10 Nintendo Gaming Innovations That Changed Everything

8. Controller Feedback (Or 'Rumble Technology')

Lylat Wars on Nintendo 64 is a wonderful game, with exciting gameplay, tight controls, a fun campaign mode and a surprisingly aggressive multiplayer mode. All these factors made it one of the N64's great titles, but it stands out for making history in one particular way.

Copies of the game were bundled with a Rumble Pak, a peripheral that fitted into the back of the gamepad and caused it to shake to simulate things happening in game. The Rumble Pak jolted in time to your damaged spacecraft, pulsed ominously if your Arwing was in particularly bad shape and jolted loudly if you crashed. It may have eaten through AA batteries and made the controller twice as heavy, but the Rumble Pak helped to make games more immersive. A huge number of titles on the system ended up having Rumble Pak support, and its success made Sony release the Dualshock. Can you think of a current-gen controller that doesn't rumble?
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Tom, simple country boy, scarily close to his 30th birthday. A juxtaposition of sporty and active alpha male with TV and gaming nerd. Newcastle United fan who lives a LONG way away from Newcastle.