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A History of Game Controllers

Posted by Zonk on from the wave-your-hands-in-the-air dept.

Next Generation has an excellent piece, looking back on the history of game controllers, leading up to the Revolution's fascinating controller. They look at controller design, as well as the usage that some games wrest from the controllers. From the article: "There are ways to mess with the system; in Shadow of the Colossus, the player stabs a beast not by pressing the attack button but rather by letting go of it, making the violence a release, a consequence of the player's action. Still, there's not a lot of room for subtlety or nuance. The most subtlety you can get comes from analog control and state-shifting, and both of those are just jury-rigs to the system."

4 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Too recent, too light, too bad by Gulthek · · Score: 5, Informative

    The oldest controller the piece looks at is the NES controller, and even that is only given a cursory glance.

    Atari joysticks, Atari paddlewheels, the qwerty keyboard, custom arcade controllers (Golden Tee), genre specific controllers (steering wheels, light guns), game specific controllers (Guitar Hero, Steel Battalion), platform specific controllers (the Nintendo DS), any-company-other-than-Sony-or-Nintendo's controllers: all are missing from this piece of fluff article.

    You're better off reading the Game Controller article on Wikipedia.

  2. More of the same? by rylin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While the article is very well written, it ruins everything by going with the same old "Nintendo is dying"-message we've been hearing for the past couple of years - something that's getting quite annoying.

    1. Re:More of the same? by hattig · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Maybe we could get the cops onto him for harassment?

      I agree. Nintendo is doing just well. No loss on the hardware, massive portable game system sales, interesting concepts and more mean they'll do fine. It's as if people think that selling the same number of consoles as the XBox (~20m) is crap, even though the XBox made a loss on every console, and the Gamecube arguably made a profit on every console.

      The Revolution may be a lot of peoples first choice of console, with many people growing tired of more of the same from Sony and Microsoft. It certainly is the second choice of a lot of people, and even then the lower price tag may encourage an earlier purchase. It might suck for the 'ooh, another racing game' or the 'ahh, another sports game' crowd, especially as they'll probably want Racing Game 2k7 or Madden '07 in HD, as that'll be the only real difference from the previous 5 versions of the game.

  3. Not really a history... by hattig · · Score: 2

    Otherwise it'd have included weird pong controllers, 1 button atari joysticks and so on.

    It just says how the controller is being adapted by the revolution to handle things more gracefully and naturally, and that this is the end result of simplicity.

    The examples he gives are interesting though. e.g., Up being move forward, tilt l/r being strafe, speed of movement determined by angle of controller. I don't know if that is better than an analogue stick though. The fighting example was better.

    Great if the controller has a lot of sensitivity and resolution.