Logitech’s PC gamepads from around the millennium were super weird and I want to show them to you, with 1998’s zany take on motion controls and all.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today we’re going to go through the range of Logitech’s PC control pads like a dose of the salts, and maybe also wonder what we’re doing with our lives, and how it all came to this…. Anyway.
If you were a PC gamer back in the early nineties and wanted to use these newfangled gamepad joypad controller doohickies rather than the joystick that the common man enjoyed, for a while pretty much your option was the SNES inspired Gravis Gamepad. Which, I mean, it worked, but I never liked all that much.
Thankfully, competition arrived, and not as a Competition Pro, but from the likes of Microsoft with their Sidewinder controllers. This video was specifically triggered by NTG Technology’s video on the Sidewinder joypad, which unlocked the memory of my old Logitech W ingman Extreme and its whacky motion controls that either replaced or was replaced by that Sidewinder pad back in the day. My memory is fuzzy on the timeframes. I’m old.
So, while it’s this pad I want to talk about, let’s take the opportunity to give a bit of an evolutionary timeline of Logitech’s PC controllers.
Their earliest design, as far as I can see, is from 1995, the Thunderpad.
There are two flavours of this, the earliest being the common or garden Thunderpad which had four face buttons and two shoulder buttons, although two of those face buttons were just turbo fire versions of the other face buttons, so it’s still just a four button controller like the Gravis.
It was supplanted later by the Thunderpad Digital, which is a very similar shape but now each of those four face buttons are in control of their own destiny, and there’s these additional two buttons labelled 1 dot and 2 dots, although we both know they mean Start and Select. The non-digital version has them etched in the mould to remind you of what you could have won. If you believe the boxes, this unprecedented level of buttonage means that the Digital version needs DOS 5 or higher, or Windows 95 to work properly, as opposed to DOS 3.3
Of course, given the era, both attach through the Midi / Gameport interface, and modern computers don’t come with them, and even if they did modern Windows versions don’t support gameports and the drivers that fancier controllers and joysticks need. See, forced obsolescence isn’t a recent development, as the landfills of functional but unsupported flight sticks and racing setups will attest to.
As such getting this working would be a bit of a pain. My options would be to pick up some active adapter like the Rockfire USB Nest or the Necroware adapter, although building that would be an episode in itself. I could instead buy a computer of the era, but I don’t have either the space or the money for that. Retro computing hardware pricing has rocketed in price as badly as DDR5 lately. So, here’s option three, not bothering with it. I’m afraid I’ve already spent more money on this video that no sane person would be interested in that I can justify. Thankfully I cater exclusively to the insane. Takes one to know one.
After all, most of what we need to know about a controller is how it feels in the hand, and it’s decidedly fine, for the era. It’s been a long time since I held a Gravis gamepad, but from memory this is a good bit better in the hands, with curves in most of the right places, ooh err missus. Like most of these earlier pads they are a bit smaller than we have become accustomed to.
Given that I can’t test it fully I won’t harp on too much about the way these buttons feel, as maybe they’re broken, or maybe just like me, they are worn down by being more than thirty years old. They’re oddly inconsistent, with these turbo buttons up top feeling okay, but the main action buttons being decidedly squdgier with much less of a travel distance.
The shoulder buttons are, well, speaking from the age of adjustable shoulder triggers, going back to just a plain old button is a bit of a culture shock, and they’re not particularly pleasant to use, as far as I can tell from just sitting here clicking them.
I can’t commit to the D-pad actually working as well as it feels, but if it did, I’d have been pretty happy with this back in the day. It’s a bit flat, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of travel to it but I think that’s manageable. Four action buttons are a bit limiting, as anyone who’s played Street Fighter games on the Gameboy Advance will attest to, so the Digital version would have beet preferred, but as best as I can tell this seems like a solid start for Logitech in this arena.
There was one more revision of this controller that’s a bit of a missing link between eras. This picture here shows what I believe is the four button Thunderpad rebranded in the colours and design language of the Wingman era. I’ve not been able to find any available to confirm, but I can at least show you it’s most obvious successor.
