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Finding The Mysterious NES Dogbone Controller

Released at the end of the NES lifecycle this strange white and red controller is quite comfortable.

Cameron Eittreim
1 min readDec 19, 2021
Photo Credit: Nintendo

Every once in a while, you find a rare video game peripheral from an era that wasn’t too long ago. The Nintendo Dogbone Controller is one such peripheral that I came across years ago and recently stumbled on again.

Designed by Lance Barr, the Nintendo Dogbone controller came with the NES Top Loader console design that was released in the early 1990s. Nintendo was going with a new type of console design, and the NES got this treatment.

It was also done to reduce the manufacturing costs associated with producing the NES alongside the SNES. If you can remember, the original NES was a large console.

The NES 2 was only produced for a single year, and finding the Dogbone controller can be difficult. But if you can find one, it makes playing those original games much more comfortable than the original square controller.

I’ve managed to dig these controllers up on Ebay for a reasonable price and at my local retro game store. You can’t go wrong with the revised design, and who could argue with the red on white color scheme?

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Cameron Eittreim
Cameron Eittreim

Written by Cameron Eittreim

Podcast host, traveler, published author. Editor of The Self Pivot. Contact at theselfpivot.com

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