Four home consoles have come and gone at Nintendo since the GameCube was laid to rest, and each one has officially supported a GameCube pad. Call it what it is: not nostalgia, but a company conceding it nailed the design on the first attempt.
The GCN hits its 25th birthday this year, and no part of the system makes a stronger case for its legacy than the controller. Nintendo has churned out new edition after new edition of it, for hardware that left the assembly line two decades ago.
Several things account for that. The pad was designed around the games it launched with, it grew inseparable from one of Nintendo’s biggest franchises, and that franchise hauled it along onto every platform that followed. To this day it ranks among the best controllers you can buy for a Nintendo Switch.
The buttons don’t make sense until they do
Give it a glance and you’ll spot that it ignores convention. There’s no four-button diamond here. What you get instead is a supersized green A button, a diminutive red B button, and a pair of kidney-shaped X and Y buttons orbiting them like satellites.
The strangeness is intentional. Hand it to someone new and they grasp instantly that A is the button that counts. Your thumb can tell which button it’s resting on with no need to glance down. And the arrangement means you can hammer A alongside anything else without twisting your hand into knots.
Pressure, not a simple switch, drives the analog L and R triggers. A lot of games built around that. Press partway in Super Mario Sunshine and Mario sprays water as he moves; push all the way down and he digs in his heels to blast away. On Switch, the Super Mario 3D All-Stars port breaks those actions across separate buttons on a Joy-Con or Pro Controller, and the feel simply isn’t there.
The octagon under your thumb
A circular gate — the guard that caps how far a stick can travel — surrounds most control sticks. The GameCube’s main thumbstick sits in an octagonal one, a trait handed down from the N64 pad.
Nailing a precise direction gets far easier as a result. The payoff is bigger than it sounds. Threading the narrow stages of the Super Monkey Ball games calls for exact movement, while Soulcalibur II leans on those notches to cleanly divide up the directional attack inputs that fighting games are built on.
Melee is the reason this thing never died
Any conversation about the GameCube controller is really a conversation about Smash. The console’s best seller was Super Smash Bros. Melee, a party game that put all four controller ports to work — and then it became something far bigger.
Buried inside Melee are mechanics such as wavedashing that shove its skill ceiling to absurd heights. Its speed makes competitive sets a pleasure to watch rather than a slog. And the roster is balanced enough, broadly speaking, that varied approaches genuinely work.
Then the sequel arrived. Super Smash Bros. Brawl hit Wii in 2008, and since the Wii could read GCN discs and carried four GameCube controller ports, players simply stuck with the pad they’d already mastered. It also thoroughly outclassed waggling a Wii Remote. Ahead of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U in 2014, Nintendo revealed an adapter for connecting GameCube controllers to that console. The same accessory carried over to Switch and was sold once more under fresh branding when Super Smash Bros. Ultimate arrived in 2018.
Muscle memory Nintendo refuses to abandon
Millions of players — casual and competitive alike — wired their reflexes around this controller. Nintendo’s answer has been adapters plus a steady trickle of re-releases. 2014 brought a Smash edition GameCube controller, and a nearly identical model hit shelves in November 2018, just ahead of Ultimate.
Today there’s a reworked wireless GameCube controller aimed at the Switch 2’s GCN library on Nintendo Classics, complete with a few modern touches such as ZL and Home.
The flaws are real
Perfect, this pad is not. It falls short both against the rivals of its era and against anything contemporary, and where the PS2 and Xbox controllers were iterated on for a successor, this design never was. Holding it is still a joy.
Two elements are outright failures: the D-pad and the nub-shaped C-stick. The D-pad is small and mushy, so you’ll input two directions when you meant one. Quick camera nudges are within the C-stick’s range, but it’s nowhere near the twin-stick arrangement that’s standard now.
Anything not designed for that unusual button layout also suffers. SNES games that want you holding Y to run while tapping B to jump feel awkward on it. Yet with the titles built around it — Luigi’s Mansion and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker — the hardware and software seem to have been made in the same room.
The WaveBird got there first
Nintendo put out the WaveBird in 2002, among the first mainstream wireless gamepads. Wireless attempts on earlier consoles relied on IR, which collapses the instant anything obstructs the signal.
You have to match a channel on both the controller and the receiver, there’s no rumble, and the base is slightly chunkier than the wired version. Even so it’s excellent, offering long battery life and virtually no dropouts. It was my controller of choice for most of my GameCube years.
And that leads to the part that stings. The GameCube controllers I bought back then still work. Hardly any wear, no quirks to compensate for, and out they come whenever friends drop by for multiplayer. The Switch’s Joy-Con drift, meanwhile, became so pervasive that Nintendo was hit with a $40 million fine in France.