They'd have no incentive to make any change, why change a formula that just sold 100 million units. 

The idea that any force of nature/God/whatever gives a fuck about video games so much that they would have intervened to ensure the modern controller comes to be is actually very silly.

And actually the N64 is fairly underrated for how much influence it has on modern games, Mario 64/Zelda: OoT are basically the bedrock of most modern 3D game design to this day (3rd person games). For FPS shooters, GoldenEye 007 essentially created the home video game market for the FPS blockbuster, which then became Halo and then Call of Duty which continues to this very day. It was the first major mainstream console with analog control, forcing Sony and Sega to copy that. It was the first modern mainstream console with a rumble becoming a primary feature of the controller (virtually all Nintendo games post Star Fox 64 started to use rumble), forcing Sony and Sega again to copy that also. 

Same reason Nintendo updated their S2 controller with new features like magnets and mouse controls, etc.  

End of story.

Edit

And for the love...  wolfenstein and doom existed (on consoles) way before 007.  Lol, christ man.  Just, lol.  

Nintendo has a history of changing their controller to some degree every time out, Sony does not. Sony didn't do any of the analog stick, rumble, or even analog triggers first (Dreamcast had that first). If they weren't pushed by Nintendo they'd have largely kept the same design for the PS2 almost certainly. The setup worked, no reason to change it much. 

Changing control methods is just part of Nintendo's internal culture, that doesn't mean "well every company would just do the same unprompted", no they wouldn't. Nintendo has a lot of design quirks that most companies don't, that's one of them. 

More speculation...

The burden of proof lies with the person making the claim. Can you prove your statement?

You have that backwards. 

We know for a fact in mainstream consoles, Nintendo did analog first, rumble first, Dremcast had analog triggers first. Sony copied all of those things and was not first to any of them. No one can dispute that really. 

YOU would have to prove that somehow in a parallel timeline Sony would've incorporated those things into their controller magically some how unprompted if Nintendo or Sega didn't do it first with nothing to copy it from. I doubt that would have happened. You can't remove cause from cause & effect and expect the effect to be the same. 

Having actually worked in R&D for 20+ years i can assure you most ideas are being developed by multiple companies around the same time. This is extremely common.

Anyone who wants an example, read up on electricity. Many people were working on it simultaneously.

The idea idea being pushed is wrong. That isnt how R&D works. Never has. Never will.

And plenty of companies do flat out just copy other companies too. See that a billion times over. 

Nintendo of the 80s/90s especially was the industry trend setter, whatever they did basically others copied. They had a six button controller so ... Sega released a six button controller and later on tried to pass that off as the new standard Genesis controller .... that's not random coincidence, they obviously saw the SNES had 6 buttons and reacted to that. Then Sony copied that same exact layout and added an extra shoulder button. 

Nintendo was the standard so anything they did basically got copied almost immediately. The analog stick and rumble pack were quickly copied. 

No fucking sense in doing cartwheels and mental gymnastics to pretend none of that happened, even at the time I remember in the 90s most people just accepted "oh yeah, Sony/Sega are going to copy that". 

It's actually part of the reason Nintendo is so annoying with drip feed news to this day ... they just embraced a company wide philosophy from those days onwards that they weren't going to show virtually anything too early (especially hardware wise) which has made it a pain in the ass for fans. Everything is treated like it's some top secret government secret with Nintendo, it's extremely annoying. 

If you want to argue Nintendo had the largest influence on gaming, that is fair and I would agree.

But that is a HUGE goal post shift from none of this existing because Nintendo and only Nintendo could think of it, which was your original asinine comment.

Could you imagine if someone argued videogames would never ever existed without Magnavox?  Me neither because that is silly.

Analog may have been delayed but to argue we would be using only d pads on a ps5 and PC gaming is hot garbage and I think you know it.

They may not exist in a way you recognize them today either though. Without Magnavox who knows if the game industry develops in the same way. Maybe it develops better or worse, but it would almost certainly different. 

I mean the example above where the person said the telephone would've happened even without Graham Bell ... says who? It could have taken decades longer or never happened in that same exact way at all, it may have been invented in a form factor much later that was not as attractive or more expensive or something like that and not have achieved mass adoption at the same rate if at all. 

Even more than, it's very probable none of us would even exist. If you change things in a time line like that, you realize none of us are probably born at all. The entire time line changes so that everyone's mother/father may not meet at the exact same time or even get together at all, certainly enough to shift who is born period. Like you're getting deep into the weeds of time causality if you just assume "well if I change this one thing, everything else just continues on the same way". No it almost certainly wouldn't. 

Wrong.

https://segaretro.org/XE-1_AP

Also the first Analog stick was Vectrex not Atari