B.G. Willers

10. PlayStation: I’m going to lump all the PlayStation controllers into one. And had the original PS1 controller never evolved, it might have actually ended up higher on this list. But I have one major gripe with the Dual Shock X controller… and that is the analog stick placement. When they originally debuted the analog (after someone else paved the way…) it felt super pasted on. But the d-pad, button layout and overall comfort of the controller is outstanding.

9. Arcade Joystick/Buttons: I love the old arcades. The control panels were not only built to withstand daily abuse and grind, but were also purpose designed for the games themselves. I still remember the button layouts on some of my favorite old arcade games. Everything on a good arcade machine feels solid and provides great feedback as you play.

8. Nintendo Entertainment System: This isn’t necessarily a list of the most influential controllers, but not including this controller on the list would feel certainly wrong. Today the NES controller feels really small to me. When I hold the controller it’s obvious that my hands have grown since I first used it. And it serves to remind me of the youth I can never truly return to. Be that as it may… it’s still a brutally efficient design. And the fact that it still works almost 30 years later after countless hours of use proves it LITERALLY stands the test of time.

7. Super Nintendo: I remember when the SNES first came out and my first thought of the system was, “Look at all the buttons on that controller. How do you remember what each button does!?” But once you play Super Mario World, you realize how perfect it is. The way one set of action buttons is concave and one is convex, the excellent D-pad, and the rarely used, but perfectly positioned shoulder buttons… there’s absolutely nothing about this controller I would change. It’s the ultimate 2-D controller in my opinion.

6. Wii U Gamepad: I haven’t spent nearly as much time with this controller as the others for obvious reasons. But from the time I spent with it, I’m blown away. It’s lighter and more comfortable than it looks. It’s solid and it is connected wirelessly to the console from my couch AND my toilet. It has a built in universal remote. I could go on. Nintendo has always pushed controllers where they’ve never gone before, and they’ve done it again with the Wii U.

5. Gamecube: The Gamecube was probably my most anticipated console of all time. And when the local store in Manhattan finally got a Gamecube kiosk setup and I laid hands on the Gamecube controller for the first time, all of the things I had imagined about it were finally realized. To this day, the GCN controller is the most comfortable controller I’ve ever held. The handles are perfectly molded. It just feels like an extension of yourself. And best of all, the analog stick was infinitely improved over the N64 stick which has the lifespan of a gnat.

4. Wii: For a second I thought to myself, why am I putting the Wiimote so high on the list?  Yes it does some things no other controller does, and it did enable an entirely new way to play.  But so many of those games were just waggling the controller around in lieu of pressing a button.  Then I remembered “Skyward Sword”.  The latest Zelda game used the Wiimote to its fullest potential and with great finesse.  In the right hands, the Wiimote can do great things, kinda like the Master Sword I guess.  Any shortcomings in Wii controls are no fault of its controller.  Sadly many developers just never took the time to get it right.

3. Xbox 360: Starting with the Controller S on the original Xbox, somebody finally nailed the design of the perfect layout.  Left analog and action buttons sit squarely and naturally under your thumbs.  D-pad and right analog are only millimeters away.  Trigger fire buttons underneath perfect for shooters and easy to reach shoulder buttons.  Everything was finally where it needed to be, comfortable and solid.  And possibly best of all, a matte finish in a world where every other single piece of electronics is a glossy, fingerprint smudged mess.  I’m one of the few that actually enjoyed the original Xbox controller bohemouth, but I have to admit future iterations again, starting with the Controller S are far more refined.

2. Mouse & Keyboard:  There’s a few genres out there that are only optimally experienced with a keyboard and mouse.  FPS, strategy, and simulation games to name a few.  While it’s been done, I can’t imagine playing many of those games with a controller without feeling like I’m making a serious compromise.  I’m not a huge PC gamer, but I’ve played a few great games long enough to appreciate the level of control and customize-ability the platform offers.  Being able to swap action keys around.  Fine tune sensitivity  and having multiple commands at your fingertips.  After a while your brain forgets about the controls and you just play the game.  Which is what any great controller should do.

1. Nintendo 64:  Okay… no big surprise here if you’ve followed the blog for any length of time.  I am and forever will be hopelessly infatuated with the N64 controller.  Objectively… should it be number 1?  Definitely not.  That joystick gets destroyed under moderate use in just a few months.  But let me tell you, when it’s new and working like intended, it’s silky smooth, and the sensitivity is incredible.  You can simply apply pressure, and not even actually move the control stick itself, and it will cause Mario to creep along ever so slowly.  The button layout is perfect.  Two main action buttons, and the yellow C buttons that, while designed for camera control in games like Super Mario 64, are also perfect for shooters and strafing like in GoldenEye, or simply additional action buttons like in Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  The trigger underneath was always satisfying for firing whatever weapon you happened to be wielding  and the shoulder buttons are large and responsive.  I don’t care if its less than perfect, this is my list, and if you ask me, the N64 controller is the most awesome controller of all time.

There’s Luke with the gamepad dock…. in his mouth.

Here’s that queue I was talking about for the Retro Room. Years of fun on this table!

