TAKING CONTROL

While consoles evolve, the humble gamepad hasn't changed much for years

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Any exploration of the future of gaming will eventually slide into the far future, with games we control with our minds.

Despite the flurry of headlines about Neuralink chips and the like, we're nowhere near there yet. The game controllers of the next generation are likely to be extremely similar to those of the past, and there's a good reason for that: they work really well.

Back in 2005, when Sony was first starting to talk about the PlayStation 3, the images of the nascent console it released featured a controller that was shaped like a boomerang. Despite being official enough to appear on the covers of otherwise sensible gaming magazines, this evolution of the PS2's DualShock 2 looked like a fan-made render, and came in for a lot of derision.

The Boomerang was never released, Sony heading back to the familiar shape for the PS3, 4 and 5, while over in Xbox-land the controller has been more or less the same shape (and size) since the original console's Controller S. Astonishingly, no thirdparty controller maker has yet produced a lookalike of the Boomerang.