A father of my friend used a joystick akin to this one on his NES and later SNES because he couldn't use the D-Pad normally due to a lack of a thumb and a couple of fingers. Would also use a little wedge to put the controller at an angle. Combination of the two made it more comfortable for him to play a lot of RPGs and shmups back in the day until he could find an arcade stick.
Yeah, a lot of these things often end up being based on disability aids that get marketed to a wider audience to make them at least a little affordable. I can really see the numpad one being good for traversing data entry or text documents (because the numpad used to be where all your editing/navigation buttons would be, before mice)
I know people who would unironically use this in their NES pads, especially people who grew up on atari 2600. I know for a fact it was not uncommon to be baffled by the concept of a d-pad back in the day
@@Palendrome I grew up in that sweet spot during which Amiga AND NES were common in many households, so I feel comfortable with both, Joysticks and D-Pads. :D
there were some gamepads which had little sticks like that as optional screw-in thingies. Like the European Atari 7800 / 2600jr controller, or the later GRAVIS gamepad for PCs (which was heavily inspired by the SNES controller)
As somebody who grew up with that kind of joystick (not on the Atari 2600 but on the C64 and then the Amiga) I can tell that these "devices" were nothing more than marketing gimmiks to make d-pad controllers less intimidating to us but they never worked as such. They felt wrong for all sorts of reasons. An Atari joystick was usually held with the right hand, it doesn't work like an arcade stick or a left analog stick at all and there is no analogy to the way a d-pad is operated. These "adapters" were doomed to fail. They were right that some adjustment was needed if you weren't used to d-pad controllers, but these cheap pieces of plastic where not suited for that.
The french part on those packages are... ouf. On the NES one, for some reason, they translate champion with "championnat" witch mean championship. So the sentence is now: "GET TREATED LIKE CHAMPIONSHIP!"
@@yukimoe Worst part is this one is pretty good lol. The google translated manuals from china are unintelligible lol. I had one, i believe for a drone, where i had to read both the english and french instructions to kind of put together something that almost made sense, since both where complete gibberish.
Back in the 80s Bandai made something called the NES Super Controller which snapped over the entire controller leaving only the buttons exposed. The D-pad was replaced with a disc shaped pad with the option to put a tiny joy stick in the center. Some of my cousins had them, I never really thought they were all that useful but they seemed to like them.
Disc d-pads are honestly fantastic for a lot of arcade ports, especially anything with 8 directional movement. So if they played a lot of space shooters or beat-em-ups that totally woulda been a solid option.
And Konami sold the Hyper Boy, a shell for the Game Boy turning it into a small but clunky arcade cabinet and to turn the lighting on it needed something like 4 D-cells.
@@rastas_4221 Early 2000s had nothing on the worst of the worst 80s joysticks. Back when even first party joysticks could be bad... looking at the atari 5200 joystick.
I want to see someone try one of the crazier Doom speedruns using one of those keypad joysticks. While it'd be a terrible run, I think it'd be entertaining.
Canadian "As Seen on TV" commercials were usually the commercials we got on US networks (Canadian affiliates though) when they were re-broadcast up here. They'd insert Canadian ads in place of the US network's. Or they were part of infomercial telethons late at night.
@Code Turtle I had a different experience. The 360 d-pad is not the best however the two I mentioned earlier are worse. PlayStation and Wii u are better.
The exact kind of full plastic enclosure one that you showed in the video was sold here in Slovenia by Conrad Electronic back in the mid-to-late 90s. :)
I know it was common for keyboard peripherals of the time to use adhesives, but this would have been a little classy to have come with a key cap puller and it's own replacement cap to mount onto the 5 key. Also would the 'word processing' claim be legit for dos programs that utilize the numpad directions? Thanks to the donator, and also for the vid, Clint.
I had one of those translucent plastic one for the cursor keys. I don't remember it being too bad... the stick was small, and it had its own springs. It wasn't more accurate or anything, but i thought it was cool.
