Power glove still is the most badass geek tool ever.

Retrogamers and geeks of the 90s certainly remember the Power Glove, released by Nintendo in 1989.

Power glove ad image courtesy of giantbomb.com

That thing was mainly unplayable, but everyone wanted one. Its development still led to the wii controller years later, and proved Nintendo was a good technology developer, in addition to making cool games.

More even, it was cool – in the years where geek wasn’t cool, the geekiest controller was cool. The power glove is the summum of 1990’s geek cool.

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Retro controller that looks rendered in 8-bit pixels

Coming soon from Hyperkin: the Pixel Art Controller. Ergonomics or comfort doesn’t seem to be its forte, perhaps it was planned mainly as a display piece for the geek lounge, but it is a fully functional controller.

Those were demonstrated at E3 without release dates or prices. What is known is that they will be either bluetooth ( wireless ) or USB ( wired ). Sadly, that means they won’t be compatible with the old SNES console they are copying in pixel art.

The pixel-nature of its shape might scare modern ergo-freaks, but gamers used to play with uncomfortable controllers all the time…

Related articles

• Hyperkin teases pixelated SNES-style USB / Bluetooth gamepads at E3 (hands-on) (engadget.com)
• These pixelated controllers from Hyperkin aren’t minecraft models (Kotaku.com)

Console gamepad evolution – or – why did they have to (again) change the dualshock controller?

We’ve been using dualshock controllers since the first playstation. It started out without its analog sticks, but since the addition of the sticks, the controller has been de facto the one people copied upon. Just look at the xb360 or wiiu pro controllers.

A little backstory on the story of the creation of the dualshock. At some point in time, sony and nintendo worked together on an addition to the Super NES called SNES-CD – Sony didn’t envision yet to work in the game industry.

SNES-CD on wikipedia.

Now, after some shenanigans and disregards for licensing, Nintendo turned around and worked with Phillips for the production of the SNES-CD add-on – which never came to existence. But it did tick off Sony enough to start its own console, the original playstation, which was the direct competitor of the Nintendo 64.

The original playstation.
The Playstation originally came with a “Playstation Controller” wich was the evolution of the SNES controller, that in turn was an evolved version of the NES gamepad. It made sense, since Sony originally thought of it to play Nintendo games.  Nintendo on their part, for the N64, went a completely different direction.