The trend these days is to have controllers be a seamless part of the game playing experience, to the point that they're virtually transparent. The Kinect and other purely motion based solutions is perhaps the best, most extreme example of this increasingly popular train of thought.

So thank goodness that some folks out there are willing to go against the norm, and create controllers that both bold and absurd. Like the "Doom Piano", which as the name implies, is a piano that's been modified to play "Doom".

The following, which Gamasutra was the very first to report on such a bizarre yet wonderful interface, was presented at the Virgin Media Game Space in London. It's the lovechild of organizer David Hayward, developer Sos Sosowski, Ricky Haggett of Honeyslug and George Buckenham of Die Gute Fabrik:

Basically, the white keys are for actions that mostly related to movement, while the black keys are all for just shooting. There's also a key that's broken and makes a thud when hit; that one is for opening doors and hitting switches.

And thus, yet another man made object has been engineered to play "Doom". The list of items keeps getting shorter and shorter. What's next, the Magic Bullet?