Masahiro Sakurai must have been generations ahead of the rest with his idea.

In the video embedded below, Sakurai, who is now partially retired from the gaming industry, talks about how he wanted a scrolling feature for Nintendo’s GameCube controller, which will reportedly appear on the Switch’s successor. Sakurai has worked for Nintendo for three decades (not always as an in-house developer), so he’s been around for the Nintendo 64’s successor platform (he created Super Smash Bros. Melee) and has gained attention with a series of videos on YouTube. (And he has more interesting things to say in his videos. It’s worth subscribing to!)

Many of his videos are about anecdotes and development principles, and his latest video is about the user interface. Sometimes Nintendo would ask him what he thought about new hardware that was being made, and in some cases he would share his thoughts on features with Anagy N. One of the features he had wanted since GameCube was to have a scroll wheel-like element on the controller (a jog dial) that would replace the L and R buttons, making it much easier to switch between commands in the menu and, he said, to quickly select the function you wanted.

This didn’t come to fruition for the GameCube, but now there are rumors of a Switch successor that, albeit a few generations later, will see Nintendo take Sakurai’s idea on board. This is due to the fact that a TSA agent came across one of Nintendo’s researchers at work and found his controller’s scroll wheels in his luggage. These are close to triggers and could be considered similar to the mouse solution.

Unfortunately, we have to add that all of this is not official yet, as Nintendo hasn’t even named the successor to the Switch yet, and it might not be until the summer, possibly fall, that a platform with a GPU based on Nvidia’s Ampere architecture will be released.

Source: GameRant