| Rubang B said: I would like some sauce that says he wasn't solely responsible for the D-Pad! He was sitting on a train, and he saw somebody messing around with a calculator, and thought a thin flimsy gaming device could be made cheap and fun, and the D-Pad came straight out of his G-dly brain at that moment! |
"A precursor to the standard D-pad was used by the Intellivision console, which was released by Mattel Electronics in 1980. The Intellivision's unique controller featured the first alternative to a joystick on a home console, a circular pad that allowed for 16 directions of movement by pressing it with the thumb. A precursor to the D-pad also appeared on Entex's short lived "Select A Game" cartridge based handheld system; it featured non-connected raised left, right, up and down buttons aligned to the left of a row of action buttons. Similar directional buttons were also used on the Atari Game Brain, the unreleased precursor to the Atari 2600.
The first "connected" (pad) style D-pad appeared in 1981 on a handheld game system: "Cosmic Hunter" on Milton Bradley's Microvision. The pad was operated the same way today's D-pads are, using the thumb to manipulate the onscreen "hero" character in any of four directions.
In 1982, Nintendo's Gunpei Yokoi updated this idea, shrinking it and altering the points into the familiar modern "cross" design for their Donkey Kong handheld game. The design proved to be popular for subsequent Game & Watch titles, although the previously introduced non-connected D-pad style was still utilized on various later Game & Watch titles, including the Super Mario Brothers handheld game. This particular design was patented."
