Page 6 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #40 FREE Edition

Something strange was happening in the Phillips household.
The confusion had started when Howard's father had come home from work carrying a package under one arm. It wasn't Christmas or anyone's birthday, and Mr. Phillips wasn't the sort of dad to spontaneously bring home gifts.
Then his father had gone into the living room and was on his hands and knees, rooting around behind the television, a curved, gray screen planted in the center of a wooden cabinet. Howard sat on the couch and watched. The screen was where images were displayed, so what was his father doing behind it?
The mysterious package had been opened, and its contents, a boxy wedge of plastic, sat on the carpeted living room floor beside the TV. It was white, black, and brown, and
a cord extended from behind it and around to the television, where it scraped the wall as his dad fussed with connections. There were the other two chunks of plastic on the floor. They were rectangular, with two knobs on either side, connected by cords to the larger plastic box.
Howard fidgeted on the sofa. He wanted to reach for one of the boxy chunks, turn it, tinker.
"They were completely foreign," Howard told me in a previous interview. "They didn't look like anything that had come before.
We couldn't say, 'It's like this other game controller,' because there weren't game controllers. It just had this weird, space age look."
Just when Howard’s curiosity threatened to overwhelm him, his father turned a knob on the front
of the television. One moment the screen was blank. The next, it filled with snow that cracked and hissed like a rainstorm. Then his father did something strange. He reached down to the plastic box on the floor and flipped a switch.
The static cut off abruptly. Two white rectangles, taller than they were wide, blinked into existence, one on either side of the screen. At the top were two zeroes with sharp edges, squarer than they were ovular. A series of dashes ran down the center of the screen, dividing it in half.
A small square floated across
the screen between them. It was the funniest thing: Each time the square connected with one of the rectangles, it would make a noise – BINK! - and then drift across to the other rectangle in a straight line... back and forth... over and over...
This, Howard decided, was the most boring television program he had ever seen.
His father picked up the paddles and handed one to Howard. He took it and watched his father for some clue what to do next. His dad did something with his hands. On the screen, the rectangle on the right jerked up and down.
Howard twisted a knob on his paddle - and the rectangle on the left glided upward.
He turned the knob in the opposite direction. His rectangle sailed downward, and the white square
drifted past him. At the top of the screen, the zero on his dad's side ticked over to one.
Howard caught his breath. His jaw, slack at first, curled into a wide grin.
"It's hard to explain to somebody who grew up controlling things on screens, but when I was a kid, there was none of that," he said. "It was always programmed by televisions."
Everyone is a gamer. I bumped
into my mother-in-law in our optometrist’s office and found her playing Candy Crush. Receptionists killed time by playing Solitaire and Minesweeper between phone calls and checking in clients since the ‘90s. We rarely think about how
we interact with games - in some ways the video game controller
has changed little - but these devices define not only how gamers interact with their games, but the games themselves. It’s impossible for one article to break down
every innovation and iteration
of controller design. Instead of attempting the impossible, we’ll focus on the groundbreaking sticks, d-pads, and buttons that have defined the way we interact with our favorite hobby.
Most game controllers have fit in rough square or rectangular molds. That design conception dates
back to 1972 and the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial video game console. If you’d have raised its boxy controller to your face, it might have felt like holding a View- Master. Each beige box contained two knobs that you determined horizontal and vertical movement.
6
O O L L D D S S C C H H O O O O L L G G A A M M E E R R M M A A G G A A Z Z I I N N E E I S • S U I S E S #U 3 E 3 # 3 7
THE WAY WE PLAY THE CONTROLLER EVOLUTION by David L. Craddock