This is the Wingman Precision, the simplest form of the design language that Logitech used either side of the millennium. This was launched in 1998, and in came in both newfangled USB and gameport variants. This is the USB flavour, coming in a tasteful transparent blue as was the style at the time, and really ought not to have ever gone out of style. It is a boss look, top tier, no notes.
It’s a starkly different beast, and while it’s most likely taking inspiration from the PlayStation controllers with these larger handles, it’s very much its own thing. They’re much longer, as you can see comparing here with a PlayStation 4 controller. These are almost comfortable, and if the radius on that outer edge was just a little bigger it’d be worlds better. As it stands, a smidgen awkward for long play sessions.
The other obvious point of differentiation is the D-pad. And just look at it, and it’s weird-ass shape that defies easy explanation. It has more in common with a paint splatter than any geometric shape. Maybe it’s a distant cousin to the Squircle? I’m christening it the Squonkle.
There’s four face buttons and two shoulder buttons, and in a lot of ways they are similar to the Thunderpad, with the bottom two buttons having a different travel distance to the top two which is inconsistent at best and irritating at worst. It’s hard to feel that your button presses are consistently registered, so it just does not inspire confidence.
The shoulder buttons would appear to be better from looking at them, with a much larger surface area with a texture to them, so there’s no mistaking where you should be fingering, ooh err missus. Oddly, this has made them feel much worse, and they now take a borderline uncomfortable amount of force to use, at least over longer sessions.
The way I normally check how well I can get on with d-pads and buttons is to run through Street Fighter Alpha 2, a game I’ve been playing on and off since getting it on the Saturn back in the previous millennium. If I can dragon punch and fireball consistently, then it’s reaching good-enough status.
In use, it’s overall just fine, thanks. The unorthodox d-pad, to be fair, is getting the job done. I’m not sure that if used long-term it’d be the most comfortable design, but it’s working, and to a degree the same can be said of the face and shoulder buttons. I don’t like them, but they’re functional.
That said, to my mind, this is a bit of a step backwards. It’s much less comfortable in the hands, mostly from the more angular nature of it. Maybe it’s this that has left this feeling a bit cheap, more so than the Thunderpad at any rate.
I suppose that’s because it was cheap. If an old IGN article is to be believed, it was $10. That excuses quite a lot of my criticisms, particularly given that it was apparently well built enough to be working nearly thirty years on.
At the time that’s pretty good value. You could spend two to four times as much on joypads not that much better than it, so if you were on a tight budget or just needed something for occasional player two use, this is a step up from the Mad Catz-tier instant e-waste that you’d get on the PlayStation and the likes.
If you were spending a bit more, Logitech had a couple of options for you. Also appearing in 1998, we have the Wingman Gamepad and the reason I’m making this video, the Wingman Gamepad Extreme. The “Extreme” here stands for motion controls, beating the Wii to the punch by eight years.
Other than the motion controls, these are practically identical, bar a change to one button and losing the awesome transparent blue stylings, so let’s get that non-Extreme version in the bin. We only deal with the most Extreme, Radical, Groovy, and Totally Tubular devices on this channel.
These both ship with this gameport to USB doodad, beating the USB-C MacBook to the punch for that #donglelife. I believe this is ultimately a passive pass-through with the controller’s logic board knowing whether to speak USB or DB-15 as appropriate – as least that’s my guess as to why it doesn’t work with the Thunderpad.
It’s an evolution of the Squonkle D-pad from the Precision, which remains just as silly. But finally, our long national nightmare is over and we have the proper Classic Sega style layout of six face action buttons. This is the correct layout, and I will brook no further discussion on the matter.
These are much more consistent in feel that the Precision pad, so a step up in that regard. They are more rounded and more comfortable to use. Indeed, we can say that about the pad as a whole. The curved mouldings are a lot more comfortable in the hand, although the overall shape of it isn’t quite right. It’s a bit too flattened out, and doesn’t feel quite balanced in the hand.
The shoulder buttons have again changed, and these do sit better in the hand with a much more comfortable trigger press, but again, the recurring theme for modern play is that it’s weird they aren’t analogue.
