Atari · Atari Jaguar · 1993
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.
When Atari launched the Jaguar in 1993, marketing it as the first "64-bit" console, it bundled a controller — sometimes called the PowerPad — that would become a byword for misjudged design. The controller carried 17 buttons in total: a directional pad, three face buttons labelled A, B, and C, dedicated Pause and Option buttons, and, dominating its lower half, a 12-key telephone-style numeric keypad. The keypad was intended to accept game-specific overlays, paper templates laid over the keys to show what each did in a given title — the same concept Atari had used on its 5200 and that Coleco and Mattel had tried a decade earlier. The rationale, once again, was that games were growing too complex for a handful of buttons, and that a keypad could function almost like a compact keyboard. Some Jaguar games did make real use of it: Doom used the keypad for rapid weapon selection, and Wolfenstein 3D used it for quicksaving. But the execution undermined the idea. The controller was large and clumsy in the hand, and, more damningly, it offered only three primary face buttons at a time when the Genesis and SNES had already established six-button pads as the norm for the fighting and action games players wanted. A machine billed as a generation ahead of its rivals shipped with fewer accessible action buttons than either of them. The consequences for game design were awkward. With only three top buttons, developers had to either keep control schemes basic, contort themselves to cram functions onto those three inputs, or push actions down onto the cumbersome numeric keypad — where reaching them mid-game was slow and uncomfortable. Reviewers of the day, including GamePro, praised the Jaguar's raw hardware while singling out the controller as a serious liability, and its reputation has only hardened over time into a standard example of how a poor controller can hamper a console. Atari eventually acknowledged the problem by releasing a six-button "Pro Controller" that replaced the keypad's prominence with three additional face buttons, a revision widely regarded as far superior to the original. But by then the damage was done: the Jaguar sold poorly and the bundled pad became part of the story of its failure. Today the original Jaguar controller is a frequent fixture on "worst controller" lists, remembered as a device that repeated the keypad mistakes of the previous decade just as the industry had firmly moved on.
Reviving the keypad-and-overlay approach in 1993 with too few face buttons, becoming a textbook example of a controller that undermined its own console.
Atari's justification for the numeric keypad echoed the reasoning behind its own 5200 controller and the earlier Intellivision and ColecoVision pads: as games grew more complex, the thinking went, players would need something closer to a keyboard, and paper overlays could relabel the keys for each title. A handful of Jaguar games genuinely exploited it — Doom mapped weapons to the keypad, Wolfenstein 3D used it to quicksave — but for most games the keypad was an awkward afterthought, slow to reach and uncomfortable to use during action. By 1993 the wider industry had already learned that this approach did not work, making its reappearance on a supposedly cutting-edge console especially puzzling.
The controller's deeper failing was its shortage of proper action buttons. With only A, B, and C available up front, the Jaguar pad offered less immediate control than the six-button Genesis and SNES controllers that were already standard for fighting and action games. Developers were forced to simplify their schemes, overload those three buttons, or banish functions to the clumsy keypad. GamePro and other outlets praised the console's power but condemned the controller, and Atari's later six-button Pro Controller — which swapped the keypad emphasis for real face buttons — tacitly admitted the mistake. The original pad endures as a cautionary tale about how badly a controller can hamstring otherwise capable hardware.