A History of Game Controllers

Next Generation has an excellent piece, looking back on the history of game controllers, leading up to the Revolution's fascinating controller. They look at controller design, as well as the usage that some games wrest from the controllers. From the article: "There are ways to mess with the system; in Shadow of the Colossus, the player stabs a beast not by pressing the attack button but rather by letting go of it, making the violence a release, a consequence of the player's action. Still, there's not a lot of room for subtlety or nuance. The most subtlety you can get comes from analog control and state-shifting, and both of those are just jury-rigs to the system."

Too recent, too light, too bad

[Gulthek]

The oldest controller the piece looks at is the NES controller, and even that is only given a cursory glance.

Atari joysticks, Atari paddlewheels, the qwerty keyboard, custom arcade controllers (Golden Tee), genre specific controllers (steering wheels, light guns), game specific controllers (Guitar Hero, Steel Battalion), platform specific controllers (the Nintendo DS), any-company-other-than-Sony-or-Nintendo's controllers: all are missing from this piece of fluff article.

You're better off reading the Game Controller [wikipedia.org] article on Wikipedia.