However, it’s easy enough to reach both the Dpad and the face buttons, and they are hadokening and shoryukening well enough. So, for me at least, these Wingman Gamepads are better joypads for the one on one fighters from Capcom and the like that were both the style at the time and my particular jam.
But we’re here for the motion controls, which were pitched as giving you the benefits of an analogue joystick and the precision of the digital controls in the one device. It was a compelling enough idea to get me on board at least.
In practice, it was a feature either way ahead of its time or a gimmick that never worked as well as advertised. Or, well, maybe somewhere in between, as this is an idea that’s been revisited by both Valve with the Steam controllers and Deck, and Sony with their Sixxaxxisss controllers. There’s a hardcore of controller users particularly into the Steam Input paired with the Steam controller who swear by, for example, using the stick or touchpad for broad strokes aiming, and motion controls for the micro-adjustments.
Personally, I’ve never been able to give up a keyboard and mouse for FPS aiming, and the now-standard dual analogue sticks and pad work well enough for everything else that I don’t routinely keep either a Fight or Flight Stick hooked up. But back in 1998 that was a mad-man’s dream of a far off future, so let’s return to what it’s like to wrangle this beast.
Getting it working in Windows 11 is a simple matter of plugging it in, because all the motion controlled stuff is being handled in the controller. Great for compatibility across all games, but not so great for usability. Logitech used to have software for remapping buttons and whatnot for this and I think all of the pads we’re looking at today, but it’s long since stopped working in modern Windows. My memory tells me it could do some calibration for this, but it’s quite frequently wrong. At any rate, this and all the pads we speak of today still work with the standard Windows drivers in Windows 11.
Hitting this sensor button is, in effect, remapping the d-pad to the roll of a hat switch, and your tilting forward, back, left and right becomes the analogue stick inputs. Well, it defaults to that setting, but that doesn’t comply with this video’s continutity. Would you have cared? It’s too late to tell. Crashing on.
And y’know what, it actually works pretty well for what it is, frankly better than my memory of it so maybe there’s a touch of nostalgia creeping in. It’s pretty sensitive, so you don’t need to wave it around in comically exaggerated fashion to get it to do anything. If anything, it’s too sensitive, it’s actually reasonable tough to keep my X-Wing on the straight and narrow. Or maybe I need to cut back on the caffeine.
It’s honestly pretty fun playing space combat games this way. I hesitate to say more immersive, and it’s certainly not the way to go for ultimate accuracy, but it’s a cool novelty in short bursts.
It’s exacerbated here by me being at a weird angle to try and get this on camera, but after maybe fifteen minutes my wrists were eager for a break, so it’s a control pad with an entirely new axis of bad ergonomics. To be fair, in normal use it’s better, but still not suitable for marathon gaming sessions.
And it’s still just effectively one stick and ten buttons, which is plenty for X-Wing but not for Flight Simulator or anything more complicated to control. Driving games can also work, but prefereably if you can configure a deadzone in software, otherwise it’s a bit twitchy. For I hope obvious reason it’s not going to be anyone’s first choice for Counter-Striking or Call of Dutying, so this is a device with a very limited number of use cases. Was this worth the around $35 I believe it launched at?
Well, when was the last time a controller actually evoked even a little bit of joy? This joins the short list of controllers like the Dreamcast fishing rod and maracas controllers, the Band Hero instruments and any lightgun ever as something that actually enhances your gameplay experience, even if it’s exceedingly limited in other scenarios. Although trying to play SoulCalibur with a fishing rod was a lot of fun too.
Anyway, I digress. This thing is of limited value in 2026 but I love it regardless. Let’s see what else Logitech have in store for us.
If we’re going chronologically, we should be talking about the Wingman Rumblepad next, but if you’ll allow it, I’d like to cover 2002’s WingMan Action Pad first, as I think it’s a little more interesting by virtue of what it doesn’t have.
See, there’s just the one analogue stick on this pad, so I suppose Logitech are again copying Sega’s homework as this feels more like a Dreamcast influence than a N64 one, or the Saturn’s Analogue pad if you are a man of taste and refinement.
