Nintendo (manufactured by Asciiware) · Nintendo Entertainment System · 1987
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.
The NES Advantage, released in 1987, was Nintendo's answer to a specific desire: NES owners in the 1980s had grown up feeding quarters into upright arcade cabinets, and the small rectangular NES control pad did not feel like that. Manufactured for Nintendo by Asciiware, the Advantage was a large, heavy unit designed to sit flat on a table or the floor while the player operated a tall, ball-topped joystick with the left hand and the face buttons with the right — the ergonomics of a standing arcade cabinet, reproduced for a seated living-room player. Beyond the arcade-style layout, the Advantage added two features the standard pad lacked. Each of the A and B buttons had a turbo function with an adjustable dial, letting the player set the auto-fire rate anywhere from a gentle repeat to a rapid stream — invaluable in the shooters and action games that punished a tiring thumb. It also offered a "slow" button that produced a pseudo-slow-motion effect by rapidly pausing and unpausing the game, easing difficult sections; because it worked by hammering the pause line, it did not function with every game, and titles using the Zapper or R.O.B. were incompatible. On release the Advantage was well received as the closest thing to a home arcade experience, and it became one of the era's most recognisable peripherals — recognisable enough to earn a cameo in Ghostbusters II, where a character uses one to steer the Statue of Liberty through New York. Its heft and its microswitched stick gave it a durability and a tactile authority the standard pad could not match, and it developed a lasting association with the more hardcore end of NES play. The Advantage endures as the archetype of the third-party-style deluxe controller made official — a peripheral that existed not to fix a flaw in the standard input but to serve a particular kind of player who wanted the arcade in their home. Its combination of a proper joystick, adjustable turbo, and slow-motion assist set a template that arcade sticks for later consoles would keep returning to, and it remains a fondly-remembered icon of the NES accessory ecosystem.
Bringing an authentic microswitched arcade-stick experience, adjustable turbo, and slow-motion assist to the NES as an official Nintendo peripheral.
The Advantage sold a feeling more than a function. The NES pad worked perfectly well, but it did not feel like the cabinets players had learned games on, and the Advantage existed to close that gap — a big, weighty slab with a tall ball-top stick you gripped like the real thing. Sitting a player behind it, joystick under the left hand and buttons under the right, deliberately recreated the posture of standing at an arcade machine. It was a peripheral built to make the living room feel a little more like the arcade, and for a generation of NES owners in 1987 it succeeded.
The Advantage's two signature features both served players pushing against the difficulty of late-1980s games. Adjustable turbo dials turned the exhausting mash of a shooter or a sports game into a held button, and could be tuned to each game's needs. The slow-motion button — a clever hack that worked by pulsing pause on and off many times a second — let players crawl through sections that were otherwise beyond them, though the trick's crudeness meant it simply did not work with a number of titles. Together they marked the Advantage as a tool for the committed player, and helped fix its reputation as the serious NES owner's controller.