From the original big-boned ‘Duke’ to the elegant extravagance of the Elite Series 2, OXM charts the history of Xbox controllers to date
DAVE MEIKLEHAM
At the dawn of time, just after the Big Bang went boom, the gaming gods made a pad that changed it all. And by ‘dawn of time’ we mean ‘GDC 2000’, and by ‘changed it all’, read: ‘Microsoft made a gamepad the size of a Buick’. First revealed 20 years ago, the original Xbox pad would inspire a collection of the finest controllers ever constructed.
Despite its intimidating size, ‘The Duke’ – as it came to be affectionately known in later years – helped form a legacy of gamepads that would become synonymous with quality and comfort. Yet the journey to the high-end luxury of today’s Elite Controller Series 2, which you can hold in your hands for a ‘mere’ £160/$180, wasn’t without the odd bump along the road. Join us as we take you through the inside story of the evolution of Xbox controllers… To tell the tale of how that original pad was conceived, we need the assistance of one of the key figures in Xbox history. Enter Seamus Blackley. Often nicknamed ‘The Father of Xbox’, it’s a fitting moniker for the game designer who dreamed up the wacky concept of Microsoft’s first videogame console on a red-eye flight from Boston to Seattle back in the late ‘90s.
When OXM sits down to chat exclusively with Blackley, now CEO of tech firm Pacific Light & Hologram, Poppa Xbox quickly informs us initial designs for The Duke were inspired by Sega’s Dreamcast controller. Specifically, a cool little display unit that never quite caught on. “I wanted the VMU [Virtual Memory Unit] pretty bad. I was a big VMU fan; I f***ing loved that thing. I wish consoles had VMUs today, I really do,” Blackley tells us. While early sketches for the first Xbox pad took design cues from the controller of Sega’s ultimately doomed console, these early concepts had very little to do with Microsoft.
“The story behind that is Kevin [Bachus] – who was the original marketing guy – wanted some sketches of controllers for one of our presentations to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer,” says Blackley. “So he hired a Seattle design firm to come up with controller sketches, and at that point there was PlayStation and Dreamcast… they basically just copied the Dreamcast.” Blackley actually shared these early conceptual drawings on Twitter in 2016, partly because he found them so brazenly silly. “They put characters from games on there we didn’t own and we didn’t ask for because they were clueless. I posted those pictures because it was hilarious to me how stupid that exercise was.”
Though The Duke never got the teensy little screen Blackley had hoped for, the final peripheral certainly didn’t lack for real estate. When the Xbox launched in 2001, any talk that didn’t revolve around a certain Spartan invariably led b
