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Discussion Were people confused by the N64 controller?

OctoSplattack

OctoSplattack

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N64-Controller-Gray.jpg


Exactly what the title says. I never found the controller difficult to understand as a kid -- none of the games I owned outside of Pokémon Stadium used the D-pad, so I just put my left hand in the middle most of the time -- so when I started engaging with gaming content on the internet when I got a bit older, I was really confused by all the videos and comics treating it like a bizarre piece of alien tech that is impossible to figure out how to hold if you didn't have three hands. Of course, all of these jokes were from after the fact, and I assume a good deal were from people who have never actually touched an N64 or were just poking fun at the weird design (because it is pretty goofy), but I am wondering if there was any widespread confusion about how to interact with the three-pronged controller back during its lifespan.
 
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I don’t remember being confused by it but I remember Nintendo Power had a primer about how to hold and use it so I already had that knowledge going in
 
Personally, I wasn’t, but I read gaming magazines so it was clear to me when I finally played Super Mario 64 at Toys ‘R Us.

The one time my mom played Mario Kart 64 with us, she used the analog stick with her thumb and index finger like a mini-joystick.

As far as the prongs, yes, I’ve seen some visible confusion from others at least initially.
 
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Yeah, I always felt like N64 controller felt natural in my hands, I forget it's there.

Right hand is always on the right side. My left hand would be either on the left side, or the middle part, depending on game controls scheme being used.
 
The first time I held one, my neighbor simply told me "no you gotta use the middle one" and it was smooth sailing from there.
so a little disorienting on first glance, but quickly resolved.
we made a lot of jokes about needing three hands but in reality we figured it out pretty quick. manuals were still a thing back then too.
 
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There were probably some, but I always felt like that was an over exaggeration. I think some of what is being said stems from how people think is more comfortable to hold. Like holding the middle and right may not feel right for some people.
 
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Very confused. N64 was my first controller and only really learned it by assuming the left flank was almost completely useless (which confused me when a handful of games, like Kirby 64, used the d-pad).

To be clear, I got used to it very quickly. But still took some time.
 
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Every manual had to include the recommended hand positioning, so Nintendo was well aware it was confusing. I also remember people holding the two sides and uncomfortably stretching their thumbs to the stick.

The idea behind the three prongs is understandable, but two prongs became the standard for a reason, or rather multiple reasons.
 
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I thought it looked cool and futuristic as a kid, coming off the likes of a Genesis and Game Boy. It felt so much more substantial than other controllers, and the middle prong gave it a unique identity. I’m still pretty nostalgic towards it, especially my blue controller I got for my very own (I have two siblings, and was originally relegated to using a third party Mad Cats controller until I finally got a “real” one later).
 
I didn't own an N64 until around 2007 so seeing pictures of the controller, it looked confusing

When I got my N64 and actually held the controller to play a game, it was easy enough to figure out it basically had a "2D mode" and a "3D mode" way to hold it with how the 3 triggers were placed at the back
 
Yeah, I get the sense most jokes about it are from "kids these days" who've never actually held one (or possibly people who were PS-only back in the 90s). But at least in my early childhood experience where N64 was "the console" everybody seemed to have and want to play, I don't remember there ever really being confusion about how to use it or people making "it must have been designed by a 3-handed alien" jokes at the time. Outside of a few edge cases (like the inevitable momentary confusion when first loading up a Pokemon Stadium) it just made sense to us

(and wierdly, Pokemon Stadium's "D-pad for menus" thing actually does feel more intuitive now because that's how everyone prefers to navigate menus, whereas back in the day the impulse was typically "control stick for everything")

I wonder if some of it is because things just weren't as standardized back then. Like, up until maybe the Xbox 360 era, I remember it being the norm when playing a new game at someone's house to ask from the get-go "OK, what are the controls"; So there was a built-in expectation that any new game came with a bit of a control learning curve anyway and what configuration you held the N64 controller was just part of that. But now most people have a very specific way they expect pretty much every game to control and the N64 controller doesn't really lend itself to that rubric, so I guess the idea of a game not having those now-standardized controls and instead expecting the player to meet it halfway feels alien and foreign to some
 
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I just assume a lot of the commentary on the internet is from people who never bought an N64 game at the time, and only played them on emulators or from online stores many years later, as each one had a manual in the box explaining the control scheme. Pretty much every single console game did up until the mid 00s, even NES and Gameboy games with the simplest of controls, before games started going in for lengthy in-game tutorials instead.

