30 years of the Sega Saturn: The legacy of the 3D Control Pad

On May 11, 2025, the Sega Saturn will turn 30 years old in North America. Throughout the month of May, I’ll be covering the console and its history, its games, and what made it the most successful Sega console in Japan but a disappointment outside of it. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Given all the talk of the commercial failure of most of Sega’s consoles — the Master System is the company’s second-best-selling console, and that still sits behind the likes of Nintendo’s GameCube and Microsoft’s original Xbox even with Brazil’s continued support — you might be surprised at their comparative design influence. Nintendo and Sega borrowed from each other, in this regard. When the Genesis launched, it had three face buttons compared to the Super Nintendo’s four, but an updated controller variant would come mid-console that resulted in six face buttons for Sega’s pad. This controller would be the basis for the Saturn gamepad, in terms of its shape and its general design, but that controller would also add in the shoulder L and R buttons that the SNES had popularized on its own controller.

And, like with the Six Button Control Pad — that is its name, really — the Saturn’s Control Pad — also its name — stuck with a smaller design, rather than the larger shape of the Genesis controller that I enjoy holding less and less as time goes on. It’s still larger than the SNES controller was, but that’s mostly due to the grips that stick out and fit into the palm of your hands, as opposed to the SNES pad’s round design.

There’s a pretty clear design through line there, with Sega deciding that the original controller was a little large and its grips probably not optimally designed, and then hanging on to the general shape and button design of its improved mid-lifecycle variant— but with slightly modified grips — for the Saturn’s primary controller. While also finding a midpoint between the grips that fit into the palm of your hand, one that would end up sticking in the long run. Not for Sega, no, but for a not insignificant amount of what came after.

The original Saturn Control Pad is a great little controller. The L and R buttons don’t depress as much as with the SNES’ ones, but they are notably clicky in both feel and sound, so you know when you’ve pressed it as needed. It wasn’t perfect for the era it released in, however, which wasn’t the controller’s fault so much as the direction things ended up heading in. While the Saturn was designed and released at a time where it felt like there was a transition to 3D games happening, what ended up occurring was a pushing out of what was considered old — 2D design and sprites — in favor of 3D worlds and polygons. As more and more 3D games released, and developers and players started to realize something different was required to make controlling characters and ships and what have you in those 3D spaces, controllers would undergo a major shift. And that’s where analog sticks came in.

For all the talk of Sony knowing 3D wasn’t just the future, but also the present, it’s worth pointing out that the inaugural Playstation controller didn’t have analog sticks, either. That was, like for everything of the era besides the Nintendo 64’s controller, a late addition. The Playstation might have hedged a little more toward 3D dominance with its internal hardware (and its success at retail only accelerated that trend), but it shipped with its own take on the D-pad and digital inputs, with it taking the same approach to controlling characters and viewpoints in a 3D space — via buttons on the top of the controller — that the SNES and 3DO had already played around with to that point in years prior. (If you’ll allow a plug here and are interested in a dive into this subject, Lost in Cult’s upcoming book, Joysticks to Haptics: A Visual History of Video Game Controllers features an essay from me on the very topic of the changes in controllers from the era of 2D to 3D, and what that meant in terms of design and gameplay.) The Playstation wouldn’t get analog sticks on a standard controller until April of 1997, when the Dual Analog Controller, the predecessor to the Dual Shock, first went on sale.

Before Sony got into the analog game on its standard controllers — a phrase that is being used because, before this time, they also had a pricey peripheral known as the Analog Joystick, which looks like something you’re supposed to pilot a mech with — the Nintendo 64 released, with its analog stick right in the center of its controller. While the N64 beat Sega to market in Japan by a couple of weeks, in North America and in Europe, the first standard controller with an analog stick was Sega’s, not Nintendo’s. The 3D Control Pad arrived in North America in August of 1996, and in Europe in September — a little over a month sooner than the N64 in the former, and six months beforehand in the latter. (The N64 controller, by the way, switched to six face buttons from the SNES’ four — those C buttons are versatile, as they can act as a sort of pseudo right analog stick, but they’re also just additional buttons, arranged alongside the A and B buttons in Sega’s now-traditional six-button configuration. See? Borrowing from each other.)

At first glance, the 3D Control Pad is a bit of a monstrosity. My former colleague (and Retro XP guest contributor) Patrick Dubuque, who sold me the very 3D Control Pad you see in that photo years ago, one time referred to it as a “dinner plate,” and that phrasing has stuck with me. It looks like there is no way that it’s comfortable to hold, or to play on, but, against all odds, it is. It might be something of a prototype for a new kind of controller, but it’s also mostly already where it needed to be. Refinements were possible, of course, but the 3D Control Pad fits a lot more naturally into your hands than you might imagine just from looking at it. I’ve found myself often just keeping it plugged in and using it for games that don’t require analog control, rather than swapping it out for the standard Control Pad, and not just out of laziness, either. Well, mostly not out of laziness.

Part of the reason for it working so well out of the box despite its size and shape might be because it wasn’t even the first foray into an analog controller on a Sega console. The Dempa XE-1 AP was an analog stick controller — the first thumbstick controller, in fact — designed for the Mega Drive in Japan. Given the Mega Drive was a bust in Japan, and that this was meant to give you a better control option for games like After Burner II, specifically, it’s not a surprise that it didn’t [curse the English language] take off. But the 3D Control Pad wasn’t Sega’s first foray into this space, is all. Though, it was a far more comfortable and sensible one, with much broader appeal in a variety of ways, despite clearly taking some cues from the XE-1 AP’s design.

