Plug It Back In: The Underdog Controllers and Peripherals That Retro Fans Are Rescuing From the Junk Drawer

Every console generation has its hero controller — the one that defines the era, ends up on T-shirts, and gets the official modern reissue treatment. The NES gamepad. The SNES controller. The PlayStation DualShock. These are the ones that get the museum plaques.

But tucked behind them in the closet, shoved into the back of the game shelf, or currently listed for $8 at a Goodwill outside Columbus, Ohio, are the other ones. The weird ones. The ones that shipped in bundles, got used twice, and then spent the next thirty years collecting dust. And right now, a growing corner of the retro gaming community is making a very loud argument that some of those forgotten peripherals deserve a whole lot more respect.

The Bundle Problem

Here's how most of these peripherals ended up forgotten: they came in the box.

When you bundle a peripheral with a console at launch, you guarantee it gets into millions of homes — but you also guarantee that a huge percentage of those homes will never use it seriously. The Atari 2600 joystick is the canonical exception, the one that actually became iconic. But for every CX40, there are a dozen controllers that got one gaming session, got declared "annoying," and got relegated to the junk drawer.

The NES Zapper is a perfect example. Packed with the Control Deck bundle in 1985, it was the reason Duck Hunt existed and the reason millions of American kids spent Saturday mornings shooting at a television. It's genuinely beloved in a nostalgic sense. But from a collector's standpoint, it's also incredibly common — which means it's both easy to find and chronically undervalued.

The more interesting collecting territory lives one tier below the Zapper.

The Power Glove: History's Most Fascinating Failure

No conversation about forgotten peripherals is complete without acknowledging the Power Glove, and not just because of The Wizard. Released by Mattel in 1989, the Power Glove was genuinely ambitious — a wearable controller that used ultrasonic sensors to track hand position in 3D space. In concept, it was decades ahead of its time. In execution, it was famously, legendarily terrible.

The tracking was imprecise. The setup was a nightmare. Most games that claimed compatibility were essentially unplayable with it. And yet — the Power Glove has become one of the most collectible and culturally significant peripherals in retro gaming history, precisely because of how spectacularly it missed the mark.

What's fascinating is what's happened to it in the maker community. Hobbyists have spent years reverse-engineering the Power Glove's hardware, retrofitting it with modern sensors, and turning it into a functional controller for everything from emulators to MIDI instruments. There are YouTube builds that would make the original Mattel engineers' jaws drop. The glove that couldn't play NES games reliably in 1989 is now being used to control synthesizers in 2024.

That's the kind of second life that deserves attention.

Joysticks That Time Forgot

If you grew up with a Commodore 64, an Atari 800, or even an early IBM PC with a game port, you probably encountered a third-party joystick at some point. The market for these things in the early-to-mid '80s was enormous, and the quality ranged from "surprisingly solid" to "broke on day two."

The ones worth hunting for now are the outliers — joysticks with unusual form factors, premium build quality, or specific games they excelled at. The Wico Command Control series, for instance, has a devoted following among collectors who swear by its microswitched accuracy for shooters. The Kraft joystick, a staple of American computer gaming in the early '80s, is another one that comes up repeatedly in collector communities as a peripheral that deserved better than the obscurity it landed in.

For arcade stick enthusiasts, the real holy grail is finding peripherals that used actual arcade-grade components — leaf-switch sticks and Sanwa-adjacent buttons that were designed for longevity. These exist, they're out there, and they're increasingly sought after by collectors who want authentic hardware rather than modern reproductions.

What the Maker Community Is Doing With All This

Here's where things get genuinely exciting for anyone paying attention to the intersection of retro gaming and DIY electronics.

A growing number of makers — people with 3D printers, soldering irons, and a deep well of retro gaming knowledge — are doing more than just collecting these peripherals. They're reverse-engineering them, documenting their pinouts and protocols, and in some cases building functional modern versions that retain the original feel while adding USB compatibility or wireless connectivity.

The Super Nintendo's multitap, which allowed four-player gaming and was criminally underused during the console's lifespan, has seen multiple open-source recreation projects. The NES Four Score adapter has been similarly documented and reproduced. Even more obscure items, like the U-Force motion controller (essentially a precursor to gesture-based gaming that also didn't work very well), have found their way onto workbenches in the maker community.

What drives this isn't just nostalgia — it's preservation. Many of these peripherals used proprietary connectors, custom chips, or mechanical components that are increasingly difficult to source. If the community doesn't document and reproduce them, they'll eventually exist only as non-functional display pieces.

The Case for Official Reproductions

Nintendo has shown there's a market for nostalgia hardware with the NES and SNES Classic Minis. Sony did it with the PlayStation Classic. But all of these focused on the consoles themselves, with standard controllers packed in. Nobody has made a serious commercial bet on peripheral reproductions.

That feels like a missed opportunity.

Imagine an officially licensed modern Zapper that works with contemporary displays — something that addresses the inherent incompatibility between CRT-calibrated light guns and LCD screens that has made the original hardware largely unusable without a vintage television. The technology to make it work exists. The nostalgia market clearly exists. The gap between those two facts is puzzling.

For third-party manufacturers, the opportunity is even more open. Companies like 8BitDo have already proven that there's a robust market for retro-styled modern controllers. A well-executed modern joystick that captures the feel of a classic Atari CX40 or a Wico Command Control — with a USB connection and modern internals — would find buyers immediately in the collector community.

Which Ones Actually Deserve the Comeback

If we're building a shortlist of peripherals that have genuinely earned a modern second chance, a few names keep surfacing in collector conversations:

The SNES Super Scope — a bazooka-sized light gun that was more fun as a prop than as a controller, but represented genuine ambition. A modern wireless version with display-compatible tracking would be both ridiculous and completely irresistible.

The Sega Activator — an infrared ring you stood inside to control fighting game characters with your body movements. It was awful. It was also twenty years ahead of the Kinect, conceptually speaking. Someone should try again with better sensors.

The Atari Trackball — the arcade version, specifically. Trackball controllers have never really gone away, but nobody has made one that captures the heavy, satisfying weight of the original arcade hardware for home use.

The junk drawer of gaming history is full of ideas that were right but early, or wrong but interesting, or simply unlucky in their timing. Digging through it isn't just a collector's hobby — it's a reminder that the path to where gaming is now ran through some genuinely strange territory.

And some of that territory is worth revisiting.