More game controllers evolution charts

Working on the game controller project book, we’re building various charts of joypad evolution. What’s interesting is that we’re definitely not the sole persons doing this. Over the recent months, there’s been several other relevant visualizations, that I compiled in this blogpost.

Obviously, the first that caught my eyes several years ago is the following one by Sock Master:

Then, more recently by incontrol and Steve Cable:

Or these two, focused on game controllers, beyond joypads by Pop chart lab:

I also found this others one, slightly less visual:

Why do I blog this? We try to differentiate our representations, so it’s good to see how others are proposing relevant visualizations. In our case, we’re creating a family tree for each of the joypad characteristics (d-pad, shape, action buttons). Which, hopefully, will highlight the complexity of the gamepad evolution.