Wisconsin is, in many ways, white. It’s the middle of winter, so the state is blanketed in snow, and with temperatures climbing all the way up to 14 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s likely to remain that way for months. The state’s world-renowned cheddar cheese lacks pigment. And to top it all off, the taxi radio is playing all the homogenized classics: Kenny Loggins. Billy Joel. Walter Egan’s lite-rock classic “Magnet & Steel.” But in Verona (“Hometown USA,” according to the sign at the edge of town), there lives a guy who defies blandness. He opens the door to his nondescript two-bedroom apartment — the one where the adorable little bird statues have frozen inside the mailbox — and shakes my hand with a smile, then immediately excuses himself. He disappears into his basement workshop with a two-word explanation: “I’m soldering.” That’s what Benjamin J. Heckendorn does; it’s who he is. You may not recognize the name, and you may not have visited see his customized creations. But chances are you’ve at least heard about them. The handheld Atari 2600. The one-handed PS2 controller. The Xbox 360 laptop. These are his hacked masterpieces — the mutant children of a mad scientist who, it turns out, isn’t crazy at all. He’s simply making things that no one else can.

Young Frankenstein

Ben Heckendorn swears he was not grown in a lab. “And as far as I know, I’m not a Cylon either,” he adds quickly. With a slim build, wispy ginger-tinted hair, and a receding hairline, the 33-year-old Wisconsin native could pass for a cousin of late-night comedian Conan O’Brien; his quick wit doesn’t hurt. But his true origins are neither glittery nor mysterious. “My dad was an auto mechanic and my mom was a hairstylist,” he says. “My dad’s dead, but my mom and my stepdad are as technologically backward as you can get. For Christmas my mom got a new digital camera, and she took some pictures of my niece, then printed the pictures and mailed them to me — in the mail. She has email, but she thinks when her memory card is full she needs to buy a new one. I’m sure that my dad was more technologically adept than my mom — I mean, he’d almost have to be — so that must be where I got it.”

Predictably, the drive to tinker hit at an early age, fueled by a Radio Shack Solar- Powered Lab and some very hackable Stompers — toy monster trucks powered by a single AA battery that were very popular in the early ’80s. “Those were fun to modify,” recalls Ben. “You could take them apart and they had gears, so you could learn about gear reductions and stuff. When I was a kid, anything I had, I would take it apart, but I would usually put it back together. And I had a rule that you should always have some screws left over, because everything is over-engineered anyway.”

After a love affair with the Atari 800 and Nintendo NES as a kid, Ben attended college for graphic design but soon dropped out. “I just didn’t care,” he says without malice or remorse. Instead, he focused on independent filmmaking while working as a graphic artist for a sign company. “We were actually designing things that we built, and that helped me a lot with learning mechanical design,” he tells us.

When he started having less fun with filmmaking by “taking it too seriously” in the mid-’90s, he found his way back to computers and started to tinker. The idea of making an Atari 2600 into a handheld system fueled his imagination — and when he posted his successful results online, internet geeks cheered. A slew of other portable projects followed, from N64 to Neo-Geo; eventually it led to a how-to book, 2005’s Hacking the Video Game Consoles, and a full-time career as a hardware hacker. After the book, Ben says, “I was never unbusy enough to go back to a regular job.”

Lending A Hand

But just because Ben can make something doesn’t necessarily mean he wants to. “I’m still really busy; I turn down all sorts of stuff,” he reveals. “I’ve been doing a lot of controllers lately. Whenever I break off into all-new things, people say, ‘Oh, you can do this?’ I’ve made some weird stuff.”

In this case, “weird” really means “specialized.” Ben fielded a request from ex-Joystiq editor-in-chief and current Microsoft employee Vladimir Cole for a controller that would let him play Xbox 360 while he worked out on a rowing machine. “I thought, ‘That’s ridiculous, so I’ll do it’,” says Ben. I laugh, but Ben really means it. “Hey, that helps — if someone comes up and asks for the same goddamned thing over and over, I don’t care. Or the big thing is ‘cram 10 systems into a box’ — why would I do that? That’s not interesting to me. But if someone says, ‘I want a rowing controller,’ I go, yeah, that’s ridiculous.”

Sometimes, the unusual concepts have led to life-changing results. When a soldier returned from a tour of duty in Iraq with a serious injury, he turned to Ben to create an Xbox 360 controller that could be operated with just one hand. Ben’s solution: Mount one of the analog sticks on the underside, so the player could aim with his knee. A few revisions of this design led to the Access controller, a tabletop gamepad that features reconfigurable modules for buttons, joysticks, and D-pads, so that one-handed gamers — whether they’re left- or right-handed — can move the parts around to fit their needs. A PlayStation and PC version is available from eDimensional.com; the 360 prototype is pending approval from Microsoft. “Very ironically,” Ben notes, “I had to take my own product and hack it and make it into a 360 version for their review, and that’s where we are right now.”

Having built custom strum pedals for one-handed Guitar Hero players, Ben is currently working on a PlayStation 3 controller for a quadriplegic gamer. He shows me a rough cutout of parts that will become a mouthpiece with two holes. Blowing on one hole represents pressing X, while sucking on it means pressing Square; blowing/sucking on the other hole functions as Triangle/Circle, respectively. Move the entire module around to act as an analog joystick. “It doesn’t look like anything right now,” he notes, fidgeting with rough-cut plastic parts, “but it will.”

