The original Xbox controller was “embarrassingly enormous” says its co-creator

To say that the original Xbox controller was big, would be an understatement. Here’s a far more accurate summary as to its size:

• F-14 jets were landed on it during the Gulf War.
• King Kong climbed to the top of it as he swatted away machine-gun fire from pesky aircraft.
• The original Xbox controller was the prototype for the first series of Jaegers in Pacific Rim.
• Even your mom isn’t as big as the original Xbox controller.
• It’s regularly mistaken for a moon in Star Wars movies.
• The original Xbox controller kicked off the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs when it crashed into our planet during the late Cretaceous era.
• In Hollywood, the original Xbox controller is referred to as “Kanye West’s ego”.

Get the picture? The OG controller, which happens to be known as “the Duke” these days, would soon give way to a more modern and ergonomic design that wouldn’t require you to dislocate your fingers to properly hold it. But even before the first Xbox console launched, the people behind the development of it were looking to have a very different input device bundled with it.

That’s according to Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley who was quizzed about the beastly peripheral on Twitter via GameSpot, who said that Microsoft completely ignored focus group testing over the unwieldy size of the controller. “It was embarrassingly enormous; politically I had no juice to fix it,” Blackley tweeted.

They ignored focus tests; I understand you can land a helicopter on it.

The guy in charge of the controller picked a vendor that couldn’t make the electronics small, so they made the design huge to fit around it. https://t.co/vjEDKGNoEF

— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) October 3, 2016

The Dreamcast was our favorite console at the time, and it had a big controller that docked a tomagachi. So that made it seem less insane! https://t.co/WwFQ8q6QRO

— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) October 3, 2016

The Japanese were alarmed by the huge controller; the feedback was taken and the team did an amazing job shipping the smaller version https://t.co/vgY2mpreKP

— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) October 3, 2016

Many people love the big controller; it’s also true that the amount of plastic needed to make it uses the equivalent of a tank of premium. https://t.co/Cobioob80R

— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) October 3, 2016

Sorry to vent about Duke, it’s just that I took such a volume of shit about it back in the day, I need to let go! https://t.co/ilnHZCejPg

— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) October 3, 2016

The early 2000s were an odd era for video game controllers. Nintendo had just come out of the N64 era which introduced a peripheral which was seemingly designed to stab penises with during a round of Donkey Kong, while the Dreamcast set the tone for a round device that also included an underrated VMU piece of hardware. Man, what a time to be alive.

Last Updated: October 4, 2016