Once again, Nintendo produced the goods in 1991. The Super Nintendo was released with yet another revolutionary controller design. The SNES control pad looked simple enough, with four action buttons on the face of the pad, but the real innovative idea was the insertion of two shoulder buttons. These were perfectly placed so the pad was never congested.

The game which typified the usefulness of the shoulder buttons first was the superb conversion of Street Fighter II. Probably one of the greatest games of its time, it brought its six-button arcade machine onto the SNES seamlessly. Shigeru Miyamoto and his team had managed to create a pad that was the envy of the industry. Sega did release a six-button pad when the Mega Drive finally got its version of Street Fighter, but this could only be seen as an imitation of the SNES joypad.

As you can see, the controllers only evolved when the machines and games did. Very rarely, if ever, did you see a new "standard controller" released on a console as it would split the machine's buying audience and people without certain controllers would be unable to play certain games - the Mega Drive made this mistake with the six-button joypad. Once the standard controller was designed, the developers of software were confined to these specifications during the machine's life cycle. Often several buttons on the SNES pad were redundant in a game, but the hardware was there if they developers saw fit to use it.

In the next generation consoles a similar revolution occurred. Launched in 1995, both the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn pads had eight buttons. Ideas had obviously been borrowed from the SNES as shoulder buttons were present on both, but whereas Sega placed an extra two buttons on the face of the pad, making it clumsy and congested, Ken Kutaragi's Sony crew simply slapped two more shoulder buttons on the PlayStation pad.

Although not revolutionary, it was brilliantly executed. The pad was complex but not congested. Also, the PSX pad, in our view, is extremely comfortable - the small humps on the bottom of the SNES pad had grown into prongs which meant you could rest the fingers you didn't use in a comfortable spot. The prong formation has been imitated by countless third-party hardware developers and even Nintendo bowed to the PSX pad's comfort with the "prongs" in place.

Next week we look at the competition to the Dual Shock and imagine what the future may hold for controller design.