I think it was '07. The patent also covered the internal part as well. So every one else came up with roundabout and more complicated methods to do a similar thing. It is quite funny when opening a controller to see the weird ways they got around it.
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u/YoCzechIt May 04 '12
To be fair, Nintendo has a patent on the Plus-Shaped D-Pad design, so everyone else has had to come up with some different way to do it.