Your arcade joystick is your video game's steering wheel. Without it, all of a game system's supporting technology is for naught. You can make games faster, louder, more colorful, and more complex, but without a reliable joystick you exert no control over your player.

Historically, arcade joysticks have been used to guide frogs over perilous freeways, spaceships through asteroid belts, gobbling characters through mazes of dots, and every other scenario you can imagine. In the early days of video games, these navigational devices were little more than four-way stick shifts with pushbuttons. The Atari Company's 2600 game console, which went wide in 1977, is a perfect example of a system that relied on this (by today's standards) crude technology.

The Arcade Joystick After the 2600

As technology marched along, new game systems from companies like Coleco, Intellivision and Sega began to sprout up around the electronics landscape. As gamers grew more sophisticated, they demanded better machinery, including joysticks with greater range. Four-way sticks gave way to eight-way sticks, and developers began producing controllers with multiple buttons.

Today, some home game systems boast literally a dozen buttons on a single controller. These can be used for jumping, sliding, kicking, spinning, flying, shooting, and defending, as well as innumerable other moves. Joysticks are critical arcade game parts for any gallery owner or game manufacturer. And keeping joysticks intact is one of the most obvious ways to cut down on arcade repair.