How long have wireless game controllers been around?

If you’ve been a gamer for a while, you may know that wireless controllers have been in use since the 1980s. Those who grew up in the PS2/Xbox/GameCube era probably have a different game controller in mind when they think of the first wireless controllers. Although wireless tablets have been tried various times over the decades, they have only been perfected in recent console generations.

The history of non-wired controllers is fascinating. This is the story of how your current console freed you from the couch.

As a 41-year-old, I’m slightly relieved that the first wireless game controller was older than me: enter the Cynex Game Mate 2. Released around 1982, it was an Atari 2600 peripheral widely considered the first wireless console-compatible game controller. It was the start of scalable, genre-defying technology, although it wouldn’t be fully realized for some time.

The Game Mate 2 used radio frequencies. By adopting RF technology, this pioneering pad gave gamers more freedom than lesser IR alternatives that would be released later in the decade. Unlike the Acclaim remote launched on the NES in 1989, you don’t need to point the Game Mate 2 directly at your Atari 2600 for its signal to be recognized.

While early infrared pads could easily lose signal if objects were between their sensors and the console’s receiver (much like IR TV remotes), the more flexible Game Mate was not bound by these restrictions. Indeed, this early RF technology worked well enough to have a range of up to 20 feet.

Although they were ahead of their time, they were not perfect. They were heavy and bulky, essentially being a standard 2600 controller sitting on a heavy base. They also quickly drained the required 9V battery. Once Atari took over distribution, a year after this peripheral launched, it was renamed the CX42 Remote Control Wireless Joystick. Catchy, right?

The GameCube’s mini-discs weren’t the only notable part of the console’s legacy. The WaveBird wireless controller arrived in 2002 and was the first consumer wireless pad that wasn’t weighed down by tons of compromises. I have vivid memories of queuing on a semi-balmy May evening in my native Edinburgh in 2002 to collect the marvelous purple box of the Big N, then buying the small console’s wireless controller around Christmas that same year.

And what a bulky but beloved brute it was! the WaveBird was anything but subtle. Adding some serious girth to the GameCube’s standard controller, it came with an equally bulky receiver to plug into the sixth-generation console and required you to map a channel with sliders on each. If you love the best of the GameCube library, chances are you’ve played some titles with a WaveBird.

Using 2.4G radio frequency technology in a controller for the first time, the WaveBird had a range of about 20 feet at minimum. It’s hard to explain how important it was to have a game controller that detached you from a console. No longer do you need to perch precariously less than six feet from your beloved game box. Instead, you could lean back or even move around the room, which was great for multiplayer sessions so everyone didn’t have to congregate on the same couch.

To maximize battery life, the WaveBird didn’t have rumble support, but it ran for up to 100 hours on a pair of AA batteries. The freedom it gave you in controlling games paved the way for future gamepads, leading to all the fabulous wireless controllers from Sony, Microsoft and others released over the last quarter century.

Before learning this story, you might have thought that the first wireless game controller was a PlayStation product. This is understandable, since Sony has (mostly) dominated the console market since the PS1 arrived in the United States in 1995. It turns out that Sony’s first wireless peripheral wasn’t introduced until the PS3 era. Looking back, you could say it was a bit stinky.

The Sixaxis is perhaps the most infamous Sony controller of all time, minus the banana-shaped “Boomerang” PS3 gamepad prototype that never saw the light of day. As the initial controller model for the PS3, the Sixaxis ditched the rumble for half-baked, early, and never fully realized motion controls.

Shortly after the Sixaxis’ launch in 2006, Phil Harrison said that Sony had not included the Rumble in Sixaxis, not because of a lawsuit over patent rights, but because it was a “last generation feature.” This was a pretty bold (quite cowardly) statement, considering Phil was the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios at the time.

Although the PS3 launch title Resistance: Fall of Man was one of the first games to support Sixaxis features, it was truly the dragon driving game Lair which came to define the controller. It was widely criticized for its half-assed motion controls, and people made it clear that the lack of rumble was unacceptable. Sony quickly understood the meaning, and soon, titles like the one from 2007 Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction would embrace the palm-shaking possibilities of the DualShock 3 after its release in 2008.