I think almost every N64 game I owned was based around holding the central prong and analogue stick in the left hand and right prong in the right, as most of the games were early 3D affairs built around that stick. There were some that used the dpad as a primary input though, but not very many.
 
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I don't recall any confusion around the controller at the time. Nor was there any discourse around it's design as far as I'm aware.
It was, at the time, seen as the future of controllers in the eyes of many publications. And it's not like we could all go on our computers, log in to a forum and scream "Nintendo is doomed".

Simpler times maybe...
 
Lit_bae said:
I don't recall any confusion around the controller at the time. Nor was there any discourse around it's design as far as I'm aware.
It was, at the time, seen as the future of controllers in the eyes of many publications. And it's not like we could all go on our computers, log in to a forum and scream "Nintendo is doomed".

Simpler times maybe...
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I think it’s also that mainstream action games have a very homegenised input language over the last 20 years, built around twin sticks. You pick the pad up, one is to move, one is to look around, the most accessible buttons and triggers are the primary inputs etc. So anything that looks a bit different, whether it’s an N64 controller, a Wiimote/nunchuck, or the stylus or lack of a second stick in DS/3DS games, often had people look at it as if it’s weird. Before then, while the NES controller had set a sort of standard design language of ‘movement is the pad on the left, the outer button is jump, the inner button is attack’, there was still plenty of other experimentation around early 3D games.
 
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I was never confused by it. It seemed pretty straight-forward to me. 2 different grips, 1 controller.
 
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My first console and no not at all. Tho most manuals showed the ideal positioning
 
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I never had any issues. You see the part with the joystick and know to hold that part and if you need the dpad, you hold that part. It was also comfortable to hold for me. I like how it feels in the hands.
 
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Nah, not confusing, just thought it was kind of bad tbh.

Didn't like how many of the buttons were not accessible depending on the game. So, it's weirdly bottlenecked for no good reason. Feels almost like a prototype design being sold as the final controller and given that the actual prototype controller for the N64 looked nearly identical, it's not far from the truth.

Sony had the right idea by just copying the SNES layout and then adding two sticks to it later on. Really wish Nintendo had enough foresight to do the same with the N64. Can't imagine how much better all games on the platform would have been.
 
The 64 wasn't very successful here in Brazil, and in my generation (2000 onwards) most people never even had personal contact with one, whenever I saw photos of the controller online before understanding how it was used, yes it looked like a piece of extraterrestrial technology.
 
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I was but also I was playing the N64 before I could do my times tables so I wouldn’t hold it against me.
 
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Considering they used the c buttons for camera functions, more often than the triggers, I never even thought about it as a kid. That said, I had much much smaller hands and there was no concept of twin sticks or positioning my left to cover the pad and stick. Don't think I ever questioned the design until I experienced a PS for the first time. It felt natural to either hold the center or the left side and ignore whatever I wasn't using for that game.

Can't think of anything the d pad really did in any game... Aside from an alternative movement did it usually have some use?

The c buttons are what actually hurts my brain to consider now. It's awful to go back to that.
 
No
That’s a gen z meme that people don’t know how to use it

Games only ever used one configuration
No games really use the DPad and if they did then it doesn’t use the analogue stick
 
not really, it was just there

there was no real accepted paradigm for an analog controller, but we were pretty familiar with joysticks

so it really read like “hold it this way for dpad shit, hold it the other way for analog shit”

of course the consensus moved to future iterations were even better, but this was new terrain back then. it was cool that it existed at all
 
I think from the perspective of hindsight it does look mildly bewildering - controllers weren't exactly standardised until the 8th generation (yes really, it took that long) - but at the time, most games made using the thing intuitive and if an alternate scheme was used, it was explained in the manual.

That said, even at the time, third-party manufacturers were looking to simplify the controller, as exemplified by the Mini Pad from Hori (which came out only in Japan, and very late into the console's life cycle):
vchwVKX.png


Felony said:
Can't think of anything the d pad really did in any game... Aside from an alternative movement did it usually have some use?
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I think it was used in Majora's Mask to turn the mini map on and off.
 
