Nintendo 64 Controller - Design

Design

The controller for the Nintendo 64 was designed to be held in several different positions. It was designed around Super Mario 64. It could be held by the two outer grips, allowing use of the digital D-pad, right-hand face buttons and the "L" and "R" shoulder buttons (but not the "Z" trigger or analog stick). It could be also held by the center and right-hand grip, allowing the use of the single control stick, the right hand-buttons, the "R" shoulder button, and the "Z" trigger on the rear (but not the "L" shoulder button or D-pad). A combination of the D-pad, L-shoulder, analog stick and Z button is possible but was never implemented for any game. Finally, one controller could be held in each hand with a thumb on each analog stick and index fingers on the "Z" trigger. This setup allowed dual-analog control on some first-person shooters such as Perfect Dark. More often than not the analog stick and right-hand face and shoulder buttons were used in games. while in some, both the control stick and directional pad could be interchangeable (ex: Mortal Kombat Trilogy). Very few games used the directional pad exclusively; two examples are the 3D puzzle game Tetrisphere and the side-scrolling platformer Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards.

This design was controversial, as by its nature it prevented the use of all of its features with the player's hands in any one position; the D-pad, L-shoulder, analog stick and Z-trigger could not all be used at the same time as it required the player to switch hand positions, taking their hands off of the key directional controls. When Sony released its Dual Analog and DualShock controllers for the competing PlayStation, it retained the original controllers' two-handled ergonomics, placing the analog sticks below and inside the primary D-pad and face buttons, allowing the player to quickly switch from the D-pad and face buttons to the analog sticks without letting go of the controller. This layout would become dominant in gamepad design, and several third-party manufacturers would produce aftermarket N64 controllers with more conventional layouts, such as the MakoPad and Hori Mini. Nintendo itself would largely follow suit with the stock controller for its GameCube console, but swapped the positions of the analog stick and D-pad, as by that time the left analog stick had become universally accepted as the primary movement control on 3D games across all consoles.

The controller also included four "C buttons", which were originally intended to control the camera in the N64's three dimensional environments. However, since the pad only contained three other face buttons, the C-buttons often became assigned to ulterior functions. An example of this is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, where three of the C-buttons can be assigned to secondary items and the upper C-button is used to orient the camera.

One game, Robotron 64, allowed one player to use two controllers to control an avatar. This way the game played like its predecessor, Robotron 2084. Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark also used this set up for slightly different gameplay experiences (in terms of control, at least) compared to the standard single controller option.

The controller initially came in six colors (grey, black, red, green, yellow and blue) but other colors were released later, many of them coinciding with the release of a similarly colored or designed system. Some of these others include smoke black, watermelon red, jungle green, fire orange, ice blue, grape purple, and special edition colors like gold, atomic purple, extreme green, "Donkey Kong 64" banana bunch yellow, "Pokémon" blue/yellow and "Millennium 2000" platinum.