#8 – The Sega Activator
Before the Kinect was the unmitigated failure that it is on two separate Microsoft systems, Sega was showing how terrible the idea of motion controls were back in the early 90’s. It was like the wild west of the video games back in the 90’s, a time where even console manufactures were making insanely stupid products for their already great systems. The activator didn’t do anything new, instead it used infrared technology (an already terrible form of communication) to mimic the inputs of the Genesis controller. The idea was that you would move your arm or leg over a part of the Activator and break the invisible beam. That break would then translate to a button press and the game would react. The only problem was that it almost never worked and instead of looking like the guy in the cool martial arts poses above, you looked like an octopus that was constantly being stabbed with a cattle prod.
#7 – Intellivision Disk Controller
The early days of video games were a much different time. Companies didn’t quite yet know what to make of this new market and didn’t have a defined layout for how controllers should be. The Atari 2600 nailed it thanks to building a controller that mimicked the controls of an arcade machine, but was limited with only one button. Enter Intellivision and their Intellivision disk controller. I’m not really sure why so many companies went with the numeric keypad approach, I can only guess that telephone touch pads were easy for people to understand, but that’s not what really makes this a bad controller. You see, the most important thing about playing a video game is being able to control a video game and the Intellivision disk controller was terrible at doing just that. The disk itself is slightly recessed into the controller limiting your range of freedom and motion, but the damn thing would also pinch your thumb something fierce on a regular basis. You also had to hold the thing in a vertical position so it felt less like playing a video game and more like climbing up a rope.