Pushing Buttons

Speaking with Rienne, the “Controller Mother” about the Gamecube controller

How did you begin making controllers?

I started making these because my Melee play evolved into the realm of wanting modification and the best controller I possibly could while getting sick of controller blowouts or suboptimal behavior caused by wear. I was already a PC technician and an ex-physics major so a GCC kinda combines both of those angles and was a natural adaptation.

How many customizable points are there in a Gamecube controller?

As for customizable points there's honestly a lot more than you'd really expect you can customize a GCC down to the potentiometers, if a pot has a desirable trait but is on a bad controller you can just move it over and have better response on whatever axis you use it on. Sticks, stickbox, button and trigger pads, sliders, analog trigger response, button mods like height and balding, stick gate notching, the sticks themselves, digital press buttons, and that's not including anything aesthetic at all.

What are your thoughts on the analogue/digital elements of the Gamecube Controller?

In regards to the analog nature of a lot of things of the gamecube controller it's a huge point of desire for me and contention in the rest of the Melee community again, my controller work is really through the lens of Super Smash Bros. Melee, so I know these controllers through that eye, but in Melee the wait animation has a huge amount of options due to the analog variance of a control stick.

this is all of the options in one animation. The analog elements need to be extremely precise and well tested in order to be able to hit the things you're trying to hit in this game. Projects like B0XX and hitbox kinda spit in the face of the more analog-centric control stick idea for more modern concepts in Melee.

Do you consider why the Gamecube was the controller that has been replicated, supported, and maintained out of all the controllers before and after it?

Smash has a looooooot to do with it honestly. The GCC had a really large production line and became the fall back favorite input method in Melee and Brawl. It continued being produced in large bursts until 2008 when Nintendo put them on the backburner, then people started breaking them playing Brawl and Melee. As well as the pure nostalgia factor of gamecube games, keeping the wider market for them alive. The same thing happened with the release of smash 4 and ultimate, limited production lines of gamecube controllers got more people hooked on the input system and they became a defacto standard for a specific popular game franchise. A lot of people talk about how terrible it feels, and a lot talk about how good it feels, but damn near all of em use it to play smash lmao.

What are the steps to make a Gamecube controller?

Intake/cleaning-> testing -> functional repairs and improvements -> testing those results -> custom parts and aesthetic mods -> testing those additions -> functional mods -> testing those mods -> playtesting -> last round of component + value verification testing, with tests at the end of each step.

Interviewed by Benjamin Rait on April 14th, 2020