It’s also retaining the six front button layout as mandated by the heavens, so that’s nice, and therefore automatically makes this a great joypad. I will brook no further discussion on the matter. There are the usual two shoulder buttons, and as usual they aren’t great feeling.
There is one other analogue control, though. There’s a throttle slider up above the right shoulder button, a relic of the days when space combat and flight sims were the order of the day. A simpler and better time, and I will brook no further discussion on the matter.
The Squonkle has de-evolved back into the form seen on the Wingman Precision, and indeed overall this looks and feels more like an evolution of the Precision joypad than the Wingmen Gamepads, being a bit more on the angular side and therefore a bit less comfortable. It’s slightly weightier and more substantial than the Precision pad, so it does feel like a more premium product, at only a slightly more premium $20 price tag, as best as I can gather.
In general, running this through the Street Fighter testing gives a similar feeling to the Precision, but the extra buttons mean I can have my preferred manpunching layout, so that helps a great deal. However, the d-pad still refuses to spark joy. Again, it’s functional but it would be hard to go use this full time.
The analogue stick surprised me somewhat by functioning perfectly well, after nearly 25 years. Like most of the sticks we’ll cover today it can’t be clicked in as an extra button. It feels a bit different to modern joypad analogue sticks, which tend to have more resistance and a bit more eagerness to snap back to neutral. That might be an age thing, but I think not as it makes this feel more like the older PC analogue joysticks, which makes sense.
Indeed, it made light work of X-Wing Special Edition, which has extensive controller remapping so it’s easy to come up with something workable. Incidentally, if you’re wondering what the mode button on these pads does, it swaps between the dpad and analogue stick acting as the HAT switch.
The throttle slider, it turns out, is a very useful additional control to have, and it’s a real shame that it’s gone extinct in the modern era.
If this was just a bit more comfortable, with analogue triggers and a more conventional Dpad this would be an excellent joypad for Dreamcast and Saturn emulation, rather than a decent one. It’s also pretty good for the sort of space combat sims that I still enjoy, and some of them get a bit confused with a second analogue stick so perhaps it still has some purpose.
But of course, that same lack of a second analogue stick means that it’s going to be hobbled quite severely in modern games that expect one so unless you have a clear use case for one, I’m not recommending you hop on eBay to pick one up.
Still, a really cool novelty that I’m glad to have to fiddle with.
Part of why the Action Pad is interesting to me is the earlier existence of the controller we skipped over, this WingMan RumblePad which came in both wired and this Cordless variant. Released around Y2K, as best as I can gather, this makes it one of the earliest 2.4Ghz wireless controllers that pretty much standard these days.
However, take a look at the wired version. Clearly this shares a great deal of DNA with the action pad so I won’t retread that ground – same D-pad, same overall shape, same throttle slider, same buttons, but looky here – two analogue sticks, as they continue to evolve towards basically being a PlayStation DualShock controller. So, if the timelines the internet tells me are correct, Logitech spent two years to decide to release basically the same controller with one less analogue stick. That’s deviant behaviour and no mistake.
Let’s return to the Cordless Rumblepad then, which shares the same analogue sticks but is otherwise heavily redesigned, I assume to accommodate the then sort of cutting edge wirelessness of it. You’d have paid about $80 for this at launch, so let’s see what that gets you.
Speaking of, look at the size of this thing. I’ll never complain about the Xbox Elite’s mildly inconvenient dongle size again. This looks like it should be scanning credit cards in a downmarket restaurant.
What might not come across in the video is the heft of this thing – with these dimensions and four AA batteries required, it’s giving the Xbox Duke controller a run for its money. I presume a lot of that weight is to service the rumble motors, which unfortunately appears to be the one thing across all these pads going forward that won’t work in Windows without the now obsolete and unsupported drivers. At least, I couldn’t get it to fire up.
A shame, as this would be quite comfortable, if not for the weight of the batteries. With them removed, I’d have been quite happy with this shape of controller, I think. It sits well enough in the hand, it’s just too damn heavy to use for extended periods.
