DualShock | Code Like It's 198x

Sony’s first PlayStation pad was digital: press a direction and it was either pressed or it was not. Within three years the company had put two analogue thumbsticks and two small motors into the same shape, and the result, the DualShock, became the pad nearly every PlayStation owner used. The route there was not straight. The first Sony pad with sticks and vibration was sold only in Japan with its motors; everywhere else the motors were taken out, and when they came back they brought a patent suit that Sony was still fighting in 2007.

Fast facts

Dual Analog: Japan, April 1997, with vibration; in the UK by September 1997 at around £25, without it.
DualShock: Japan, 20 November 1997; two motors of different strengths, one in each grip.
Sticks: each reports two 8-bit positions, with the centre at about hex 80.
DualShock 2: shown with the PlayStation 2 in September 1999, with “analogue, velocity-sensitive” buttons.
Immersion v. Sony: filed February 2002; $82 million jury verdict, September 2004; settled March 2007.

The Dual Analog

The first PlayStation pad with two sticks arrived in Japan in April 1997, and it vibrated. When it reached the West it did not. Edge reported in September 1997 that the pad had “sidled onto UK shelves three months earlier than expected” at around £25, and that “the US and UK pads do not feature the vibrating feature of the Japanese model.” Sony’s explanation, as Edge reported it, was that the feature “was dropped after market research revealed that gamers found the analogue feature to be most important.” Edge itself thought cost the likelier reason, since Sony needed developers to support the pad and a dearer peripheral would sell fewer.

Players noticed. One Edge reader bought the official UK pad to play Rally Cross, a game that supported the Japanese pad’s vibration, and found “no response from the so-called vibrating feedback”. The magazine replied that there were “several schools of thought regarding Sony’s decision to drop the vibrating mechanism”, from “disputed reliability and compatibility to issues of cost”.

The sticks themselves won praise at once. In its first issue, in October 1997, the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine called Rally Cross “one of the first titles to utilize Sony’s Dual Analog Pad”, and said of Jet Moto 2 that “control with Sony’s Dual Analog Pad is so precise it virtually eliminates the need to lean with the shoulder buttons.”

The DualShock

Sony put the motors back for the DualShock, launched in Japan in November 1997. Edge played Gran Turismo with the “Japanese Dual Shock analogue” pad in early 1998 and found it “heightening the realism by vibrating under hard acceleration, violent braking and high-speed turns”. Later that year it looked inside Sony’s translucent Japanese editions and found the name was literal: “Each of the arms contains a separate motor, one for low-frequency vibrations and the other to deliver a stronger kick.” In Japan those coloured pads cost ¥3,300, around £13, which Edge noted was about half the UK price of the grey one.

The pad spread quickly. In mid-1998 the PlayStation’s American price fell to $129.95, alongside a new $149 pack that included the DualShock. Games added support, sometimes in new editions: Capcom announced versions of Resident Evil Director’s Cut and Resident Evil 2 whose main addition was support for the pad, and the Japanese Biohazard 2 was reissued as a “Dual Shock edition”.

How a program talks to it

The PlayStation reads its controllers over a serial link, and a pad announces what kind it is when polled. The community reference psx-spx documents the DualShock’s protocol. Each stick returns two bytes, with hex 00 at one end of travel, hex FF at the other and about hex 80 in the middle, though the measured centre varies from pad to pad, so programs cannot assume a fixed centre. The two motors are driven differently: the large one takes a speed byte from 00 (stopped) to FF (fastest), while the small one is simply on or off. A button on the pad, with a red LED, switches between digital and analogue modes. On the Dual Analog a second press gave a green LED and a mode that imitated Sony’s earlier analogue flight stick.

DualShock 2

Sony showed the DualShock 2 alongside the PlayStation 2 at the console’s unveiling in Tokyo on 13 September 1999. It looked almost the same, but Edge reported that its buttons were “analogue, velocity-sensitive”: its buttons can report how hard they are pressed, as a value from hex 00 to FF, as well as whether they are pressed.

Immersion v. Sony

Immersion Corporation, a Californian company that licensed “touch feedback” technology, sued Microsoft and Sony Computer Entertainment for patent infringement on 11 February 2002, over the vibration in their consoles’ controllers. Microsoft settled in July 2003, paying $26 million for a licence and an equity investment. Sony went to trial. On 21 September 2004 a jury found that Sony had infringed two Immersion patents and awarded $82 million; with interest, the court’s judgment in March 2005 came to $90.7 million. The court also issued an injunction against selling PlayStation consoles, DualShock controllers and 47 games in the United States, but stayed it while Sony appealed. The Australian magazine Hyper found it odd in June 2005 that Sony “didn’t go the same way as Microsoft and settle out of court with Immersion Corp. for a far smaller sum of money”.

The two companies announced on 1 March 2007 that they had agreed to end the case. Immersion received the full amount of the judgment and the licence fees already paid, and the companies entered a business agreement that Immersion’s chief executive, Victor Viegas, said was “specifically intended to enable advanced vibration capability for the benefit of the PlayStation gaming community.”

The case overlapped with the launch of the PlayStation 3, whose Sixaxis controller had no vibration. Sony said the motors would interfere with its motion sensors. After the settlement Sony brought vibration back in the DualShock 3, released in Japan in November 2007 and in Europe in July 2008. The DualShock 4 followed with the PlayStation 4 in 2013, and the PlayStation 5’s DualSense replaced the name in 2020.

Sources

Edge issue 35, August 1996, “Joypads” feature: the PlayStation’s digital pad.
Edge issue 49, September 1997: the Dual Analog in the UK, its price, the missing vibration and Sony’s explanation.
Edge issue 52, December 1997: reader’s letter on Rally Cross and the European pad, with Edge’s reply.
Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine volume 1 issue 1, October 1997: Rally Cross in the Top 20; Jet Moto 2 preview.
Edge issue 55, February 1998: Gran Turismo with the Japanese Dual Shock.
Edge issue 59, June 1998: Capcom’s Dual Shock versions of Resident Evil Director’s Cut and Resident Evil 2.
Edge issue 60, July 1998: US PlayStation price cut and the $149 Dual Shock pack.
Edge issue 61, August 1998: the translucent Japanese Dual Shock, its two motors and its ¥3,300 price.
PlayStation Power issue 34, Christmas 1998: Biohazard 2 “Dual Shock edition”.
Edge issue 77, autumn 1999, p. 7: the Dual Shock 2 at the PlayStation 2’s unveiling.
psx-spx, “Controllers and Memory Cards” (web, secondary): stick ranges and centre values, motor control, analogue modes and LEDs, DualShock 2 pressure values. https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/controllersandmemorycards/
Wikipedia, “Dual Analog Controller”, “DualShock” and “Sixaxis” (web, secondary): release dates, the Sixaxis’s missing vibration and Sony’s stated reason, and later models.
Immersion Corporation press releases filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission: “Immersion Files Suit Against Microsoft and Sony Computer Entertainment for Patent Infringement” (11 February 2002); “Microsoft Licenses Immersion’s Haptic Patent Portfolio” (28 July 2003); “Immersion Wins Patent Infringement Trial Against Sony” (21 September 2004); “Immersion Obtains $90.7 Million Judgment in Patent Infringement Case Against Sony” (28 March 2005); “Immersion and Sony Computer Entertainment Conclude Litigation and Enter into Business Agreement” (joint release, 1 March 2007).
Hyper issue 140, June 2005: the $90.7 million judgment, the injunction and Microsoft’s settlement.