Page 23 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #40 FREE Edition

Today, the Playstation 5 Dualsense controller is seen as one of the standard-bearers of video
game controllers. Its form factor, weight, and button placement
was honed over many years of
both internal R&D and change alongside new consoles. Sony has changed quite a bit about their controllers over the years, but it can be a challenge to see just how far they’ve come without the history spread out before you. We intend to allow you the chance, dear reader.
The first Playstation controller wasn’t the grey slab you remember playing Crash Bandicoot on. The original Sony remote was, in fact,
a Super Nintendo controller. Yes, the Nintendo Playstation counts,
so it is mentioned here. As it was a prototype, the Nintendo Playstation recycled a lot of SNES hardware. The controller was no exception, as it was a standard Super Famicom colored SNES controller with Sony and Playstation branding. Who knows what the actual Nintendo Playstation’s controller would’ve looked like, but at the least we can be fairly sure it wouldn’t just be the recycled SNES pad the prototype used.
When Sony did launch their
own console in 1994, after a
messy break-up with Nintendo,
the Playstation controller felt revolutionary. This was the first controller to have two bespoke grips on the bottom of the pad (I’ll hear an argument for the Genesis, but those are the suggestion of grips, not full, wrap-your-hand-around-it grips).
The PS1 was also the origin of the famous shapes associated with
the face buttons of Playstation controllers. Teiyu Goto, the designer of the controller, told CNET in 2010; “The triangle refers to viewpoint;
I had it represent one’s head or direction and made it green. Square refers to a piece of paper; I had it represent menus or documents
and made it pink. The circle and
X represent ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision- making and I made them red and blue respectively.” The designers at Sony also put two triggers on the
top of the controller, one behind each shoulder button, which were accessible thanks to the handle grips on the controller providing further reach for the player’s fingers.
One strange occurrence for the Playstation controller was the swapping of the X and O buttons’ use cases when the console left Japan. Sony worried that a singular circle would be read more as a zero, or a symbol of negativity, instead of one associated with correct answers
to Japanese folk. The buttons’ functions were swapped up until the PS5 era, when Sony decided to have Japan match the rest of the world, so now X is confirm and O is cancel everywhere.
Three years later, in April 1997, Sony updated the Playstation 1
controller with two analog sticks in the bottom-middle of the gamepad. This Dual Analog Controller wasn’t Sony’s first foray into analog devices, as a massive Joystick device
was released for PS1 in 1996, but this controller fit in your hands, and games such as Ape Escape seemed unplayable without the full movement options the sticks provided. 3D games finally had a comfortable way to interact with them, and that legitimized the Playstation’s devotion to polygons over pixels.
This controller was swiftly replaced. In November of that same year, Sony swapped out the concave top of the analog sticks with smooth ones
and added built-in rumble support, practically finalizing their magnum opus, the DualShock. This design was so perfect, by writing about the DualShock, I am also pretty much
THE PS CONTROLLER IT ONLY DOES EVERYTHING! by John Michonski
MAY 2024 • WWW.OLDSCHOOLGAMER.COM
MAY 2024 • WWW.OLDSCHOOLGAMER.COM 2 2
3 3