A bunch of stuff about game controllers

"Game pads are totems of a strange religion"

A quote from Selectparks that is inspiring for the project:

“Gamepads are totems of a strange religion. Boxed with exploding supernovas or depicted as craft at war in space, they’re always marketed as a kind of mythological vehicle. Some gamepads come embedded with glowing LEDs as though they were a magical item of arcane power to be discovered by the player in the flesh. Regardless of their shape, every gamepad is released in Beta; countless human hours of chafe and blistered thumbs are testimony that we are in a sense responsible for their evolution - wearing at their form until those that make them listen to our cries. The history of gamepad design echoes the evolution of games through a description of how we play them; in this sense their design is a rich pictogram of action. The same could barely be said of the knife and fork.”

d-pad ancestor

The electronic game called “Split Second” features an interesting ancestor to the direction pad. The four buttons are independent and allows the player to use different interactions for the whole set of games proposed by Split Second.

d-pad patent

This URL points to the D-pad patent proposed on August 18th 1987: “a four-directional switch which can be turned on and off in four directions, which comprises a base plate having a plurality of electrodes formed thereon, a key top having an indication showing predetermined four pressing directions in an identifiable manner, a support member constituting a fulcrum between the base plate and the key top, a plurality of conductive rubbers disposed opposing to the plurality of electrodes so as to be in electrical contact with corresponding ones of the electrodes, and a sustaining member having the plurality of conductive rubbers fixed thereto and having elastic force for sustaining the conductive rubbers so as not to be in contact with the electrodes when the key top is not pressed.” The patent was proposed by Ichiro Shirai who is not the real inventor. It was Gunpei Yokoi who created this device but he was so into creating new devices that he asked Shirai to write the patent!

The following drawings extracted from the patent depicts the “prior art” (Game & Watch prior to the invention of the d-pad), the invention and the d-pad itself. Note that Nintendo planned to put the direction pad on the right!

History of the d-pad

I tried to collect here various examples of projects that led to the direction pad. A preliminary version, from the US, is the Atari “Game Brain” (C-700 released in 1977). There were no joystick or joypad but it had a set of four cross-oriented buttons with a symbol in the middle (telling you that these buttons controlled direction):

But the first instance of a d-pad may be the Microvision by Milton Bradley from 1979. this device was a sort of screen with a set of buttons that would be used with inserts that, when placed into the system with the corresponding game, would show the player what buttons to push to accomplish game actions. The arrows on this insert act as directional controls:

Games & Watch platforms form the 1980s like the one above only had buttons till the arrival of Donkey Kong. This game required the player to move into 4 directions (up/down/left/right), which is why the designer (Gunpei Yokoi) created this button called “directional paddle” or later referred to as “d-pad” “+Control Pad”)

Stick/pad hybrids

An interesting aspect of the gamepad evolution is the recurring return to prior metaphor. Although the stick and pad “paths” diverged from the beginning, several hybridization occurred over time. The two paths crossed several times over as shown by the examples depicted in this blogpost. The threaded hole in the center of the d-pad allows indeed to add a mini joystick which takes different shapes or color. Of course some are more carefully-crafted than others (the red mini-stick is a bit rough while the one above is more complex).

Although I am not a great fan of the “evolutionist” metaphor, I find interesting to observe how certain features are chosen and integrated by designers.

Playstation action buttons variety

Still in the collecting phase, which seems to be a never-ending phase. The saturday flea market in Geneva always provide me with good opportunities to buy weird gamepads. Today, we managed to buy some Playstation  and PS2 pads made by Sony and third-parties.

Besides the shape/material appearance, what’s interesting and striking when you put them all next to each other is the difference in the action buttons symbols. While the regular layout by Sony is made of the “Square Triangle Circle Cross” structure, there are some obvious derivations as represented below. All of them have intriguing characteristics that express various design intents. Documenting these different propositions seems interesting to us for the project.