The hardware that sits between player and game — designed to disappear
Gunpei Yokoi's cross-shaped directional pad, first appearing on Game & Watch handhelds and standardised on the Famicom controller in 1983, replaced joysticks with a flat, durable, thumb-operated input that has governed game control ever since.
The Atari CX40 joystick shipped with the Atari 2600 in 1977 and became the most widely recognised game controller of its era, shaping how an entire generation learned to interact with games before d-pads existed.
The SNES controller introduced shoulder buttons (L and R) and a four-button face layout (A, B, X, Y) that expanded the action vocabulary of console gaming and established the template every modern controller builds on.
Released in 1993 to support Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II, the Genesis six-button controller added three face buttons (X, Y, Z) to the original three-button layout and became the preferred pad for the console's fighting game library.
The DualShock combined twin analogue thumbsticks, a d-pad, six face buttons, and dual rumble motors in a single controller, establishing the layout template that Sony's controllers have maintained through four subsequent hardware generations.
The Nintendo 64 controller introduced the analogue thumbstick to mainstream console gaming in 1996, enabling the precision of movement that 3D games required — at the cost of an unusual three-pronged layout that divided players.
The Power Glove was a wearable NES controller that translated hand movements and gestures into game inputs, promising a future of gesture-based gaming that its implementation in 1989 could not deliver.
The NES Zapper was a light gun peripheral included with Duck Hunt in the NES's original pack-in, bringing the arcade light gun experience to the home and becoming one of the most widely recognised game accessories of the 1980s.
The Sega Saturn controller's six-button face layout on a compact, ergonomic shell produced what fighting game communities consider the finest d-pad controller ever made for arcade-to-home ports.
The Intellivision's hand controller featured a 16-direction circular disc rather than a joystick, offering more directional precision than the Atari 2600's eight directions — at the cost of a layout that few players found comfortable.
The original Game Boy's control scheme — a d-pad, two face buttons (A and B), and Start and Select — was deliberately minimal, optimised for one-handed thumb operation and designed to survive the rough treatment of a children's portable device.
The Super Scope was Nintendo's SNES-era successor to the NES Zapper, replacing the pistol form with a shoulder-mounted bazooka that used infrared wireless transmission — making it one of the first mainstream wireless game peripherals.
Sega's controller for the Dreamcast paired a single analog stick and pioneering analog triggers with two expansion slots for the VMU memory card and vibration pack — an inventive design admired for its ideas and criticised for its bulk and forward-facing cable.
Coleco's controller combined a short joystick with a full 12-key numeric keypad and swappable game-specific overlays — an ambitious, complicated input device that mirrored the Intellivision's approach and reflected the pre-standardisation experimentation of the early 1980s.
The Atari Jaguar's bundled controller sported a telephone-style 12-key numeric keypad beneath just three face buttons — a bulky, widely criticised design often cited as one of the worst controllers ever made.
The largest controller ever bundled with a major console — so poorly received that Game Informer gave it "Blunder of the Year", and Microsoft replaced it within a year.
A controller built around a single enormous green button, with hybrid analogue triggers that click at the bottom of their travel — asymmetric, opinionated, and still in competitive use today.
A knob on a potentiometer, sold in pairs, with about 330 degrees of travel — the analogue input that made Pong, Breakout and Kaboom! possible before the joystick took over.
Nintendo's official tabletop arcade stick, built by Asciiware, brought a microswitched joystick, adjustable turbo dials, and a pseudo-slow-motion button to the NES — the definitive way to get the arcade feel at home in the late 1980s.
An octagonal ring the player stood inside, firing infrared beams at the ceiling to read body movement — the first full-body motion controller, a decade before the Wii and Kinect, and a near-total failure in practice.
SNK's home console shared its hardware with its arcade boards, so its controller was built to match — a heavy, microswitched, ball-top arcade stick with four large buttons, bundled in the box with the $599 system.