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There’s a lot of fact-free Sony vs Nintendo articles getting in the way of computing and technology news at the moment. For example, the folks at Nintendo UK are are currently wibbling about Sony supposedly “stealing Nintendo’s idea for a motion sensing controller“.

When I heard this I was reminded of a very cool joystick I once saw for (IIRC) the Sinclair Spectrum - back in the good old days when you typically needed to first buy a “joystick interface” before selecting your preferred controller.

What made this particular item so cool was that it was basically a vertically held stick, with mercury switches mounted tangentially to each other so that tilting forward, back, left and right could all be detected.

Sadly, for once, I could pull nothing from the web - so if anyone’s got a clue what the stick was called, please let me know.

Strangely however, what I did find was that the US Patent Office attributes the idea of a motion controller to a “Mr. Jacobs”, not Nintendo: giving it patent number: 5059958.

I also noticed that Nintendo were unsuccessfully sued by the patent owner in 2004.

Nintendo UK boss David Yarnton says “With Nintendo, I’m trying to think of anything we’ve copied… but I can’t”.

I wonder if criticising Sony over stealing a “Nintendo idea” was a little premature.