Analogue Control
Degrees of freedom
Analogue control reads how far a stick is pushed, not just which way. Atari sold it on the 5200 in 1983 with a stick that would not centre; the Nintendo 64 thumb stick made Mario walk or run by degree in 1996, and Sega and Sony followed with analogue pads of their own.
Analogue control gives a game the angle and the amount of a stick’s deflection, not just which of eight directions it points in. Atari sold it on the 5200 in 1983 and lost the argument over a stick that would not centre; Nintendo won it in 1996 with the Nintendo 64 thumb stick and a Mario that walked, ran or tip-toed according to how far it was pushed. Sega and Sony followed with analogue pads of their own.
Fast facts
- Atari 5200 (1983): “an incredibly precise 360° analog joystick” in the advert; “poor, non-centering” in the reviews.
- Nintendo 64 (1996): “press up fully and Mario will run, press it halfway and he will walk” (Edge, February 1996).
- Not strictly analogue: Genyo Takeda told Edge the N64 stick “has been engineered to emulate an analogue joystick”.
- The followers: Sega’s Saturn analogue pad with NiGHTS (1996); Sony’s PlayStation analogue pad in Britain for about £25 (1997).
The Atari 5200
Atari’s January 1983 advertisement called the 5200’s controller “the most advanced in the world. With an incredibly precise 360° analog joystick.” The magazines that reviewed the games disagreed about the stick: Electronic Games called it “the 5200’s Achilles’ heel: its poor, non-centering joystick controller”, and a reader wrote in to say a Wico replacement “overcomes the major problem with the Atari 5200 non-centering. It makes Pac-Man playable again”. By the time the console was discontinued in 1984, Wico, High Score and Coin Controls were all selling “good, self-centering 5200 replacement controllers”. A decade later Edge was still using it as the type specimen: “If the Atari 5200 was the first massive commercial control failure, it was certainly not the last.”
Nintendo 64
Edge’s report from the Shoshinkai show, published in February 1996, described what the thumb stick did for Super Mario 64:
Nintendo technicians claim the pad can detect a full range of 360 directions, affording even the most basic of software a degree of directional control above and beyond the eight-way limit of a PlayStation or Saturn controller. The pad also adds a new dimension of velocity since it is able to detect degrees of movement in particular directions. Mario 64 makes use of these features extensively: press up fully and Mario will run, press it halfway and he will walk, press it a little and in some circumstances he will crawl or tip-toe his way forward.
Shigeru Miyamoto told the magazine that “in the past there have been lots of games that could not have been developed because of a lack of analog control. In fact, the consumer has often had to buy custom controllers as accessories, so companies have been afraid of supporting such peripherals.” Building the stick into the standard pad removed that fear. A year on he reported that the pad “has been accepted with open arms” and that “most people manage to master it after about two hours’ playing time”; Edge’s Wave Race 64 review had found the same, “quite a bit of getting used to” and then “an intuitive simplicity rarely found in videogames”.
The stick was not what it appeared. Genyo Takeda of Nintendo R&D3 admitted to Edge in August 1996 that “the centre joystick is not really analogue by the strictest definition of the term, but that it has been engineered to emulate an analogue joystick”; the magazine could not confirm rumours that it was optical, like Microsoft’s SideWinder. Takeda said R&D3 “tried many different types [of controllers] and prototypes and we threw them away”, among them a motion-sensing wristwatch that reached the patent stage.
Sega and Sony
Sega’s analogue pad for the Saturn arrived with NiGHTS in September 1996; Edge thought the game “doesn’t really need analogue control” but that the pad, “although not as striking as the N64’s”, was comfortable and worked with existing games such as Sega Rally. Namco’s NegCon had already offered analogue steering on the PlayStation, operated, as Edge put it, “by twisting it”. Sony’s own analogue pad reached British shops in September 1997, “three months earlier than expected”, for about £25, with one PAL title supporting it. The Japanese version’s vibration had been removed; Sony said “market research revealed that gamers found the analogue feature to be most important”. The vibrating version returned as the DualShock.