Should Nintendo Stop Innovating And Make A Traditional Console?

[NATO]

Hynad said:

Man, you make the case for me. You're saying it yourself. Nintendo brought forth the D-Pad and everything that came after adopted it.

It's like you don't even follow your own arguments anymore. xD


And TMNT (1989) came out long after the NES was a thing. Which gives me proof enough that you came into the 3rd gen consoles at a later age than me. Which means that your memory is that of a late 3rd gen adopter at best. So nobody should give any credit to your anecdotal "evidence".

Since it's an argument about dpads, one of the first actual single injection cross shaped 4 directional "d-pads" was on the mattel  armour battle and mattel sub shark handheld games.

This was in 1978, the input buttons themselves are all physically connected by a thin cross allowing them to flex and return to the original position.

Prior to that Atari released the Atari VCS with a joystick that used a single piece plastic base that had a central pivot to prevent input for alternate sides of the 4 button matrix at the same time, and only neighbouring buttons for diagonal input.

Both the dpads form (mattel) and function (atari) are not innovations by Nintendo, the only thing Nintendo can be credited with here is combining both the pivot and the shape together, and that, ladies and gentlemen, isn't innovation, it's simple evolution of an existing idea.