The push for an adaptive controller emerged around the time Microsoft launched the motion-sensing Kinect accessory in 2010, when gamers started to ask Microsoft if they could use it while in a wheelchair or with one arm. “So we wanted to make something that took some of the guesswork out, while still allowing gamers to use the controller in a way that fit each person’s unique needs in gameplay.”
“The gaming and disability community has been forced to come up with creative solutions to obstacles for a long time,” says Brannon Zahand, Senior Gaming Accessibility Program Manager at Microsoft. For example, some gamers have used pieces of foam or towels to better manipulate thumb-sticks that are too small or too far away from the gamer’s body. In a way, the XAC has formalized homemade adaptive designs disabled gamers have concocted at home for decades. Logitech sells an Adaptive Gaming Kit that includes light-touch buttons, large and small buttons, and pressure-sensitive variable trigger controls that can help you get started with designing an XAC arrangement that suits your needs and your body. Third-party input devices can be purchased separately and plugged into the XAC to create the ideal device. The XAC is fully customizable and allows gamers to save three controller profiles based on their needs and the specific games they’re playing.
Released in 2018, the Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC) is a large, flat gaming pad with two large buttons and nineteen 3.5mm ports to plug in external devices such as joysticks, buttons, switches, pedals, and other specially-designed devices. Nowadays, the Xbox brand is the only mainstream console maker with its own adaptive controller. Xbox in particular has long been the console that I never saw myself playing from the time of Halo: Combat Evolved, Xbox games have been particularly two-handy.
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Over time, I’ve stubbornly figured out how to play most things, though not always comfortably. Since then, I have used my knees and legs in creative ways to press L buttons as needed, and simply avoided games I couldn’t get to work for me. Eventually, I realized I didn’t need that, and pressed my stump into the joystick - much easier to use than the D-pad, even if it left an impression of concentric circles. They later bought me a strange miniaturized driver's seat controller with a wheel and pedals you’d press with your hands-perhaps a very early example of an adaptive controller. Later, my parents were convinced I wouldn’t be able to play Mario Kart 64 and taped the A button down, putting Yoshi in permanent acceleration. The controller’s D-pad was small and hard to press precisely with my limb, leaving little gaming calluses on my arm. Long before I was a fifteen-year-old pretending to be a pistol-wielding T-rex, my first video game experience was with Nintendo's SNES.