Microsoft’s original Xbox was a fine machine – I think that’s something we can all agree on – but the controller was objectively an absolute monstrosity.
It was, easily, far too big, and not really all that comfortable to use. Now, Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley has come out to weigh on why the controller was just so damn fugly.
‘It was embarrassingly enormous; politically I had no juice to fix it’, Blackley explained over Twitter when asked if he could talk about the controller, which is today known as The Duke.
Blackley has since left Microsoft, but stressed that he simply didn’t have the pull within the company at the time to get the controller down to a reasonable size.
He then went into more detail, across a small fleet of tweets. He explained that the Dreamcast was a big influence, and that Japan was ‘alarmed’ by its size.
Check out the tweets below – I’ll let ’em speak for themselves.
The guy in charge of the controller picked a vendor that couldn't make the electronics small, so they made the design huge to fit around it. https://t.co/vjEDKGNoEF
— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) October 3, 2016
The Dreamcast was our favorite console at the time, and it had a big controller that docked a tomagachi. So that made it seem less insane! https://t.co/WwFQ8q6QRO
— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) October 3, 2016
The Japanese were alarmed by the huge controller; the feedback was taken and the team did an amazing job shipping the smaller version https://t.co/vgY2mpreKP
— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) October 3, 2016
Many people love the big controller; it's also true that the amount of plastic needed to make it uses the equivalent of a tank of premium. https://t.co/Cobioob80R
— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) October 3, 2016
Sorry to vent about Duke, it's just that I took such a volume of shit about it back in the day, I need to let go! https://t.co/ilnHZCejPg
— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) October 3, 2016
Microsoft did eventually release a smaller controller for the original Xbox, but not before using 90 percent of all the plastic in the world at the time (that’s a joke, not the truth).
Of course, the Xbox controller could have been much worse. Back in June, Blackley shared a number of concepts for the controller, all of which are awful – check them out below.
Some original Xbox controller designs from November 1999. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/cTReQCJ96s
— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) June 26, 2016
At the end of the day, I’m sure we all have a soft spot in our hearts for The Duke – if there’s any controller we could use to survive a zombie apocalypse, it’s definitely that one.
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.