I remember them advertising this in between Saturday morning cartoons in the mid 80's here in Michigan. We had a Nintendo at the time and I wanted the one for the NES controller so bad. I lived out in the country about an hour from any place that would sell these and my parents wouldn't let me use a credit card for it. It was like $4.99 plus shipping and handling, which I don't know the exact amount because I never got to order them. Soon NES came out with a really cool joystick controller and this item was forgotten. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I was hopping you would do a video about these soon after the mail call video. Thank you for making these videos. Also, the part where it said on the package about confusion for the d pad, that was for the parents at the time that had never seen a controller before, so the d pad was like 4 more buttons to them, I had to remind my parents that they were for directions, yea had to explain that one a few times.
I seem to remember this around the mid 90s. It was presented on a tech show.. I swear I remember video. Also a print ad comes to mind. Maybe in the back of a computer magazine or Popular Mechanics.
You NEED the foam style double sided tape for the numbpad one. The foam gives the slack to move the joystick around without moving the 5 key very much. Find you some foam tape and try again. The velcro stuff you tied at first obviously isn't what you need.
I was waiting for this one. I had one of these joysticks as a kid, played bomberman with it. A. LOT. :)) EDIT: you need to do two things: 1. get a similar pad, won't work without it and it won't work with the masked key coming off 2. you need to cut a spacer that goes under the key, blocking it from going down all the way (specifically, stops it from making contact). That's how it worked for me. Weirdly enough, despite a similar package, and getting it from relatives in Canada... mine did not have the maple leaf. Weird.
These bring back so many memories. In the early 90s i worked in data entry, i owe all my promotions and success to how much this joystick sped up my keyboard use
I had the multicolored "joystick" in the clear enclosure growing up. Absolutely loved it, like the dummy I was. edit: Okay, in my defense, it's a world of a difference between that and the garbage in the video. The clear box one actually works.
Wow, I had the exact same other joystick you showed, that goes over the arrow keys. Like really the exact same one as in the picture - the clear housing and the same colors of the levers inside! And it actually worked pretty well. You glued metal pieces right and left of the up arrow and in the joystick were strong magnets. And I was so glad for it, cause it came with my first PC I bought and I came from an Amiga and I was used playing with a joystick.
I don't know how I ended up with one of those kits, back in 1990 or something, but; the sticker pad worked for about four hours. We thought it was pretty dumb, but still better than most third-party or PC controllers.
Wow, I remember seeing this at KB toys northtown mall, MN as a little kid. I remember the clerk trying to convince my mother and I to buy it for my NES. So glad to see this in action years later, I always pondered if that would work good or not. Thank you and the donator for this one!
0:41 I was laughing at that, too, but suddenly the Amstrad PCW came to mind: it was conceived as a word processor, but it did have a significant number of games ported to it. Of course, that doesn't make the "... or word processor" thingy that much less ridiculous, since I seriously doubt those guys ever heard of that essentially European-only machine.
I noticed that gadget in your thumbnail and immediately remembered that I had the PC keyboard based one back when they came out and in the early days of DOS games. I likely picked it up at one of the computer stores here in Canada that I used to frequent but I don't think I ever saw it on TV in Canada. I think the adhesive pad only stuck for a limited time even with a keyboard that didn't have keycaps that were easy to remove, so not really the finest piece of Canadian engineering but an interesting piece none the less.
The d-pad was such a step up from the joystick controls that were common place in systems prior to the NES. It's funny how adding a joystick element was seen as an improvement by some back then, probably because it was just so ingrained with gaming at the time.
I remember getting something like this for my gameboy thinking it was gonna be like having a proper joystick. Young me quickly realized how wrong I was.
