A recent list over on MSN rounded up 13 of the most beloved retro game controllers ever made, and reading through it hit me right in the nostalgia. Four decades of gaming means I've held a lot of plastic. Some of it was great. Some of it was the original Xbox Duke controller, which I'm still convinced was designed for someone with catcher's mitts for hands.

The list covers the obvious heavy hitters. The SNES pad, with its shoulder buttons and diamond face button layout that Sony clearly drew from for the original PlayStation pad, adding grips and dual analogs later. The Genesis six-button controller deserves its spot too, especially for fighting game fans. Trying to pull off a Hadouken on the three-button pad was doable, but that six-button revision felt like a revelation.

The NES controller made the cut, naturally. People forget how bold that rectangular design was for 1985. Every other console on the market was still messing with keypads and number pads. Nintendo stripped it down to a D-pad, two action buttons, and Start/Select. That D-pad alone is legendary. Gunpei Yokoi's cross-shaped design was so effective that every competitor adopted some version of it for the next two decades.

I want to say it was around '97 when the N64 controller dropped and everyone had to figure out where to put their hands. Three prongs. An analog stick in the center. A trigger underneath. It looked like an alien artifact. But the first time you played Super Mario 64 with that analog stick, none of the weirdness mattered. The Rumble Pak slot gave us force feedback, and games haven't been the same since.

The original DualShock deserves all the praise it gets on this list. Sony took the basic PlayStation controller, added dual analog sticks and vibration, and created a standard that persists today with only incremental changes. I still remember the first time I felt the rumble in Metal Gear Solid, during the Psycho Mantis fight. Kojima used that controller feature as a gameplay mechanic. That kind of ludonarrative trick wasn't possible before the DualShock.

What I appreciate about lists like this is the reminder that controller design used to be genuinely experimental. Sega tried everything from the Activator to the Saturn's bizarre 3D pad. Nintendo released the Bongos, the Power Glove, the WaveBird. Not all of them worked, but the willingness to swing for the fences is missing from the current generation, where Sony and Microsoft have basically converged on the same gamepad with slightly different ergonomics.

The GameCube controller is another one that aged like fine wine. Ridiculed at launch for its asymmetric button layout and that weird Z trigger. Two decades later, competitive Super Smash Bros. players still refuse to play on anything else. There's an entire cottage industry of adapters and reproductions keeping that controller alive for tournaments.

Reading through the full list, the thing that struck me is how many of these designs were built around a specific idea about how games should be played. The Dreamcast VMU existed because Sega wanted portable gaming tied to the console. Every pad on this list was an argument for a particular vision of gaming.

Now we get symmetrical feature sets. Haptic triggers, adaptive resistance, touchpads that half the player base never touches. The technology is better. The soul is thinner. Give me a WaveBird and four friends on a couch any day of the week.