The Controller That Almost Wasn't
If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try, Try, Try, Try, Try…
When did the PlayStation first appear in your world?
Can you remember picking up the controller for the first time? Maybe turning it over to get a proper look, getting used to the handles, finding your bearings with the new button layout.
Did your hands settle into position almost without thinking? Maybe it was immediate. Maybe it took a few sessions to shake off whatever you'd been using before.
Either way, after years of flat pads, it felt like a natural evolution. Like someone had finally stopped to ask ergonomic questions, rather than just drawing something that looked like a controller.
Love it or loathe it, the controller that became a 90s icon nearly didn't exist at all.
My Name is Teiyu Goto
When Sony designer Teiyu Goto sat down to create the original PlayStation controller in the early 90s, the brief from Sony management was essentially to make something like the Super Nintendo pad.
The SNES was its own cultural juggernaut at the time, and the thinking was sensible enough. If you want SNES owners to upgrade to your new machine, don’t frighten them with something unfamiliar.
Give them that flat but familiar design. Give them safe. Goto had other ideas.
The PlayStation was being built from the ground up around 3D gaming, and he felt a flat pad was a relic of a two-dimensional world.
So he designed a controller with handles. A sculpted, two-pronged grip that let your hands actually wrap around something. The idea was that holding the device should feel like inhabiting the same three-dimensional space as the games themselves.
But management, except for one powerful supporter, hated it. The design was knocked back pretty much immediately. Goto, under pressure, reluctantly went away and produced the flat version they wanted.
Come Fly With Me
Norio Ohga was a serious pilot, not just a hobbyist, but a man who had flown jets and understood viscerally what it meant for a control device to feel right in your hands.
As Sony's president and chairman, he had a rather personal stake in making sure this little gaming experiment didn't drag the Sony name through the mud.
But when Goto presented the flat model, Ohga’s reaction was pretty blunt. “This is no good. Change it. What was wrong with what you showed me before?”
He loved Goto’s original grip design because it reminded him of an aircraft control wheel. Something shaped to be held, designed with the physical reality of the human body in mind.
Management pushed back again and the standoff that followed became something of a legend in Sony corridors. At one tense presentation of the flat model, Ohga apparently came close to physically hurling the prototype across the room.
Goto, who was present, allegedly had to intervene to stop him. “Looking back,” Goto later said, “I think that was Ohga’s way of saying ‘hang in there’ to me.”
And it worked. Management, faced with a furious company president on one side and a flat piece of plastic on the other, relented.
The controller that shipped with the PlayStation in December 1994 was Goto's original vision intact. Handles, grip, the full thing.
Next time you pick one up, spare a thought for Teiyu Goto and the Sony president who nearly threw a controller across a boardroom to make sure you had something worth holding.
I must be in a pretty small minority that hated the playstation pad. It felt like a 3rd party snes controller. It did get better, I haven't really played with the newer versions but I hear that they finally got it right