Controller evolution over the gaming years

I've been a part of home gaming since it was something that was even available. At great expense, my family was an early adopter of the Atari 2600 which retailed for $199 at release. That would be about $700 in today's money and I am still in awe that my super-frugal and not rich parents let us have one of these at that price.

The controllers were very basic but hell, we didn't know any better at the time and most arcade games only had 1 button at that point in time anyway.

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If you were alive at the time you are likely already aware that the rubberized cover on the joystick would get stuck and most people eventually just pulled it off exposing the plastic stick below. It was pretty advanced at the time considering that it was almost capable of detecting movement in a 360 degree sense. This is the late 70's and early 80's we are talking about here. We really couldn't do very much with any tech at the time. As an example most houses still had rotary telephones and if you were born after 1990 you probably don't even know what that means.

Controllers changed a lot when Nintendo decided to abandon the joystick and go towards a controller that nobody, at least not in the USA, had ever even thought of.

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4 buttons on the same controller? are you insane? Plus the D-pad was something that perplexed all of us when we first picked it up. Play for an hour or so and you were converted though, it is a MUCH better design than the joystick. Some purists didn't like it though and preferred the arcade experience. Nintendo was happy to accommodate such people and they had joystick versions of the controllers available for what I considered to be a rather excessive price. It was probably around $30 or so, I don't remember. This was the mid-80's though and I had a paper route that paid around two dollars a day so getting a $30 controller was never going to happen for me.

The evolution of controllers continued and rather than show all of them and make this blog entry 10,000 words long, I think someone summed everything up that happened over the years in this meme perfectly.

I play Playstation more than anything else these days and I only know one person that even has the latest X-box. Lots of people have a Switch and for my PC gaming the only available and reliable option is a Xbox controller.

I do find it funny that Nintendo for some reason feels compelled to completely reinvent their controllers with every new console release. I actually kind of fell out with Nintendo because of this and the last non portable system of theirs that I owned was the GameCube, which I thought was a fantastic system that unfortunately just had too much competition at the time.

If I had to choose a favorite controller of all time it would probably be the original NES one and this isn't because it is the best one by today's standards. It sits at number one on my list because Nintendo took a HUGE risk by completely changing the design of what people considered to be a controller and they totally nailed it. If anything they were the pioneers that paved the way for modern day controllers and while I am sure someone else would have done it eventually, joysticks have almost completely been phased out.

I don't miss them. They were huge and were easy to break.