Despite the low prevalence of the Nintendo 64 in the territory of the former union, its three-handle controller is very recognizable. The reason is the unusual design, which surprised then, surprises now. However, it is not the shape of the case that makes the Nintendo 64 controller legendary. This is the merit of the joystick in the central part. It was he who introduced the players to a fundamentally new control and paved the way for modern three-dimensional games.
Don’t think Nintendo didn’t invent the joystick. The company made an invaluable contribution to its popularization and laid down the basic principles for managing the then-nascent 3D games. Prior to the N64, joysticks were in demand mainly among flight simulator enthusiasts who were looking for an equivalent to real aircraft controls. And in some older consoles, such as the Atari 2600, a large joystick was used in a similar way to a push-button D-pad for 2D games.
Moving around in the 3D world requires a lot of freedom and versatility that the traditional d-pad used in the past doesn’t provide. Freedom of action is reflected in the design of the N64 gamepad: an octagonal niche subtly hints at eight directions in which you can deflect the joystick and, accordingly, move the character on the screen. This characteristic shape was used in subsequent Nintendo consoles up to the Wii U.
The magic lies in how Nintendo taught players to use the stick and navigate new planes. When you first dive, you want to take the gamepad by the outer handles, like a classic controller, to use the D-pad. However, the joystick on a separate handle in the center encourages you to try out a new control principle. Well-thought-out ergonomics immediately come into play. The thumb grips the textured rubber surface of the stick perfectly, which allows you to deflect it in any direction, clearly dosing the effort.
Indeed, now the degree of deviation plays an important role, it allows you to make more accurate movements compared to the traditional cross. For example, in Super Mario 64 with a strong pressure, the main character runs, and with a slight deviation, he simply walks. A little later, there will be games that use this principle for flying in three dimensions. In them, the maneuvers performed depend entirely on the degree of deflection of the stick. Today, such mechanics seem to be the only true one, but at the dawn of the formation of 3D games, everything was not so simple.
However, it was not without problems. The plastic mechanism of the Nintendo 64 stick gradually wore out, which required regular lubrication with inevitable replacement after some time. It’s not worth scolding the engineers for this puncture, because they first implemented an analog stick in a compact gamepad at a time when the Sony PlayStation 1 and Sega Saturn were content with a cross. Gamepads with a joystick for these consoles will appear much later.
The N64 controller is transitional and combines the old D-pad concept with the new analog stick concept. In other words, it looks like the SNES gamepad has additional independent extensions that do not interfere with the interaction with the classic buttons for those who do not like the new control scheme. The company was probing a new approach and could not know all the nuances in advance – a single analog stick does not allow you to simultaneously control both the camera and the character. This point would be corrected by Sony with the release of the Sony Dual Analog Controller with a pair of analog sticks in 1997. The famous DualShock will appear a little later by the end of 1997. The gamepad format with two joysticks became the accepted standard and is still used today. Even Nintendo uses two sticks in GameCube, Wii (classic controller), Wii U and Switch.
However, the merits of Nintendo cannot be denied, the N64 single stick became the starting point, the bridge from the sprite consoles of the past to the super-powerful PlayStation and Xbox that we have today. It was this gamepad that set the trend and taught generations of gamers to navigate the virtual space in a new way.
The article was created based on materials from The Vegre.
Source: Trash Box
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