Gather around, children, and I’ll tell you a story about the Great War. Its name was true to its nature - it pitted man against man, red against blue, and blast processing versus brand name. This was the Great War — The Console War.

Ohhh, what a riot! Look at you guys, drooling like hungry orphans for the latest controller shell for your Wiimotes or for the next way to cram a purple LED into your Xbox 360 controller’s ‘A’ button! You know, back in our day, your neighborhood knew your status based on the ridiculous contraptions stuffed into a clear plastic bin underneath your living room television. It’s what the Great Console War was all about: loyalty – regardless of what got set between your hands!

Just as in World War II, there were more weapons than you could shake a bayonet at! There were good weapons, and there were bad weapons. There were indestructible gears of war, and there were flimsy chunks of plastic that were pretty much an affront to practical design! Over the course of 11 short years, we saw the creation of some of the greatest controllers of all time and some of the most horrendous abominations to roll off of an assembly line floor.

Truly, between the birth of the NES to the tragic death of the N64, it was a golden age.

There’s no cotton-pickin’ secret about it - peripherals were one of the biggest contributions to the fanboy fire of the Console War. There were good ones, and there were bad - but when you found one wacky controller that you felt was the perfect blend of engineering and aesthetics, you couldn’t help but rally behind it! It was part of being a fanboy. Not only would you wave the banners for your company, but you’d also wear the T-shirts, read the biased magazines and buy its wacky off-shoot controllers. Hey, sometimes, you’d know quite well that the controllers sucked, but you’d give them due face time anyway – just as a show of support!

Fanboyism aside, one hard fact emerged from those days: It was an age of sharp duality. A proud few controllers and peripherals survived the gantlet, and because they did, they emerged from the smoldering heap to be named some of the greatest triumphs of peripheral design in video game history. Many others, however, fell to the wayside and sold worse than houses in Chernobyl - now considered miscarriages of form and function, proverbial “anti-matter” in the universe of peripherals!

At the very top of the mountain sit two kings, ruling their Nintendo-colored lands with oversize buttons and re-imagined d-pads: the NES Advantage and the NES Max.

The NES Advantage entered the market with its sword drawn in 1987 and has reached more people than Tokyo Rose - not only was it the easiest controller to see from space, but the thing also handled any game you could throw at it without breaking a sweat. In addition to replacing the NES’s tiny, plastic d-pad with a joystick that fit into the palm of your hand, the NES Advantage also brought the cavalry with it: variable-speed turbo buttons and a “slow motion” trigger (which was actually just a turbo-controlled ‘start’ button). And, to top it off, the dag’gum thing plugged into both controller ports so you could play as two players at once with reckless abandon. Also, if you remember back that far, it was jerry rigged to control Ray Stantz’s modified Statue of Liberty in Ghostbusters II.

The NES Max followed its bulky father into the fray in 1988 - but this time, it sported an easy-to-use sliding d-pad, its father’s turbo buttons and a ‘tapered’ form factor, designed to fit more naturally into the human hand. Thankfully, it offered much in the way of relief from the dreaded “NES palm,” in which the stock controller would dig into your palms and sometimes even draw blood. Because of its tough-as-nails build and revolutionary design, it was one of the few NES peripherals to be relatively universally adopted. If you recall, the PlayStation’s famous controller borrowed almost directly from the NES Max’s form.

Under even the greatest kings were their courts: truly unique people in their own right, but not made with the stuff of high royalty. In peripherals, the royal court was sparse – but, without a doubt, made up of dignitaries that helped to shape how people interacted with their games for years to come.

Among these few, who could forget the NES Zapper? Bundled with the system in 1985, it’s one of the few peripherals that would disrespect your mother and, I swear, not even give a damn – it’s that famous. Whenever light guns are talked about, mention of the Zapper is never far behind. Hell, look at the top of the page – there it is! Like most of Nintendo’s controllers, the Zapper was known for its solid design. The thing could see heavy abuse for years and still deliver its familiar “Pck-kang!” long after the mortars stopped! Now, along with the original NES controller, the Zapper lives on as a pop culture icon gracing Hot Topics and the belt buckles of hippies and filthy beatniks everywhere.

Not all of Nintendo’s best controllers were jingoistic triumphs of design – but they worked, and worked well. Enter the Power Pad, Nintendo’s artillery strike into the heart of traditional hand-held interaction. If you couldn’t fill your father’s shoes in time to catch a glimpse of this one, it was a soft step pad, not unlike those bundled with Dance Dance Revolution. Instead of gracefully timing your steps, you’d pound your feet into it as though it ignited under you in order to make your on-screen soldier hit the finish line before the bandit did! While it was as revolutionary as sliced bread, it was definitely one of the more frustrating controllers to use – not because of its form or its build quality, but because you’d have to make sure that the guy who lived below you went to work before you could help the U.S. win back the Olympics from the French!

On the other side of the wall, the Sega Master System produced a collective yawn when it came to crazy contraptions – third parties didn’t want to get off of their rumps to do anything about it. However, Sega did manage to grace it with a megaton-size addition to its arsenal: the ill-fated Sega 3D Glasses. The 3D glasses were awkward black boxes that would slip over your eyes and make it seem like you were playing a ‘spinning around in circles’ simulator – but much to the industry’s surprise, the glasses actually did work! But, in a fate shared by most soldiers, not many games supported it and it fell on the battle field and cascaded into relative obscurity. However, in its death, it served as a foul omen to Nintendo’s own ill-fated 3D experiment: the Virtual Boy.

