A Game & Watch was about the size of a calculator, and a joystick would have stuck out of it. Retro Gamer puts the problem plainly: Gunpei Yokoi “quickly decided that a conventional joystick would impede on the Game & Watch’s portability, so he began looking for solutions that would take up less space”. His team’s answer, in 1982, was a flat cross that sat under the thumb and pressed in four directions. Within a year it was on the controllers of Nintendo’s first home console. Nintendo registered its construction in Japan and patented it in the United States, and rival consoles arrived with four-way pads of their own shapes.
Fast facts
- First cross of buttons: Donkey Kong Jr. Game & Watch, 1982: four separate buttons arranged in a cross.
- First single cross-shaped pad: the multi-screen Donkey Kong Game & Watch, 1982.
- Designed by: Gunpei Yokoi’s team at Nintendo.
- First home console: the Famicom, 1983, and then the NES.
- Protection: a Japanese utility model for a “directional switch”, applied for in 1982, and US patent 4,687,200, “Multi-directional switch”, granted on 18 August 1987.
From four buttons to one cross
The early Game & Watch games did not need much control. Retro Gamer says most “simply possessed a couple of buttons with which to control the game, usually corresponding to simple actions such as moving left and right or jumping”. A game where the player climbed as well as ran needed four directions.
Donkey Kong Jr., in 1982, was the first to have them. It “was actually four buttons arranged in a cross shape, with each one corresponding to up, down, left and right”. The multi-screen Donkey Kong of the same year joined the four into a single cross-shaped piece. Retro Gamer‘s 2004 history of the series says it “introduced Nintendo’s famous cross-shaped directional pad which later graced the NES controller and GameBoy”, and that Donkey Kong became the series’ first million-seller.
Nothing in the pad was new technology. It was a set of switches under a moulded key, which fits the approach Yokoi called “lateral thinking of withered technology”: cheap, well-understood parts used in a way nobody had tried. The journalist Lara Crigger, quoted by Retro Gamer, described the gain in terms of the hand: with a joystick “you have to use the sides of your thumbs and fingers — or in some cases, your palm or whole hand. That takes more manual effort than just pushing buttons with a thumb tip.”
Onto the Famicom
Masayuki Uemura’s team, designing the Famicom at the same time, had tried joystick controllers. Uemura recalled in a 2015 interview with Jeremy Parish for USgamer that they took “this idea that had been used for controls with the Donkey Kong Game & Watch”, fitted it to a Famicom prototype, “and we immediately knew, ‘OK, this feels right’”. The Famicom launched in July 1983 with the cross-shaped pad on its controllers, and the NES kept it.
To a program, the pad is four switches. The NES reads its standard controller one bit at a time through $4016: after the program strobes the port, eight reads return A, B, Select, Start, Up, Down, Left and Right, one button per read. Each direction is simply pressed or not pressed; there is no measure of how far.
The patent question
Nintendo protected the mechanism twice. In Japan it applied in 1982 for a utility model, a lighter form of patent for a practical device, under the name “directional switch” (application 実願昭57-57437). According to Japanese Wikipedia’s summary of a 2005 Japan Patent Office guide, it was registered in 1992 as utility model 1889504 and expired in 1994, and it covered a cross key of a particular construction, not the idea of a cross key in general. The same article credits the proposal inside Nintendo to Takao Sawano.
In the United States, patent 4,687,200, “Multi-directional switch”, was granted to Nintendo on 18 August 1987. It names Ichiro Shirai as inventor, was filed on 9 August 1985, and claims priority from a British application of 5 August 1983. The abstract describes the construction: a key top marked with four pressing directions, resting on a support member that acts as a fulcrum, with conductive rubber pads underneath that close contacts on the base plate when that arm of the key is pressed.
The magazines were never sure what this meant for anyone else. In August 1996 Edge’s history of game controllers said Nintendo “holds the patent on this type of directional controller to this day”. Fourteen months later a reader asked Edge whether that was why “Sega uses a circular disc and Sony uses a divided cross”, and the magazine answered the opposite: the same kind of device on “numerous other joypads from competing companies implies that no patent exists for the D-pad”. A right that covered one construction, as the Japanese registration did, would fit both observations: rivals could sell four-way pads, just not built Nintendo’s way. In 2004, reviewing Messiah Entertainment’s wireless controllers for the NES and SNES, Retro Gamer noted that their pad was “a thumb holding circle instead as Nintendo owns a patent for its D-pad design”.
Nintendo was not alone in looking for something flatter than a joystick. Edge’s 1996 history says that Bandai used “a similar controller which it called an ‘eight position action button’” on a handheld called Space Chaser, and dates it to 1981. No other public source settles how that control worked or when it appeared.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 55, 2008, “Retroinspection: Game & Watch”: the joystick problem, the early two-button games, Donkey Kong Jr.’s four buttons in a cross, Lara Crigger on the D-pad and “Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology”.
- Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004, Game & Watch feature: Oil Panic (May 1982) and Donkey Kong as the first two Multi Screen games, the cross-shaped pad that “later graced the NES controller and GameBoy”, Donkey Kong as the first million-seller.
- Retro Gamer issue 8, 2004, Classic Gaming Expo report: Messiah Entertainment’s wireless NES and SNES controllers and their round pad.
- Edge issue 35, August 1996: history of game controllers (Nintendo’s patented pad; Bandai’s “eight position action button” on Space Chaser).
- Edge issue 50, October 1997, letters: the reader’s question about Sega’s and Sony’s pads, and the answer that “no patent exists for the D-pad”.
- Nintendo Co., Ltd., US patent 4,687,200, “Multi-directional switch”, inventor Ichiro Shirai, filed 9 August 1985, priority 5 August 1983, granted 18 August 1987 (web). https://patents.google.com/patent/US4687200A/en
- Wikipedia (Japanese), “十字キー” (web, secondary): utility model application 実願昭57-57437, registration 1889504 in 1992, expiry in 1994, the scope of the right, and Takao Sawano’s proposal. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8D%81%E5%AD%97%E3%82%AD%E3%83%BC
- Masayuki Uemura, interviewed by Jeremy Parish, USgamer, 2015, as quoted by Nintendo Life, “Masayuki Uemura, The Nintendo Engineer Who Helped Define The Modern Games Console” (web, secondary): trying joysticks, and the Game & Watch pad on the Famicom prototype. https://www.nintendolife.com/features/masayuki-uemura-the-nintendo-engineer-who-helped-define-the-modern-games-console
- NESdev Wiki, “Standard controller” (community reference, web, secondary): the
$4016read order. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Standard_controller