This reminds me a couple years back I asked my mom to get me a nice gaming mousepad for csgo . She got me the most basic office supply store mousepad they probably sold. Completely broke my heart for some reason. I still haven’t told her how disappointed I was. Especially considering I would have bought one my dang self and saved the two month wait for Christmas
In the late 80s a friend of mine (whose brother's wife worked for Nintendo... allegedly) had a thumb stick adapter for the NES controller but it didn't glue on but was a plastic shell that went over the pad. He wouldn't let me touch it because he was one of those kinds of people.
I'm wracking my brain trying to remember if I ever saw these when I was younger on TV. This is exactly the kind of stuff I would have wanted back in the day, lol.
I'll bet when d-pads were new, some people took one look and said "What is this cheap garbage! I want a real joystick!", this product, and others like it, probably sold to them.
Back in the 80's I had a clip-on joystick for my NES controller that wrapped around the controller instead of using adhesive (so easily removable). This was great for when my Nintendo thumb would flare up.
Reminds me of the add-on joysticks that were made for Intellivision controllers. I didn't have an Intellivision growing up, so I can't say if they were an improvement, although I saw a lot of articles in magazines complaining about thumb injuries from people using the disk pad.
This reminds me of when I was a kid, I screwed a wood screw into a Sega Genesis controller and put a ball of tape on the end so my mom would play Mrs Pac-Man with me. She didn't have any coordination on the d-pad and needed something more like the arcade or Atari.
Those things were made in a little shop just outside of Oshawa, just north of Bowmanville. I met the inventor at a computer show here in St. Catharines/Thorold in the 80s, and he had sooo much of this sort of stuff, just tonnes of injection molded computer adjacent stuff. I picked up one of the Key Joysticks back then, and I think I still have it in it's packaging. This is really a local close to home sort of thing, and the guy used to sell them himself in flea markets and computer shows (I caught up with him several years later at a show in Toronto), just as much as ship them around the world.
Back in the days, my uncle made us a joystick like this.🤩. Using a wooden or bamboo chopstick. We played a flight simulator or jet fighter sim (forgot the tittle)..on 386sx i think..we didn't know they sell this things, especially in my country..😳
Just in case you want actual advice, I suspect on a Model M the best thing to do would be to remove the outer keycap on the 5 and just stick it to the lower one. That would also avoid damaging the "5" print on the key with whatever glue they used.
If the model m is anything like as good as the model f, a nuclear apocalypse, flooding or tornados won't damage those key prints. Only the fires of Mount doom.
I was a pc gamer before I was a console gamer in the late 80s - 90s, and even still to this day. I still always preferred keys and dpads to the joysticks at that time because the one or two we had never centered. The joystick always stayed where you moved it. That was literally my biggest qualm. Decades later, it’s hard for me not to use a console controller on my PC because every qualm big and small has been addressed and improved beyond what I ever even imagined wanting.
Having the nub on the NES pad like that reminds me of those old PC controllers back in the day. Gravis PC Gamepad and such? They had these detachable joysticks you'd screw into the dpad. Though in that case, the dpad was also just atrocious, especially if you're used to the standards of first-party console controllers at the time, so maybe it really did made games a lot better to play.
I can see the little joystick for the NES. Gotta remember that at that time people's experience with video games was either going to an arcade and playing games with a joystick or, if they were lucky, playing at home on an ATARI which also used a joystick.
I hope one day you'll be able to show off one of those playskool pc playset games. I used to love playing with the easy bake oven and store versions. It was a pc game that uses a big plastic playset you plop onto your keyboard that lines up with certain keys on the keyboard to do functions in the game.
Wow! I never saw this on TV but in the back of magazines, I always wanted one! And I had completely forgotten about them until this video, thank you so much. I always imagined how it would feel to play Street Fighter 2 with it, how easy it would be to do a dragon punch. After watching this video I don't think it would be possible with this device.
