Controller's History Dynamite from 1UP.com

s we close in on the weekend of the Tokyo Game Show, speculation on the content of Satoru Iwata's keynote speech -- specifically, whether Nintendo's president will spill details on the Revolution console -- is reaching fever pitch.

But very little of this speculation centers around what games might be announced, or what the system is packing under its hood. It's all about the controller. Nintendo has been dropping all sorts of hints that the Revolution's controller will be something brand new -- and whether its design will be written off as a gimmick or end up changing the way video games are controlled is entirely up in the air.

The controller is what separates video games from other media. It's where player and game meet. If the controller feels like a natural extension of your hands, it can work wonders, pulling you into the experience. If the input device is awkward or painful, it can ruin an otherwise great game.

Before we find out where we're going, we thought we'd take a look back at where we've been.

Midnight Requisitions

The first computer game controller was, appropriately enough, created by the guys who designed the first computer game. In 1961, members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) used the school's new PDP-1 computer to design a game called Spacewar. Originally, the outer-space shooting contest used the existing keys near the computer's small screen. Not only was this uncomfortable, it was unfair: the player closer to the CRT display always had the advantage.

So TMRC members quickly hacked together two identical control boxes from spare parts. (These were usually "acquisitioned" from empty classrooms in the dead of night;



An artist's rendering of the original Spacewar control box -- the first video game controller.

it was often said that the club's real name was The Midnight Requisition Club.) They wanted to use joysticks, but they couldn't find any. So two metal flip-switches controlled the ship's rotation and thrust, while a button fired torpedoes. Both players were able to sit back an equal distance from the screen and hold the small controllers in their laps.

Spacewar was so popular that eventually a copy of the program was included with every PDP-1 computer sold. Since the market for these massive, room-filling computers was mostly major universities and businesses, Spacewar was mostly enjoyed by other college kids. One of them was Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. Years later, when Bushnell decided to try putting computer games into boardwalks, penny arcades, and pizza parlors, his first attempt was Computer Space, a one-player version of Spacewar.

Computer Space's failure was in part due to the controller. Although the stand-up cabinet greatly resembled what we use today -- a monitor at eye level, a panel with control buttons at waist-level, and a coin slot -- the control scheme that made perfect sense to MIT's geniuses baffled the pinball-raised American public. Four buttons? Thrust? Fire? Rotate? Forget it, the pizza's here anyway.

Pong, the company's next game, showed that Bushnell had learned from his mistakes. First, instead of ripping off a ten-year-old computer game, Atari ripped off the Magnavox Odyssey's video tennis feature. But the controls were improved -- on the Odyssey, separate twistable dials controlled the movement of the paddle and the spin on the ball. Pong compressed both functions into one dial; you put "English" on the ball by moving the paddle quickly as it bounced off.

Everybody knows the rest of the story. Video games exploded into popularity; Pong and various clones filled every public space in America, etc. Soon after, brand new video game titles started showing up, and yes, they used joysticks. As implied above, video game designers didn't invent the control stick -- that honor, according to



The button layout for Nolan Bushnell's first arcade game Computer Space looks simple today, but was highly confusing in 1971.

a New York Times piece (registration required), goes to French aviator Robert Esnault-Pelterie. Or possibly a Missouri inventor named James Henry Joyce (and it was originally called the "Joyce stick"). Or an unknown Civil War-era submarine designer. Who the hell knows. In any case, the joystick was quickly appropriated for arcade games like Tank and Space Race.

But it's not the case that joysticks immediately took over the entire arcade. Dial-controlled tennis games and steering wheel racers were still popular, of course, but even some action games -- most notably Space Invaders and Defender -- stuck with an all-buttons layout, like Computer Space. Oh yeah -- and the rotate/thrust/fire control scheme that was too confusing for the public in 1971 became the basis for 1979's breakout hit Asteroids.

NEXT >>

Gotcha
1973, Atari

As the story goes, some of the liberated 1970's women working at Atari pointed out how the joysticks that adorned most of the company's games could be seen as phallic symbols. (The name probably didn't help.) In response, the controller for Atari's fourth coin-op release Gotcha was designed to resemble& well, uh, the only controls were two soft pink mounds. Each player grabbed one and pushed it around to control a character in a maze. Internally, Gotcha was referred to as "the boob game."

Qwak!
1974, Atari

Ducks fly over a marsh. You shoot them with a light gun, and your loyal hunting dog runs up to collect the carcasses.

Duck Hunt on the NES, right? Nope -- it's an Atari arcade game called Qwak! Okay, maybe Nintendo did a little bit of stealing here, but that was how the business worked back in the day. Besides, it's not as if Qwak's light gun controller was a new innovation either -- the first home game system, the Odyssey, had an optional Shooting Gallery attachment that sold for $24.95 and now fetches about ten times that...

Football
1979, Atari

One now-ubiquitous game input device that Atari did come up with all on its own was the trackball, first used in a very popular football title. The game was released in what was called a cocktail cabinet -- the monitor was set into a tabletop on top of which players could put their drinks. Each side of the machine had a trackball for controlling the quarterback and a button that could be used to select plays.