That mini pad actually looks comfy!

Wait, what. I never bought jack from Tingle so I'm not even sure I had minimaps when I played :0
 
Felony said:
Wait, what. I never bought jack from Tingle so I'm not even sure I had minimaps when I played :0
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I mean the map in the lower right corner of the screen that shows an overview of the room you're currently in.

Also I was wrong about that - using the d-pad to turn the mini map on and off was a thing in the GameCube ports, the N64 used the L button. 😬
 
No it wasn’t confusing at all. Games back then were so simple that you only needed to use one handle or the other. Never both at the same time. If a game used the analogue stick you held that handle and used the z button. If the game used the dpad you held that handle and used the L button. Never had any issue with anything.
 
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Back when every game had game manuals, they would show you how to hold the controller. Often games had more than one controller setup.

I was 11 when the N64 came out and never knew anyone who was confused about it.

The D-Pad was used in the AKI wrestling games for movement, and the controller stick was used to taunt and perform you special.
 
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freedomseekr said:
I mean the map in the lower right corner of the screen that shows an overview of the room you're currently in.

Also I was wrong about that - using the d-pad to turn the mini map on and off was a thing in the GameCube ports, the N64 used the L button. 😬
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I must have had a touch of egoraptor syndrome as a kid. Looking at screens, I could've sworn I only ever saw the minimap in dungeons but I guess that was never the case. Bizarre!
 
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Not confused at all, I always felt it very intuitive for most games, specially 3D ones, it was far better to play FPS on it than PS1, even the dual shock, IMO.

The 64 wasn't very successful here in Brazil, and in my generation (2000 onwards) most people never even had personal contact with one, whenever I saw photos of the controller online before understanding how it was used, yes it looked like a piece of extraterrestrial technology.
Click to expand...

What you talking about? N64 was actually very succesful in Brazil, it was heavily advertised on the mainstream media, even locally published by the Nintendo-Gradiente partnership, many N64 first-party games had TV ads and were locally published, and had big shelves on major marketplaces like Lojas Americanas and Casas Bahia. Sure, not on the same level of PSX's success (mostly because of piracy) but N64 has a fond legacy among brazilian gamers.
 
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Not at all. Controllers were far from being standardized back then, and a new system having a complete different form-factor controller was actually one of the exciting things of that time. So the N64 controller wasn't that weird.
 
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I was not confused by it because it was just already in my house by the time I had gained self-awareness as a small child. May have messed with my brain being introduced to video games like that, but I will say, I like that the three pronged design really meant devs could get wacky with the layout just by how you could hold a controller.
Like it or not, "Modernizing" the controller like the Hori Mini or the Brawler64 completely breaks how some games were designed. Games like Sin & Punishment or the many FPS games on the console expecting you to probably use dpad and stick, at least as an option, meant they actually aged pretty well, but thanks to people just mapping things to a standard modern controller, people go "ugh how did people ever play these games the controls are all reversed!"
 
3D gaming was so new while it was confusing it was most like wait maybe Nintendo knows something we don’t kind of thing

In retrospect it’s more silly but there wasn’t really as much consensus as what a controller should or shouldn’t look like at the time I don’t think
 
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I don't remember being confused by it. I just remember never really ever using the D-pad on it or the Left trigger. My hands were almost always over the analog stick and buttons.

I was really young when the N64 came out. So I don't remember too much about it besides when I look back and decide to get my N64 out of storage.

Back then you didn't have a really set standard for controllers so as long as it was useable it wasn't really confusing but just shaped differently. This was pre-PS/XB setting a controller design standard with the only differences being either offset or in-line analog sticks, 4 trigger buttons, 4 face buttons and a d-pad. Back then you had d-pads of various shapes and designs, 2-6 front buttons, either none or 1+ analog stick(s), randomly shaped semi-boomerang/circle-shaped controllers, etc.
 
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Most games used it in the way with the stic, I was not confused, but people are confused by a) options/variance and b) asymetry, and you have both here.
To me the dead fella pointless since I never played games that used it
 
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If you're my age or younger, I think it helps to realize that the context it existed in was very different. Old game controllers could be anything, it's only the generation after N64 that everything became increasingly minor variations on dualshock. So its existence was a lot less inherently absurd than it looks now.
 
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