| Gamer1211 said: 4. Controller History relating to #1: The D-PAD, didn’t Nintendo invent the D-PAD? Shoulder buttons, didn’t Nintendo invent the shoulder button concept? Do you recall the N64 rumble pack; I wonder where Sony got the rumble idea? How about Analog, was Nintendo not the one who developed this concept? (Nintendo had a controller with 1 analog and Sony created a controller with 2 analogs) |
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamepad
The analog stick was introduced with the Atari 5200 controller, but did not reach popularity until the Nintendo 64.
