10 Nintendo Gaming Innovations That Changed Everything

4. The D-Pad

The humble directional pad seems like an obvious choice for early gaming controllers now, but its intuitive design was one innovated by Nintendo. In the early days of home gaming, many releases were ports of arcade favourites and they aped the feel of the original releases by using joysticks.

1982 saw the release of Donkey Kong on the Game & Watch, a line of handheld electronic games. Each Game & Watch featured a single game, playable on an LCD screen. The Donkey Kong version was notable for its early use of dual screens, but it is also the first piece of video game hardware to implement the cross-shaped directional pad. The pad was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, best known as the creator of the Game Boy.

The success of the D-Pad on Game & Watch led to its inclusion on the NES controller a year later, and before long controllers on other systems implemented D-pads for their own joypads. Other companies may have modified and evolved the humble D-Pad but Nintendo's is the original and the best. Nintendo eventually moved away from using the D-Pad as the primary form of controlling games with the next entry on this list.