Friends In High Places

Not surprisingly, Ben’s indie work has drawn the attention and admiration of the pros. “He has clearly earned the respect of hardcore gamers and technophiles, who for good reason can be a particularly skeptical bunch,” says Michael Epstein, president/CEO of eDimensional. “He can truly relate to our customers and actualize their desires through his design.”

It wasn’t long before other companies came seeking Ben’s services. Infinity Ward’s Rayme Vinson, who hired Ben to create a specialized controller monitor for internal game testing, admits he was one of the few people who hadn’t heard The Legend of Ben before seeking him out. “I was talking to a friend at Bungie about everything, and I showed him Ben’s site,” says Vinson. “Right away, he was all, ‘Oh hell yeah, totally know this guy, he’s fantastic.’” “Ben is widely known for his excellent work, and he has a huge fanbase,” adds THQ’s Adam King, for whom Ben is building a series of Xbox 360 laptops for the upcoming game Darksiders. “He has been awesome to work with, and is truly a master of his craft.” Ben’s flattered but remains egoless. “I really don’t care about the fame,” he admits. “The fame gets you jobs and the jobs get you money — that’s how I look at it. The fact that I can keep doing more interesting things…”

The one company that hasn’t called Ben is Microsoft — which seems a shame, since he’s something of a fan. “Heating issues aside, I think the Xbox 360 is a well-designed, good-looking console that’s nice and symmetrical,” he asserts. “Unlike the PS3, which is like a hunchback or something.” By contrast, he thinks Microsoft doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets. “I get tired of the animus against it,” he explains. “It’s the same thing with American cars — ‘Your American car will break.’ No, it might break. You know? Give it a break. You could walk out into the street and get hit by a truck, too; it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t cross the street.”

But would Ben leave Wisconsin for Washington if they offered? “I would probably entertain an idea like that, if it was a place like Microsoft, because I like their stuff,” he says, but adds: “No one’s come up to me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to do the industrial design on the Xbox 720?’ If people can say, ‘Oh, I want to be a rock star’ or ‘I want to be a football player,’ then I can dream about doing the Xbox 720 industrial design. Think of the street cred for them!”

Down In The Lab

Ben’s actual workshop is all business. Once you pass the high-voltage warning sign on the door (“I got that when they were tearing down my old high school; I snuck in and found that in the boiler room”), the bare concrete walls of his basement are randomly adorned with Escher artwork, gaming posters from the 16-bit era, and assorted CAD drawings of movie and gaming projects. “Have a seat. This one should be intact,” he offers with a laugh. “I modded it.”

It’s hard to tell if Ben’s workbench is intended for diabolical experiments or miraculous resurrections — probably both. Cardboard boxes marked “X-Clamps,” “New-ish Pieces,” and “Misc. Metal” share space with stacks of loose Atari cartridges, batteries, screws, an impressive collection of resistors, and plenty of power tools. The rafters are decorated with orphan controllers that span 25 years of gaming, not to mention prototype pieces from projects past. Atop an ancient radio sits a giant mask with red LED arrays in the eyes — the costume head from a 2008 Heckendorn cinematic production called Possumus Woman. Several new 360s sit nearby, awaiting their turn on the operating table. The current patient: one of THQ’s four Xbox 360 laptops, the fifth through eighth 360 portables Ben’s created since 2006. “I’m kind of tired of building them,” he admits wearily. “It takes a long time.”

It’s also repeating himself — after all, making the 360 portable was a goal he met two years ago. Fresh challenges drive Ben — like cramming the guts of a 360 controller into an Atari 2600 joystick, creating the (wait for it) 3600 controller. “I did that in one evening,” he explains. “Some guy on Facebook [suggested it] and I thought: ‘Wow, that’s a great idea! I’m going to stop what I’m doing and do that!’ And I did it!”

“I’d love to build an automatic can crusher,” he suddenly announces with great enthusiasm. “I haven’t gotten around to it and I probably won’t, but I would love to do that! You hook it up to the wall, you toss a can in and it goes crshshrhsrsh! That’d be great! And if it was in Michigan or whatever, you could have an LED display that tells you ‘5 cents.’ So the college kids could say: ‘Yes! We have another case of beer!’ So there’s other stuff I would like to do, I wish I could branch out more — but for the time being, people want me to build Xbox stuff, and they pay me to do that, so that’s more important. Whatever you get paid for, that’s more important.”

Until he gets bored — or until Microsoft calls — Ben Heckendorn is content with building things nobody else can. And if he’s accidentally a positive example for future generations, that’s nice, too. “I would like to be known for being eclectic — doing weird things, switching up,” he says. “I don’t want to get too political here, but I think there’s a lack of vocational things in America. Not enough kids want to use drill presses and make things; they just wanna go into IT or whatever. People need to build things, and it’s good to do that sort of stuff. So I don’t know, I hope I can inspire some people; that’s one nice side effect. You know,” he says, grasping to find the perfect phrase. “Makin’ stuff.”