What the fuck were they thinking?!

What the fuck were they thinking?!

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>it's all downhill from here my dudes

Every game was supposed to come with a card overlay that you slide over the number pad, each with their own unique artwork and buttons.

lol how did they expect you to use this? Like your left hand on the control stick and your 10 fingers on each button LOL

Videogames were a bold new frontier and no one knew how to make a controller, it was all being made up on the fly.

Reminder that the first controllers were literally just volume knobs

phones where awesome
no more thought
genius start production

Most of the controllers in the second gen, however awkward looking and laid out, were used well by most games. Most designed around playing with the stick and side buttons (so that you had a firm grip on the controller while wiggling that shit), while the numpads were the equivalent of an always available menu system.

The Intellivision controller was the first to do it and did it best, the disc was light, the controller was flat, and the layout made using the pad and disc simultaneously very natural. It was the first to design a controller with the number pad, and others like Atari and Coleco immediately followed suit, but those guys fucked theirs up with shit like that 5200 stick in the OP image that was an unwieldy pain in the ass. Atari kept trying and failing at making controllers, poorly placed numpads on everything all the way up to the Atari Jaguar.

controller wasn't perfected until the dual shock 1

They assumed that consumers would be more used to something that looked and felt a bit like a television remote. Video games weren't exactly mainstream at the time.

More like the Xbox controller.

Is it a phone?! Can you call fuckernauts and astrobastards?

Had to start somewhere. Those controllers look weird, but since they made those, some designer got to say, "this sucks, let's try something else," and eventually end up modern controllers.

This made sense somehow in the late 70s and early 80s. Technology was sort of... different... back then. They were throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. In a way, I sort of miss that wacky bullshit; now there are just 3 big hardware makers, and no room for another to hold on to a niche audience.

I know Sup Forums is too stupid to know this but the Atari 5200 is basically Atari’s home computer hardware crammed into a home console with very slight modifications to various registers. Being that all the games were being ported from a home computer with a full keyboard, the addition of keys on the controller was nescessary. The analog control stick was stupid, but it killed two birds with one stone by combining the paddles and standard joystick into one.

There were a lot of desperate attempts at 'controllers' during the vidya primordial soup.

Nintendo were ones to nail. They not only prefected the D-Pad, the entire design of what we now consider joypads is almost solely attributable to them:

Directional controls on the Left
Action buttons on the Right
One or Two indirect function buttons in the middle

Every single major console for the past 25 years has based their controller off the SFC/SNES pad. Nintendo were the company who decided HOW we will play games.

Based Nintendo

SNES live stream
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>the design was completely random
>they were just throwing ideas at the wall
no. they were designed around making home versions of arcade games. This is also why the intellivision had a paddle. they didnt juse make a weird controller for the fuck of it

Xbox controller was regression dual shock 1 is perfect.

At that point Atari was split into two companies, one that handled home computers and consoles, and the other that handled arcade cabinets and software.

It was a simple case of a team of people being tasked with creating something they had absolutely no experience in, as everyone that worked on the 2600 had left for Atari Games.
has the right of it, in the end the team gave up and just lazily turned one of their home computers into a crappy console, a truck they would try and pull again in Europe with the Atari XE.