The Dpad looks more conventional, having said goodbye to the Squonkle, but to be honest it doesn’t feel much different. It’s still very flat, and there’s very little travel to it, so it’s not much of an improvement over the previous designs. In fact, it might be a regression, I’m having a harder time pulling off my Hadokens and Shoryukens than the older designs I’m admittedly more used to. Losing to Birdie? Humiliating.
The face buttons are a step up though, taller and with a more definite action and travel to them. These face buttons with some of the later D-pad designs would be a great combo.
The shoulder buttons are still pretty poor though. They’re again digital buttons, but this time we have four. They are easier to actuate, so they are certainly better, but the positioning is a bit unusual and I think assume that you’ll be holding them with your middle and index fingers continually. I prefer, most likely incorrectly, to just move my index finger between button and trigger on modern controllers.
That said, it’s handling the space combat games well, and the throttle slider remains useful.
Looking at it in 2026, the obvious weak point is the lack of analogue triggers. I suppose that doesn’t matter in every game, I doubt most FPS gamers would care, but it makes driving games a bit more awkward. I’d rather use the triggers for accelerating and braking than the right analogue stick, but I suppose I could get used to it.
Really cool that a pioneering wireless controller that’s about 26 years old remains somewhat useable and relevant, and an interesting thing to have from that historical viewpoint, but I would not be having this heavy boi as my main controller in the modern day.
This was followed up by, what else, the Logitech RumblePad 2 Cordless in 2004, which also came in a Cord-full variety, and a non-rumble capable flavour called, boringly, the Dual Action Gamepad.
Ah, so if this is a Dual Action pad, and has two sticks, and the Action Pad had one stick, logically Logitech must call a stick an Action. Gents, we have cracked the code.
The dongle technology remains the pretty much the same, at least externally. If the sticker on the bottom wasn’t different, I’d assume they were the same. Clearly power efficiency has been improved, with this only needing two double AAs to function.
And, well, viewed from a distance this is just a PlayStation controller, and thus not the most interesting device. There are a few points of difference, such as the circular D-pad that I actually prefer over the PS button-type layout, and there’s a slightly different compliment of non-action buttons.
As I’ve beaten to death, six face action buttons being the best layout is the hill I choose to die on, so losing that sucks.
It’s not exactly the same as the PS4 or 5 controllers, more like a DualShock 2 or 3, and, well, in the hand it’s close enough to these modern-ish pads that there’s not all that much to tell you that you won’t already be familiar with.
As mentioned, I generally prefer this type of dpad, although this one is a little bit plasticky. Some rubberised texture would not go amiss, although it’s still the best so far for Street Fighter.
It has clicky button when pushing the analogue sticks, so this is very close to the full complement of modern joypad controls, with again the very notable exception of analogue triggers.
Regardless, it handles X-Wing and Rebel Galaxy Outlaw well enough, and in most regards it’s the same as using a modern PlayStation controller with just a few bugbears to remind you that this is in fact a control pad that old enough to vote.
I’d have been happy with this back in 2004, especially at a reasonable price of thirty dollars, but these days it’s too old to have the feature set to be fully usable in 2026, but not old enough to have any particular novelty factor to it.
Just when you think you have all the answers, Logitech changes the question. This Precision Gamepad, shorn of the Wingman brand entirely, was released in 2010, although you’d be forgiven for thinking it released before the year 2000. I can’t find a concrete price for this but It seems to have been about $20
This is a very basic digital only joypad, most similar to the original PlayStation controller I suppose. As such there’s not all that much to tell you about it, but it is a heck of a lot better than the similarly be-buttoned Wingman Precision and Thunderpads we spoke of so long ago.
The dpad is pretty good. It’s very similar to that on the Rumblepad 2 but I feel it may be a little more responsive, but that could easily just be a difference in the levels of wear and tear.
The face and shoulder buttons are nothing special, but function as well, or better than anything we’ve looked at apart from the Rumblepad 2.
What this has resulted in is maybe the highest SF special move hit rate so far. I mean, it’s not fancy or exciting, but it’s getting the job done.
Of course, as with the pads we looked at earlier the lack of analogue sticks and triggers holds this back so much in modern gaming that it’s not really worth considering unless you very much enjoy emulating the original PlayStation.