As many existing Sega Saturn games were not programmed for analog inputs, the 3D Control Pad features a switch at the bottom of its face, that lets you swap between digital controls with the D-pad, and analog controls with the stick. It still has the same six-button arrangement as the standard Saturn pad, but the X, Y, and Z face buttons are now larger. The D-pad is the same, except that the flatter well it resides in is similar to the one the analog stick is within, rather than in an angular base that shifts upward as it moves toward the center of the pad like in its original form.

The grips aren’t rounded off any longer, but they also aren’t sitting in your hands the same way. The side of the grip is now what’s in your palm, rather than the bottom resting in it, and that still has a slight curve to it. What you can’t see in that photo is the most significant change besides the addition of the analog stick, though, and that’s replacing the L and R shoulder buttons with L and R triggers. Analog triggers, too — the first such triggers on a standard controller.

The 3D Control Pad was originally bundled with Sonic Team’s NiGHTS Into Dreams, in what was a steal of a deal. You could get the controller by itself for $39.99, NiGHTS on its own for $49.99, or you could buy them packaged together for $69.99, a $20 discount. NiGHTS, which was designed for both 2D and 3D play depending on the character and the environment — and with 2D play suited for a thumbstick, as it occurred while flying through an open space in the air — was an excellent showcase for the utility of the 3D Control Pad and the analog stick.

Despite its surprising elegance, the 3D Control Pad didn't have a ton of support over the life of the Saturn, owing to a couple of things. The small audience that would be further split by the need for the new controller and its stick, and the rapid decline of even Sega's support of the console, kept it from ever taking off with developers and publishers, which in turn kept it from being a must-have item for console owners. Which is not to say that games didn’t end up with support for the 3D Control Pad — more that games that required the controller weren’t coming off an assembly line, by any means. Not that this was a Sega-specific occurrence in this era of consoles: Even Sony didn't push their analog options on the Playstation overly hard. Ape Escape was the first game that required a Dual Shock’s analog functions, and that came out in 1999, two years after Playstation introduced their twin-stick standard.

That was just how that era went, as far as general support for analog controllers went. The true seismic changes, outside of the N64 ecosystem — which began with a stick, rather than having one introduced — wouldn't occur until the next consoles from Sega and Playstation, since the sticks were then standard on the introductory controllers.

In fact, once you use the 3D Control Pad, it’s pretty clear that, like with the transition from the Genesis Six Button Pad to the standard Saturn Control Pad, this mid-era transition was also the stepping stone toward Sega’s next hardware. The 3D Control Pad is the genesis, if you will, of the Dreamcast Controller.

There are some key differences, yes, such as the switch from six face buttons to four, but otherwise… that’s just the 3D Control Pad. The analog stick and D-pad stick further out of the face of the controller, sure, but the placement of everything is the same, the grips use the same design ideas, and the Dreamcast kept the L and R triggers of its predecessor, as well. If it ever felt to you like there was a missing link between the Saturn and Dreamcast controllers, well, now you’re looking at it.

The 3D Control Pad was Sega’s first serious foray into analog control on a home console, and the design stuck. First, there was the Dreamcast, but Sega ended up influencing others, as well. The Playstation is off always doing its own thing, but as for everyone else? Look no further than the next era of consoles for some evidence of the success of Sega’s Saturn-era designs.

While the Xbox and GameCube would go with a dual analog setup for their controllers, for the left stick, they chose to use the same design of analog stick above and to the left of the D-pad. Xbox went so far as to adopt Sega’s face-button lettering convention (though, not its color scheme). Both the Xbox and GameCube used analog triggers for the L and R buttons, rather than the shoulder buttons of the N64 and Playstation. And while the Xbox Controller in that photo is the smaller S variant that was originally released in Japan and then later worldwide, the larger “Duke” model has a lot more in common with the Dreamcast controller, in terms of shape and sheer size, and even placed the start (and select) buttons at the bottom of the controller’s face, since there was room for them there in that design. The LB and RB buttons — the white and black ones — were also arranged in a six-button face-button design akin to the 3D Control Pad’s in this format, albeit angled more aggressively upward rather than the gentle slope of Sega’s setup.

While Nintendo did zig and zag with the designs for the Wii and Wii U, for the Switch (and the not-yet-released as of this writing Switch 2), they went back to the Sega/GameCube design philosophy in terms of stick placement. Xbox has never left it behind, finding that Sega had the right of things with its Saturn and Dreamcast experimentation. While the Playstation has mostly continued to build off its original Dual Shock designs in the analog era rather than be influenced by what’s going on with the competition and their controllers, by the time of the Playstation 3, they’d at least adopted analog triggers, too. Sega’s victory, at least in this regard, was complete.

Sega’s time as a console hardware manufacturer might have been relatively short-lived next to Nintendo, Sony, and now Microsoft — yes, at this point Microsoft has been at it for much longer than Sega ever was — but the design decisions they made in their decade-and-a-half in that business have persisted well beyond their own time in that side of the industry. And are likely to do so at least as long as Xbox continues to exist as a platform. Quite the legacy for a mid-life controller variant designed for a commercial failure.

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