What were you thinking: Gaming's worst controller features

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Over the years, there have been loads of official controllers in the gaming world. And by official, I mean ones made and sold by console makers, who should have more resources than your average Chinese pirate company and also good reasons to want to make something people will use a lot for years.

But... that hasn't always been the case. Even really good controllers have often been delivered with flaws that make you wonder what they were thinking when they designed them. Here are some good examples of this:

The cord that was attached to the side

(Famicom, 1983)
The Japanese predecessor to the NES was in many ways actually better than the NES itself, with a couple of features that were missing in the West. But the fact that the cable comes out of the side of the controller instead of the top means that it is constantly in the way of your hand. An incredibly strange decision, and we should be grateful that the brain fell into the right place just in time for the NES controller to be designed.

Master System controller pause button

(Master System, 1985)
"Where is it?" The question was always justified, because the Master System controller had neither Select nor Start (as the NES equivalent did), and so it was not possible to pause games. This is obviously a problem. Sega knew this too, so they put the pause button on... the console. We'll never know how many children in a dark room accidentally pressed Reset instead of Pause when their mother called out that dinner was ready or the toilet was calling. But there are loooots of them. All because of a stupid design.

Jaguar Controller using the telephone keypad

(Atari Jaguar, 1993)
I really don't know what Atari was thinking when they designed the Jaguar Controller, which has buttons on the upper half corresponding to a classic Mega Drive equivalent. On the lower half, however, there are no fewer than 12 buttons, arranged like a push-button telephone. They are also a bit spongy and uncomfortable. The idea was that you would place a template over them to see which button did what, but their placement made them completely impossible to use and remember for each game. It felt a bit like entering a PIN code in the heat of battle.

The Three-Horned Monster Nintendo 64

(Nintendo 64, 1996)
Nintendo was an early adopter of analogue sticks and released a version at the same time as Sega. While Sega's Saturn controller resembled a modern controller in many ways, Nintendo's looked like a spaceship, and they had designed it so that you could either access the D-pad and L button... or the analogue stick and Z button. This was an epic design flaw that meant large parts of the controller could not be used at the same time.

The cord that attaches underneath

(Dreamcast, 1998)
In many ways, this was a rather unique controller in terms of design, and none of them were particularly good (except for the ergonomics). Among other things, it only had one analogue stick when two were already becoming standard, and it had a sturdy holder with space for memory cards with a screen and a shake function. But what was most annoying was that the cable came out at the bottom. Sega realised that this was suboptimal and had therefore phased out a cable holder on the underside, which often damaged the cables and kept coming loose. That's why you often see glue or tape residue on the underside of Dreamcast controllers where people have tried to come up with their own solutions.

The Duke that was made for gorillas and grizzly bears

(Xbox, 2001)
Microsoft's first Xbox controller was actually great in many ways, with superb analogue sticks that were asymmetrically placed, really good triggers, incredible rumble (almost too good) and a loooong cable (with a trip-proof feature). But... when they took the measurements for it, they probably used Shaquille O'Neal or possibly Shrek. The size was absolutely enormous, and they were quickly forced to replace it with one that was actually usable - the Controller S, which is still largely what an Xbox controller looks like today.

The misaligned trigger buttons on DualShock 3

(PlayStation 3, 2007)
When Sony was about to release its worst-selling console, the PlayStation 3, there were many strange things going on. Among other things, they wanted to replace their wonderful basic design with something banana-like. Instead, we got SixAxis, where the shake function was removed, which in turn was then replaced by DualShock 3. Everything was fine and dandy here, except for its analogue trigger buttons. Sega and Microsoft had made this the standard, and Sony didn't want to be outdone, but the buttons were convex, slippery, misaligned, spongy, and lacked "stops" that kept your fingers from sliding off. How this passed quality control, we will never know.

When Sony put a touchpad on the back

(PS Vita, 2011)
Sony had already started experimenting with touchpads before the DualShock 4, when they added a large one to the PS Vita. However, they placed it on the back, where it was often a source of irritation and rarely used sensibly, with a few exceptions such as in Tearaway. It was clearly an attempt to offer something new and fresh, and definitely not something that was added to improve quality and playability.

The battery-draining and distracting Light Bar

(PlayStation 4, 2013)
There was some criticism of the DualShock 3, mainly regarding the trigger buttons. The DualShock 4 was therefore significantly better, but it still did not escape criticism, as Sony had come up with other issues instead. They had built in a bright light strip on the top, which quickly proved to be reflected in the TV, shone distractingly in dark rooms and also drained the battery of a controller that already had poor battery life. It was not until much later that Sony partially relented and allowed players to reduce the brightness, but they did not allow the light to be turned off completely - and just like with the Dreamcast, there are often tape marks on the controller from people who simply stuck a piece of silver tape over the light bar.

Helplessly yelling at the television

(Xbox One, 2013)
Both Nintendo and Sony have tried their hand at voice commands, but Microsoft really went all-in with Kinect. The idea was that you could do things in the game like reload or throw grenades, but also pause and take screenshots. However, it didn't take long for gamers around the world to realise how totally unreasonable it is to sit and yell at the TV with arbitrary results. A horrible and lousy system that no one missed after yelling "Xbox, turn off" for the last time.

The analogue sticks that had minds of their own

(Switch, 2017)
Not a feature per se, but a systematic design flaw due to the Joy-Cons not having Hall Effect. The joystick quickly started ghosting after relatively little use, rendering them unusable despite being insanely expensive. Nintendo introduced free repairs for Joy-Cons instead of improving the quality.

The bombing of screenshots for Switch

(Switch, 2017)
Joy-Cons are small and, in terms of their internal design, are actually technical masterpieces. However, that doesn't change the fact that Nintendo's placement of the screenshot button on the Joy-Cons is really questionable. It's located right next to the control pad, perfect for being pressed accidentally in the middle of all the action. Maybe it should have been called the "Oops, I just took a screenshot" button, because if you look through Switch players' archives of images, a shocking number of them will have been taken by mistake. Unfortunately, it's not much better on the Switch 2 either.