The 10 worst video game controllers of all time

While plenty of people enjoy gaming at their PC with a mouse and keyboard, it’s not exactly practical when sitting on your couch, so it didn’t take long for the controller to be developed. Nowadays, controllers have a very well-defined shape that anyone can recognize, but it’s been a long road to get here.

Whether it’s an ill-thought-out experiment that designers thought could be the future, or simply a novelty that hurts to hold for too long, we’ve picked out the worst controllers of all time that you should never use.

Many of these terrible controllers are from the early days of gaming when people were trying everything to find the winning formula we know today. This design mimicked the mobile phones of the day, using a 4×3 numerical pad for input buttons – also being one of the first controllers to have a dedicated pause button.

It had an analog stick directly above the number pad, which was awkward positioning, plus the method used to center the stick was unreliable, so the whole thing fell apart.

The Dragon Quest slime is an iconic shape and this controller is a brilliant little novelty. However, as an actual controller, it’s an abomination that is horrible to use. The buttons and analog sticks are on the bottom of the slime, meaning you have to hold it at its widest and curviest point, which makes it almost impossible to hold comfortably, let alone reach all the buttons easily.

Another great novelty that is utterly unusable, this controller was released for the PS2 and Gamecube versions of Resident Evil 4, and if you’re wondering how exactly you’re supposed to hold it, so was everyone else at the time.

All the promo images show people holding it via the two handles, but that makes it impossible to press any of the buttons. You could lay it flat on a table, but that’s never fun for a controller. As such, they all sit on shelves gathering dust to this day.

This controller is almost good, but one terrible design decision ruins it. It has the standard buttons and directional pad on its face, as well as the bumpers on the top – so far so good. Then they decided to throw this massive number pad on the bottom, doubling the side of the controller.

It makes it impractical to hold, you’ll very rarely need the number buttons, and their mere existence makes it harder to hit the ones you actually need.

This is a controller so bad that it never actually got released. This was seen at E3 2005 when everyone was expecting the PS3 to be unveiled. It was a mock-up of what the official controller for the console was supposed to look like, but thankfully it never saw the light of day. The SixAxis controller that actually did release with the PS3 also sucked for different reasons, but it’s still better than this impractical curved stick.

If you’re a PC player, then the idea of playing any kind of shooter with an analog stick is likely an unpleasant one, but there’s a way to make console players feel our pain. The Paradox trackball PS2 controller sticks a massive trackball where the right analog stick normally is. Imagine trying to aim while spinning that thing around.

It looks like a sex toy. Let’s just get that one out in the open.

Aside from that, it’s impossible to tell from looking at it how the designers expected people to hold it. Were we supposed to hold our hands around the back of it or on top? Funnily enough, if you chop out the middle bit you’ve got something that looked very similar to the first HTC Vive controllers for VR, but having them rigidly connected was a terrible idea.

There are a bunch of gaming gadgets from the late 80s and early 90s that simply weren’t possible with the technology of the day, and by the time we had the technology to pull it off properly, we realized it was a stupid idea. So here’s the Power Glove, a device that could detect the movements of your hand to control games, but still required all the regular gamepad buttons to function properly. So what on Earth was the point?

Remember how desperately Microsoft wanted the world to adopt the Kinect? Remember when the Xbox One originally forced you to get a Kinect with it, and it was going to be always on?

You see, what happened was the Nintendo Wii came out and absolutely blew everyone away, becoming one of the most beloved consoles of all time due to its widespread casual appeal. Naturally, Xbox and Sony immediately decided that motion controls were the future and invested heavily in them.

Now we sit in the 2020s with the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge that motion controls were always a false prophet. Plus, we can’t name a single Xbox Kinect game that was ever worth owning the system just to play.

Take everything I said about how motion controls suck and then set it back to 1989 when the technology simply didn’t exist to make it work. It used two perpendicular infrared sensors to detect hand movements – kind of like a theremin – and it’d let you do things like punch in the game. It worked about as well as you’re imagining, which is to say, not at all.

Written by Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF.