[cesarb]

A traditional videogame controller is not much more than a few switches and perhaps a few potentiometers, see for instance the pinout for the Master System: https://www.smspower.org/Development/ControllerPort

That is, someone who started playing videogames in the SMS/NES days might have formed a mental model of the controller being mostly a passive device, with at most a few active chips to multiplex the pins in the interface, to allow for more buttons than there are pins.

[unwind]

Sure (I was there) but the same can kind of be said about mice and keyboards, too.

Ever since USB took off ~30 years ago and basically killed off raw I/O pins on the front of computers, human interface devices have required microcontrollers on board.

Edit: added timeline.

[cesarb]

> but the same can kind of be said about mice and keyboards, too.

AFAIK, even old keyboards (AT and PS/2 connectors) already had a microcontroller, and the same was true of mice. The communication between the keyboard or mouse and the computer was through a serial protocol, instead of the computer directly reading the keyboard matrix or the mouse buttons and wheels. The exception might have been computers with built-in keyboards. But the joystick port (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port) directly exposed the buttons and potentiometers from the joystick, instead of talking to a microcontroller on it.

[unwind]

Yeah, that was what the "kind of" was meant to shadily cover. Thanks for clarifying.