It’s got to be the least remarkable joypad we’ve looked at today, but it’s doing what it’s designed to do in quiet, unassuming fashion. Very demure, very mindful, very nice, very evil. I don’t need it, but I don’t hate it, and neither should you need or hate this.
We are now brought all the way up to Logitech’s current controller offerings. Well, semi-current – at this point they’ve been on the market since 2010 without change, so either Logitech’s really confident in them, or they’ve given up on R & D. Indeed, apart from the analogue triggers and labelling the face buttons like the Xbox, there’s not much change from the RumblePad 2.
This is the F310, the base model. There was a now discontinued step up, the F510, which I understand was the same wired controller but with rumble functionality, and the F710, which further added wireless capability.
This does bridge the old PC gaming scenes and the new with a toggle between direct input and Xinput standards, although these days for me most of that struggle has been shouldered by Steam input.
I wound up using this for a lot of the Razer Edge emulation testing, and it worked completely acceptably for casual use. I feel I should be giving you more of a description of it, but, well, look at it. If you’ve been anywhere near a DualShock controller in your life you know how this feels in the hand.
It has the full modern compliment of sticks and triggers, so it’s suitable for all the games that Xbox and PS pads can handle. It puts in a reasonable performance in Street Fighter test, although have I mentioned that I prefer the Sega style six face buttons? Because that is my preference. I thought you should know.
It’s also completely acceptable in X-Wing and Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, and the triggers mean that I can play driving games in the way I prefer. There’s not all that much for me to complain about with the F310.
That said, I’d not recommend these over the current Xbox or PlayStation pads, even with a current price of £25 for this F310 or an extra fiver for the wireless version. Much as I like the D-pad, the triggers are stiff with a relatively short throw and while there’s nothing particularly wrong with the rest of the buttons or the overall ergonomics of the F310 in hand, it’s only real selling point is feeling like a control pad from a decade ago.
There’s now budget controllers with more modern parts like drift resistant Hall effect analogue sticks and more modern design sensibilities from the likes of GameSir and 8bitdo that are a better value, and if you want something more classy and higher end it feels like a cheap toy compared to my Xbox Elite controller.
This story might have been different on launch nearly sixteen years ago, and again, it’s a perfectly useable controller, but in the modern era there’s not much reason to get this unless maybe you’re really into PS3 emulation and want something close to the DualShock 3, a controller which remains a bit of a faff to setup in Windows.
Laudably, Logitech are still selling their Adaptive Gaming Kits for those that need it, but in terms of controller development, that is your lot, you are bang up to date with what Logitech wants to stick in your palms.
It’s by no means every joypad they’ve ever made, but we need to draw a line somewhere, and for this video, that going to be it. There are still many oddities in Logitech’s cupboard, particularly those mostly aimed at consoles that would also work on PCs. For example, their Chillstream controllers in both PlayStation and Xbox layouts that blow air over your hands for sweatier sessions.
There’s also the deranged PlayStation 2 Netplay controller, which does look for all the world like a keyboard with a dual shock cut in half and welded to it, although that keyboard is detachable, presumably to use with all the games that are mouse and keyboard compatible. Which may be as many as a dozen, according to NeoGAF, so definitely money well spent.
And I’m sure there’s someone screaming that I’m not covering the Cyberman and its follow-up, which were a sort of 3D mouse, like those used in CAD applications, but that belongs in a weird mouse episode, not joypads.
It’s a shame that Logitech went from innovating in this space with the likes of motion controls and throttle sliders to basically just copying Sony’s homework.
Not to throw shade at Sony’s research and development teams, but some paddles on the back, slightly better rumble motors, and useless touchpads doesn’t feel like they are pushing close to the perfect evolution of the controller.
Microsoft are worse, being substantially more boring and barely refining the Xbox 360 pad in the twenty plus years since that came out. Again, another innovator in the PC controller space falling asleep on their laurels.
Maybe Valve’s just released revision to their touchy-feely controller will be a leap forward, even if it will cost more than I think is warranted for it. I’d like to get a hold of one and test it out some time in the future, but until then…
If you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.