I thought we’d gotten to a pretty comfortable point with the design of videogame controllers, but apparently I was wrong.
Despite the fact that the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Wii U are all essentially cut from the same cloth, independent peripheral developers Alex and Eugene Nesmeev from Russia reckon we can do more.
That’s why they’ve come up with this… thing.
Now, maybe I’m just used to the kinds of controllers we’ve been playing with since the days of the PlayStation, but I’m just not ready for change on this scale.
But you have to respect these guys for their passion, and their belief that their creation, the R-Handle, can surpass the likes of Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony in terms of accuracy and comfort.
The R-Handle aims to combine the comfort of console gaming with the advanced options and accuracy of keyboard and mouse gaming – hence all those buttons.
If you’re wondering how on Earth one might actually use this strange creation, why not check it out in action with DOOM below?
I dunno, maybe it is genuinely a functional and comfortable experience that we’ll all swear by as soon as we use it – but it just looks ugly… Kind of like a Bop-It on steroids.
Of course, the controller is still in the prototype stage, so there’s a good chance we’ll see a couple of design revisions soon enough.
The two developers are currently looking into crowdfunding options for the controller. Meanwhile, you can watch some more videos of it in action on the duo’s YouTube channel.
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.