As the SNES vs. Genesis years rolled their tanks in and fed the dogs of war, an incredible display of peripherals came filing in rank behind them. By the time the 90s reared its neon-colored head, both Nintendo and Sega began to understand that, perhaps, the way they had designed their controllers for the last generation was a bit meat-headed (for God’s sake, the Sega Master System Control Stick had its buttons on the left side!). So, in response, they rounded the edges of their controllers and added more buttons – but only Nintendo felt satisfied with its design right out of the gate.

One of the undisputed kings of controller aesthetics from the 16-bit era was the MK-1570, a swooping Genesis controller with six buttons instead of the standard three. Its grandfather was awkward, bulky and felt flimsy – much like XBOX’s stock controller. Sega thought that, early on in the Genesis’ life-span, it could phase out its predecessor and instead, include the redesign as a pack-in – and pack-in is an understatement. Sega practically launched a full-frontal assault on its first design. The MK-1570 was a dream to handle in comparison, and as quickly as it came on the market, users stuffed their stock controllers between the cushions of the couch and adopted the newer 6-button configuration.

Remember the Sega Channel? It was the grandpappy of modern digital distribution, and of course, it couldn’t have existed outside the experimental years of 16-bit. With its outlandish business model (“free games for a month!”) and its super-risky investment into the cloudy world of the Internet, it feels almost impossible to imagine it even functioning in leaner, more conservative times (such as, the era of the Sega Master System or the Saturn).

The Super NES had a meager share of epic SNES controllers and peripherals, due mostly to the fact that the SNES’s stock controller was designed well enough that it could survive at the bottom of the ocean for years, be fished up and used for a blistering weekend of Street Fighter II Turbo. Despite that, though, several designs clawed up from the depths of Brinstar to control the masses: the SNES Mouse, the Super Scope, the Super Gameboy and The SNES Advantage.

The SNES Mouse, the Super Scope and the Super Gameboy represented a shift in the world of peripherals within the 16-bit generation. While third parties attempted to turn the tides of war with unorthodox and clumsy means of using traditional controls (such as the Genesis Activator Ring), Nintendo knew the hydra on which it rode all too well. Nintendo planned to change things, and it knew how. Between 1992 and 1995, it introduced peripherals that, instead of being controllers that worked with every game, it designed games to be used with only one special controller. It began an interesting trend that echoed through future conflicts: creating a peripheral packed-in to a game that is used rarely, if ever again – and I’m looking right at you, Donkey Konga. Nintendo even ventured to release the Satelliview in Japan: a wayward attempt at expanding the playability of games through the power of the Internet. Remember that this was also around the same time that the Sega Channel was blasting hot, gooey piles of data into homes all around the nation.

And it was the day of the multitap! Consoles never had more than two controller ports, and multitaps allowed up to five people to play at once! When the Nintendo 64 exploded onto the scene, multitaps went extinct.

Aesthetics didn’t always mean the world at the time, though – no, beauty was only shell-deep! Controllers such the SN Programpad set the example: so many controllers were ugly as sin and had the endurance of a rubber balloon in a pin factory, but sometimes, they’d be the most useful.

The SNES Advantage, of course, is the direct descendant of the NES Advantage – both were for the bevy of fighting games starting to surface from the depths of the then-floundering arcade economy. The SNES Advantage, as one would notice by just looking at a picture of the thing, sported the same turbo buttons and industrial design that made its father famous in the NES era. Unfortunately, it looked more like a tank had squished a Super Nintendo and its well-meaning but misguided father had attempted to piece it back together with bits of construction paper and rubber cement. Seriously, this bastard was ugly, but it worked – and it was built like Fort Knox. In any other time, such a hideous troll of design would have sold like malaria.

Finally, near the end of the Console Wars themselves, Nintendo 64 became an almost ‘Arc de Triomphe’ of hideous peripheral design. While the controller design added the functionality of an expansion port, everything that stuck out of the damn thing either got stuck inside or made a controller look like it had gotten into a construction accident. The N64 Transfer Pack, the Memory Pack, the Rumble Pack, the Hey You Pikachu microphone and endless knockoff super memory packs – all great functions for the system, but so poorly designed and grotesque that house rules required one to play without them.

And we won’t even talk about how butt-ugly the 64 Disk Drive was. Hey kids, would you like to add another 40 feet to the bottom of your Nintendo 64 so you can see a Zora’s butt? Radical!

There were also hordes of cheap, poorly built and flimsy controllers flushing in from gray-market production companies all over the globe – it’d be impossible to name them all. The interesting effect, though, was their availability. Regardless of where you grew up during The Console Wars, you either had or knew someone who had an off-brand, third-party controller. To make matters worse, you knew someone who preferred using the damn thing over the regular controllers. Despite that most of the controllers were a blatant affront to aesthetics, many of them recognized and attempted to fix fundamental flaws in the original controller’s design. For example, take a gander at the Super L5 by ASCII – it was a one-handed controller designed for RPGs! The thing looked like a table leg, but damn, it worked wonders for running a marathon session through Final Fantasy III during the last few days of summer vacation.

No system is safe from cheap knockoff peripherals – but truly, if any generation is quickly becoming immune to them, it’s the generation of the 360, the Wii and the PS3. Who would have thought that, by making your controllers more complicated and your systems digitally protected, design firms would cease churning out an endless stream of cheap, clear-plastic controllers?

But, in a way, those crappy controllers were almost the charm of the era – it was a time when the game industry was just reaching adolescence and the limits seemed, well, limitless. There were good peripherals, there were peripherals that unexpectedly changed the market, and there were peripherals that could make babies weep – but the important part was that there were peripherals. Lots of them. Too many to even name. They were annoying and they snapped like a credit card at the first sign of that impossible boss battle, but truly, it was a rare, gilded age of experimentation.

Surviving the Console War: The Sega Channel
Surviving the Console War: No Hard Feelings, Eh?
Surviving the Console War: Gaming Parents