From the Game & Watch to the DS
Hindsight seems to be a constant in the universe, always keen on pointing out the exact moment in our pasts that led to our recent success or our miserable failure. When gamers aren't looking forward to the next generation of consoles and the realistic ways in which they'll render a fake World War II, they're busy looking back and waxing nostalgic about the good old days of destroying mean-spirited asteroids and shooting through their own ships in order to take out invading aliens. Indeed, we spend about as much time looking back as we do looking forward... which explains this strange pole-shaped indentation on my face.
The chaps at 4 Color Rebellion have posted a pretty interesting article that traces the series of design innovations Nintendo has come up with over the decades, right from the Game & Watch and NES to the DS and the Revolution. The most interesting pattern one can pick up on is that Nintendo initially added more and more buttons to their controllers, slapping on some extra plastic for the SNES and creating a freakish trident of analog power for the N64 (an innovation that the competition quickly adopted). Now, Nintendo is reversing that line of thought, choosing instead to remove those frighteningly complex buttons and instead replacing them with different and highly unique control methods.
It certainly worked for the DS, but will the industry follow? Putting the Revolution in the picture, it seems we're on the verge of the first major split in controller design, with Microsoft and Sony pulling the chicken wishbone on the other end and hoping that they'll end up with the biggest piece. Or perhaps the PC got it right all along with the classic mouse and keyboard combination (with respect to the metaphor, the PC is a vegeterian and is thus more interested in the cocktail tomatoes than the chicken).
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