Growing up in the '90s, good joysticks were strangely hard to come by. The stiff sticks on my local arcade cabinets, already inferior to their Japanese counterparts, always seemed to be so worn down that I'd have to smash them from edge-to-edge just to register an input. And yet the sticks attached to my friend's dusty Atari 2600, discovered in a box of his parents' old junk, still managed to make the arcade cabinet sticks look good. Those things were so atrocious it's a wonder videogames ever took off to begin with.
The Nintendo 64's analogue stick controller seemed like a marvel, at first—it was responsive, granular, and ushered in a whole era of 3D games. It also went to shit after a few months of use—I probably owned eight of those controllers over the console's lifetime and destroyed every one. There was only one joystick that never failed me: the beige and black, nondescript PC accessory my dad brought home one day, likely a hand-me-down from one of his computer geek friends.
