I get the impression that you may not have played a lot of indie jam games. A hand-crank is one of the least weird things I've seen done. Hell, I once made a game where the controller was two people arm wrestling each other. At least a crank is practically usable.
As a self-described inveterate hobbyist, I completely understand looking around a workshop full of parts and saying "gee, what could we do with that?" And buying parts completely at random just to full future sessions of "Mystery Meat Monday"
I played this at the Videogames exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The breadth of visual effects they can achieve with just a 1-dimensional display is surprising. https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/videogames
This is so cool! The future looks bright again,im starting to feel we’re gonna survive the touchscreen takeover and will go back to revisit physical analog controllers.
The tone may not have been clear, but my post was at least partially tongue in cheek.
I'm sure someone could come up with this idea and probably did, but getting to the stage of actually releasing a commercial product with a crank makes me think there is more to the story.
As a self-described inveterate hobbyist, I completely understand looking around a workshop full of parts and saying "gee, what could we do with that?" And buying parts completely at random just to full future sessions of "Mystery Meat Monday"