proved to be ungainly and unreliable due to the filing, alienating many consumers at the time. During that same year, General Consumer Electronics introduced the Vectrex, a vector graphics based system which used a self-centering analog thumbstick. In 1985, Sega's third-person rail shooter game Space Harrier, released for the arcades, introduced an analog flight stick for movement. It could register movement in any direction as well as measure the degree of push, which could move the player character at different speeds depending on how far the joystick is pushed in a certain direction. Sega's analog Mission Stick was released for the Saturn console on September 29, 1995. On April 26, 1996, Sony released a potentiometer-based analog joystick for use in Flight-Simulation games. The Sony Dual Analog FlightStick featured twin analog sticks and was used in games such as Descent to provide a much greater degree of freedom than the typical digital joysticks of the day. Analog thumbsticks The NES max, released in 1988, is the first instance of a thumb pad-based joystick controller. The Quickshot Chimera 2 is another example of an early thumbstick controller available to the NES. In 1989, the Japanese company Dempa released an analog thumbstick controller called the XE-1 AP for the Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) console and several Japanese computers. It was intended to replicate the HOTAS controls found in Sega’s arcade games at the time, such as After Burner II. This controller included a thumb-operated control stick which allowed for varying levels of movement and near-360-degree control, translating into far more precise movements than were possible with a D-pad. It also distinguished itself by having the player control it with the thumb, similar to a D-pad, rather than gripping a handle. It was released twice, with a price drop upon its re-release in 1994. A few games on the Genesis (as well as the Sega CD and 32X) supported the controller’s analog stick functions, which also includes Sega’s first-party games for the system. It being much more lightly to be on the second release as it was to compete with the Nintendo 64 and also supported multiple hardware platforms. Initially announced in late 1995, Nintendo released their Nintendo 64 controller on June 23, 1996, in Japan. The new controller included a thumb-operated control stick which, while a digital stick (the analog stick operated on the same principles as a mechanical ball-type computer mouse), still