Nintendo · Nintendo GameCube · 2001
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.
The GameCube controller (model DOL-003) launched in Japan on 14 September 2001, North America on 18 November, and Europe the following May. Its face is the most opinionated button layout Nintendo has ever shipped: a single large green A button sits in the centre, with a smaller red B below and to the left, and two kidney-shaped X and Y buttons curving around them. The arrangement is not symmetrical, not conventional, and not accidental — the GameCube's design philosophy held that A was the primary action in essentially every game, so A was made physically dominant and the rest arranged to fall around it. Your thumb rests on A by default; everything else is a deliberate reach. The shoulder buttons are the other significant idea. Rather than choosing between analogue and digital, Nintendo built hybrid triggers: each L and R behaves as an analogue input across its travel and then, when fully depressed, clicks to register a separate digital signal. One physical button therefore delivers two distinct kinds of input — a graduated value for aiming or braking, and a discrete on/off at the bottom of the pull — without adding a second control. Combined with an unusually good octagonal-gated main stick, the result is a pad that the competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee community has refused to give up on for more than two decades.
The only controller from a dead console still in mainstream competitive use
Every other major controller of the era gave the player four equal face buttons in a diamond, implicitly asserting that all four actions are equally important. Nintendo looked at what players actually do — press A, constantly, in nearly every game — and built the hardware around that observation instead of around symmetry. The large green A is a claim about frequency: this is the button you will press ten thousand times, so it should be the one your thumb finds without looking.
The cost is that the GameCube pad is bad at anything requiring four equally-weighted inputs, which is why it was a poor fit for fighting games and for multi-platform titles designed around a diamond layout. Nintendo accepted that trade because Nintendo was not, in 2001, building a controller for multi-platform titles. It was building one for its own games, in which A does nearly everything.
The GameCube controller is the only pad in history that has substantially outlived its console as a competitive standard. Super Smash Bros. Melee's enduring tournament scene is built on it, and the reasons are mechanical rather than sentimental: the octagonal gate around the main stick gives reproducible angles for the precise directional inputs Melee's movement techniques demand, and the analogue triggers permit the partial presses the game reads as distinct actions.
Nintendo, to its considerable credit, simply accepted this. It has repeatedly re-manufactured the controller and shipped USB adapters for it across two subsequent console generations, so that players of a 2001 game on a 2001 pad could keep competing on hardware released two decades later. Very few companies would keep a dead console's peripheral in production because a tournament scene asked them to.