It definitely has limitations, as keys only have access to 4 absolute directions, maybe 8 if you include holding 2 inputs at once. A traditional thumb stick movement has unlimited direction
Its pretty clever really, no need for more electronics when you can mod the plastic, a very cheap way to add functionality "Why would you want a joystick on a word processor?" Personally I find numpad arrow keys to be very awkward. Having the 1-3 layout for arrow keys feels a lot more natural than the 1-2-1 layout. To me, the joystick would make that space more intuitively usable. I wouldn't have to worry about hitting the wrong key in between the right keys. I agree with the implication on the packaging that the numpad arrow keys are fumbly to use. If this works in any way that feels decent at all, I totally agree that it would reduce fatigue, all you have to do is nudge that bar thats sticking up, no adjusting hand position to find your bearing on a different place on the keyboard, just brush your hand over 10:21 Is that what the intro to doom is like? No one on that dev team thought that layering the main menu text over the title screen text was hard to read? lol
This just screams 80's when people didn't understand controlling something without a joystick 😂 ... Joysticks are so rare these days. It's funny to remember that because they were first people just got used to them and probably held onto using them for too long.
@@MavericksHangar Thumbsticks are used in a different way than old-school joysticks. In a way, they're a lot closer to using the d-pad than they are to a full joystick.
@@VulpisFoxfire Definitely. Could you imagine playing Street Fighter 2 on a 2600 style joystick? The thing would be flying everywhere. Arcade sticks require a big heavy base for stability. A luxurious investment for the dedicated.
@@BMoser-bv6kn Depends on your grip, really. I could see playing SF1 on an Atari stick...except for the lack of buttons, of course. Personally, I held the base in my left hand, using my thumb to hit the fire button, while my other hand gripped the stick near the base. Someone who tries using one of those by grabbing the top like you would an arcade stick, yeah, that would be sliding all over the place. Plus, the 2600 stick is a 4-way stick, so it's not that great on the diagonals.
we used to build these out of lego in the 90s. they weren't very reliable but it gave a sense of achievement to see it even kinda work. these days it might be more sensible to design at least the base to be 3D printable
16:08 I see it useful for turning a standard gamepad into an arcade-style gamepad, and placed on a surface rather than held. Eh. Definitely Oddware. Seeing you play DooM on UV and trying to be 'dainty' with the flimsy plastic joystick had me laughing in cringe. It was funny and hard to watch at the same time, lolz
I was going to post something similar to this, laying the NES pad flat and operating it like arcade controls would be the way to go in my book, might be quite good for contra
my granddad had an joystick adapter for the arrow keys with an magnet to attach it. It was called the Logistick from the company Plawa. awesome thing to have to play as a kid ^^
Canadian here - a year or two ago I saw a big box of these things at a flea market. Didn’t realize it was a Canadian product until I saw this video though!
About the NES one trying to "prevent confusion", the NES *was* the first system (besides the Game & Watch) to even use a D-pad. People were still used to the 2600 (and presumably had the muscle memory to match) at the time this thing came out, so that claim is actually sorta sensible.
This reminds me of when I tried to do essentially the same thing with my Nintendo DS to have a more analog option to play Kingdom hearts 358/2. Through the powers of duct tape, one piece from a socket wrench set, and an enamel pin I formed an analog stick that could be defined as "technically something”. It also had the main drawback of not really staying attached, and wasn't any notable savings over the d-pad so eventually filed the endeavor away.
I had this great set for the nes gamepad that clasped over the controller and had an excellent round thumb stick that sat atop the dpad. It was excellent. Yes the nes rocked and rolled very great on the dpad, but the thing I had was just awesome.
Beautiful keyboard you got there. My company bought 3 top of the line IBM PC XTs in 1984 for the lead programmers. The managing director (getting a whiff of the zeitgeist) got himself an AT, though he had never even used a typewriter in his life. He never used it once. I met him again in 2018, and he still hadn’t used it. Probably worth a fortune. Goddam it. Things always work out for the ruling classes.
i remember as a kid, playing the first Test Drive. You could use the numpad as your gear shift, and i thought, i wonder if you could have a little shifter that would press the keys as you moved it around. thats crazy they actually made something like that.