Atari · Atari 5200 · 1982
Atari gave its 1982 console an analogue joystick, a twelve-key keypad and a pause button — all good ideas — on a stick that did not re-centre and a cheap flex circuit that wore out. It is routinely named among the worst controllers ever made.
The Atari 5200, launched in 1982, was Atari's attempt at a more advanced successor to the 2600, and its controller was correspondingly ambitious. It combined an analogue joystick, a numeric keypad, Start, Pause and Reset buttons, and two fire buttons on each side. A pause button on the controller itself was unusual for the time, and an analogue stick offered, in principle, finer control than the simple on/off switches of the 2600's CX40 joystick. The execution failed. Instead of springs, the joystick relied on a weak rubber boot to pull it back towards the centre, so in practice it did not reliably re-centre at all. Its response was not linear across the stick's travel, which made precise movement difficult, and inside the controller a very low-cost flex circuit was prone to failure. The combination of a complex mechanical design and cheap internals became, in the words often used about it, the console's Achilles' heel. Critics have been consistently harsh. An editor for Next Generation wrote that the joysticks rendered many games nearly unplayable, and IGN ranked the controller among the ten worst ever made. Atari offered the Pro-Line Trak-Ball for games such as Centipede and Missile Command, third parties including Wico sold replacements, and a self-centring revision and a paddle controller were developed but never released.
Showing that the right features — analogue input, an on-controller pause — are worth little without reliable hardware
Analogue sticks and controller pause buttons later became standard. The 5200 had both in 1982 and is remembered as a failure anyway, because the stick could not do the basic job of returning to neutral and the controllers broke. It is a clear case of a design being judged on its build quality rather than its ideas.