Talk:Gravis PC GamePad

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[edit] Release

Does anyone know when the Gravis PC gamepad was released? There are some obvious similarities between it and the SNES controller (in particular, the Japanese version). I kind of wonder if one borrowed from the other...and if so, who borrowed from who...

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I don't remember exactly when the Gamepad was first released, although I was the Product Manager for Advanced Gravis at that time and responsible for the Gamepad's development. The credit for the technical concept belongs to Dennis Scott-Jackson, the co-founder of Advanced Gravis along with his long-time friend Grant Russell. I still have the unopened first GamePad that came off the production line.

The SNES controller and virtually all others on the market at that time were looked at closely. These and a number of original ideas from the Gravis development team were presented to a product concept firm in North Vancouver, who refined the controllers shell into its final shape. The "GamePad" as it was originally spelled, was the first control pad for the PC and coined the name Gamepad which is synonymous with control pads today.

Following the PC version of the GamePad, we mated it up with our Macintosh joystick microprosessor control box and and developed the Mac Version of the GamePad -- the world's first fully programmable GamePad.

Ron Haidenger

[edit] Wikipedia self-reference

WP:ASR#Community and website feature references is pretty clear about not discussing the Wikipedia project in articles. This is because it lends undue weight to Wikipedia itself in an article, which should be about the subject. Wikipedia tries to avoid self-promotion in articles not about the site itself. We can talk about Wikipedia on the Wikipedia page and potentially where it outside sources discuss it - for instance, when Stephen Colbert did a monologue about Wikipedia, that's acceptable.

The fact that the Gravis Gamepad is the model for the icon can be mentioned on the image page (well, at Commons where it was uploaded), but it's not relevant to the history of the gamepad itself. --SevereTireDamage 11:03, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Oh well, its fine now. Apparently that icon is part of a set, and someone added the reference to that, which was my main point in the first place, but they did it without mentioning wikipedia, so its all good now.Dylan Mather 19:56, 28 August 2006 (UTC)