It's story time
Once upon a time, I was trying to do a sequence-breaking trick in Super Metroid, called a mockball. It's a bit complicated, but essentially you trick the game engine into conserving your speed while rolling into a ball in mid-air. It's required to skip a boss fight, and it's a standard part of any Super Metroid speedrun.
Anyway, the only controllers I had available to me at the time were some crappy third-party knockoffs. I kept trying, and failing, the trick. In order to successfully do the trick, you need to be able to press individual direction buttons with fairly good timing, and then do a "haduken", basically rolling your thumb on the d-pad from down to forward. With the gross controllers, too many buttons were getting pressed at the same time, and it was actually not possible to pull off.
It got me thinking, I have all this gear, but over time stuff is gonna wear out, and it's important to preserve these games in their original working order. So I designed a prototype board with full-on mechanical switches to see if I could make a SNES controller that would work. The prototypes came, but the switches were massive and I couldn't find a reasonable supplier of the plastic casings for SNES controllers to put them in. Then I decided to make a new prototype, this time just replacing what goes inside the original controllers, not the casing. This is the result.
