College student Peter Byrne is a gamer with cerebral palsy. As such, he’d been having a few problems with the new DualShock 4 controllers – until he reached out to PlayStation.
Byrne explained the issue to Sony in an email. His left hand would sometimes rest against the controller touchpad, accidentally pausing games, or bringing up unwanted menus. Definitely not ideal when you’re just after a bit of a gaming session.
Not long after, an employee in PlayStation’s Research & Development team named Ajmal Alex Nawabi got in touch with him. After a series of emails discussing the issue, Nawabi told Byrne that he was unable to do anything for him but would be sending him a PlayStation goodie bag.
Turns out this was a little white lie, so that when Byrne received his package from PlayStation, he’d be genuinely surprised to find a custom controller that Nawabi had been working on for him in his own time.
The custom controller came with a message from Nawabi, which you can read below.
Not only has this chap made an effort to build a custom controller, he even asks Byrne to stay in touch with feedback so that he can build a spare.
Hats off to Nawabi – clearly a genuinely good guy who was willing to go above and beyond so Peter could carry on gaming.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.