This paper describes a preliminary approach to teaching students about game design and development by making a custom game controller in a single course. RIT’s first seminar in alternative game controller design introduced students to game input mechanisms and encouraged innovation. By working with hardware, students explored physical design issues to improve their overall game design skills. The course demonstrated early success, as evidenced by the 2009 Game Developers Conference in which a banjo controller and game created by the students garnered accolades. To help other instructors develop a similar course, this paper addresses the motivation for, and components, of the course design. By combining elements of reverse engineering, interfaces, and game design, students can indeed design and successfully make custom game controllers. The paper contains a summary of one of the two final student projects: a deformable surface. The postmortem notes that despite the course success, future versions will need more time for projects. The paper concludes with a discussion of future directions.