Steel Battalion Controller

The Steel Battalion Controller is the most extravagant one-trick pony in gaming history. Released for the Xbox in 2002, it boasted 40 buttons, two joysticks, three foot pedals, and a $200 price tag—all for a single game, Steel Battalion: Line of Contact. Its complexity made it a collector's item, but its impracticality is unmatched: the controller took up a 2-foot-wide footprint and required a dedicated table, compared to the standard Xbox controller's 10-inch width. Only 100,000 units were sold, a fraction of the 1.5 million Xboxes sold in its first year, and the game's online servers shut down in 2007, rendering the hardware useless. At 2002 prices, the cost per button was $5, while a typical controller offered 10 buttons for $30—a 60% premium. It remains the most niche peripheral ever produced.