwich without onions? Why keep your data stored on little grey sticks when your data can have a face?
Designers occasionally try to push through the homogenization of computer peripherals, fighting against a significant part of the working world that takes computers very seriously. A tall, black computer tower becomes the beginning and end of the conversation, and in some offices, this is an inevitability. If I ever end up in one of these places, please kill me quickly. Paperclip to the brain or something.
Mimobots actively fight against practicality being unaesthetic while they serve an impressive dual purpose. They fit excellently into the designer toy aesthetic and work as killer display items alongside your Dunnys and Peecols, but they also provide a whole lot of quick data storage, doubling as handy little flash drives which hold between 2GB and 16GB of data in various increments.
Over the past five years, Mimoco has explored a wide range of art on their flash drives, including licensed properties like Star Wars, HALO and Hello Kitty, and original art by notable creatives like Gary Baseman and tokidoki.
A personal favorite of mine is the Darth Vader Mimobot, which incorporates a removable cap that reveals Vader’s scarred face beneath. Mimoco even thought to utilize the notorious ‘variants’ which blind box designer toys employ by making one in every six Darth Vaders don the classic Return of the Jedi pale Anakin, instead of the fleshy prequel Vader face. Also excellently appropriate are the R2-D2 and C-3PO Mimobots. If they ever make an Admiral Ackbar, I’m sold. I have three external hard drives and a dozen various flash drives, but I’ve never been one to deny myself an Ackbar.
I was given the chance to play with a Mimobot in the form of a Blue Spartan from HALO – a video game property which has an incredible reach into pop culture. When your video game has comics, action figures, costume replicas and prints based on it, you’ve arrived. When your video game has a board game based on it, you’ve entered meta territory and there’s no turning back. There’s definitely a kind of loyalty which players dedicate to different hues of Spartan warriors, or else McFarlane’s line of action figures wouldn’t be able to crank out so many different variations of the same sculpt in different colors. The same is true for the Mimobots.
Even better is the fact that the XBox has recently added support for flash drives just like these, and the Playstation 3 has offered this compatibility for a while, so the uber-nerd in me is excited about the possibility of keeping various game data on video game themed drives.
They’re a lot of fun, and it’s worth a few extra bucks to have a genuinely fun USB drive to fulfill whatever USB needs you have. You can’t leave all of that porn on the family computer anyhow, and it’s silly to burn a CD of music for your friend when they’re just going to pop it right onto their MP3 player anyhow. This is the coolest possible way to handle these situations.