10. Screensavers: When you got a new computer in 1996 there were two things you did immediately. See what games were on it, and set your screen saver. Screensavers were actually useful pieces of software back in the day, because they allowed you to keep your monitor on and prevent “burn-in”. Now a days with LCD, I have my monitors set to just turn off after a few minutes. But with CRT screens every time you turned it on, you had to wait several seconds while the screen faded into full brightness.
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There’s so many iconic screen savers I can remember. Flying Toasters, 3D Pipes, Stars, and of course, customizable scrolling text. Nothing more fun than setting a screensaver password on somebody’s computer and the only way that can figure it out is by solving the riddle you left for them on their screensaver!

9. Free AOL Disks: I will admit. Our first footstep on the internet was thanks to a free AOL 3.5 floppy promising 40 free hours or something like that on our 9600 baud modem. By the late 90’s AOL was begging for new users offering 700+ free hours. The service itself was of course crappy and limited. But all those Free CDs came in handy as coasters, and the free floppys were actually useful for formatting and storing your files on.

8. LAN Parties: These were awesome for me because I was a console gamer pretty much exclusively. And of course there were some great games, and great multi-player games on consoles. But the problem with those were you were always sharing a screen with your competitors. At a LAN party you had your own rig all to yourself, which you used to wreak havoc on your opposition.
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Or in my case: Spend 20 minutes trying to figure out why you can’t find the server, then spend 10 minutes trying to tweak the graphics settings of the game you just borrowed so it can run on your crappy PC, then spend the rest of the night getting owned in a game you have no idea how to play. At least some things haven’t changed since the 90’s.

7. Search Engines: This could make the list of best AND worst things about computing in the 90’s. Compared to modern search engines, the available options in the 90’s SUCKED. BUT… it was the only way to discover content without going directly to the URL.
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Problem was ye olde search engines were almost entirely keyword driven. Which meant any jerk off selling insurance can just fill the META tag of their website with buzz words, and you pop in searches for all sorts of randomness. On top of that, these search companies would sell search term rankings for cash. So to find what you are really looking for you had to filter through pages of irrelevant and sponsored results.
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Searching in the 90’s was a practice of mixing and matching Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, InfoSpace and numerous others along with a carefully crafted search term that wasn’t too generic, but not too specific.

6. Burning CDs: CD Burning changed forever how I used my computer. Suddenly I could start hoarding files. Which was important when took about 5 minutes per megabyte to download. You see storage used to be a scarce commodity. Floppys were too small. And hard drives were expensive. There were thumb drives, but at 64MB sizes… they weren’t really cost effective either.
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But CD burning all of a sudden opened up affordable storage options. I could store hundreds of songs on a single CD, or all of my Helen Hunt photos! And burning a full CD only took 20 minutes at 4x Speed.
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If you got your first CD burner in the 90’s it was probably an external drive and probably cost anywhere between $100 and $400. Because your Pentium 133Mhz probably didn’t come with one, and opening up the case and adding one was a big scary thing.

5. GeoCities: For a lot of people GeoCities was their first home on the world wide web. It certainly was mine. It started out just as a collection of stuff I was interested in, and ended growing to what eventually became the 3rd largest Helen Hunt site on the web. Haha.
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GeoCities was laid out in a conceptually unobtrusive fashion as most early websites were. As a community where people “homesteaded” in different cities centered around different interests, and within those cities were city blocks. Each block had 100 available addresses. So if you wanted to think about it, you lived in a community, on a certain street with a certain address, and you used that to tell your friends where to find your website.
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I still miss my old GeoCities site and wish I would have saved from stuff from it. It was where I learned HTML and would probably be a blast to look at today.

4. Niche News Sites: When I found out that there was a news site was dedicated entirely to Nintendo news and updated on a daily basis, I knew that the internet and I would from that point forwards always be friends. No matter what you were interested in, there was a website out there focusing exclusively on that.
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The reason it was so mind-blowing was that before that, magazines were the medium that catered to those niche audiences. You’d get updated monthly, or even bi-monthly. And other than a “letters to the editor” section, communication was pretty much one way. But with these websites, there were whole communities of like minded individuals that orbit around the content. The perfect place to find some outside encouragement for your pickle collecting habit.

3. ICQ: I know a lot of my friends used IRC, but I was ICQ all the way. It was simply a chat client. But one of the first with tons of features packed in. You had your contact list, but I’d pin my most frequent contacts to the edge of the screen so they were always on top. I spent countless hours chatting with classmates, and friends I’d made on the net. I stuck with ICQ until the bitter end. Ultimately the spam killed it for me.
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That “Uh-oh!” sound you’d get when you got a new message, I’ll never forget.

2. Web based e-mail: E-mail itself was a marvel in the early 90’s, but for me, web based mail finally gave me my own mail box. And one that was safe and protected from everyone else that shared the same computer in the house. Of course ISPs offered a crummy POP account, but it was always limited by space and attachments. Plus when someone sends you one message with a huge attachment, you have to wait 5 minutes for it to download before you can read the other 25 messages. Web based mail was genius at the time and something I still couldn’t live without to this day.

1. Just Being There: Okay, so computing in the 90’s was slow, clunky, un-organized and generally pretty ugly. But the best part of computing in the 90’s was just being there to experience all the changes. It was a completely revolutionary new way of communicating with people. It was a time where computers were moving from something that primarily hobbyists and business people used, to something that was a fixture in daily life. Computers were morphing from being a tool, to a portal.
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The internet was truly like a new un-cultivated frontier, and the boxy technology of the 90’s were the covered wagons that we used to traverse it. A place for you to homestead your own little patch of it and be whoever you wanted to be. To explore, contribute, consume, and discover.