I’ve never really sat down and thought about how different incarnations of controllers there have been over the last 30 years or so. And the neat thing about the history of controllers; every single company that has made a video game console have stolen something from another company. In a sense, every single controller from the past had some kind of impact today — even if it was considered a failure.

Up top is a quick representation of the evolutionary chain of controllers. But the amazing thing — this really didn’t even scratch the surface on how many variety of controllers their have been in our short history of games.

Below is the same concept, but instead of using a ‘joystick,’ it’s for portable systems.

source