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After all the hubbub over Sony bragging about their Emmy - the online bitching followed by Sony’s retraction - and the Academy’s eventual clarification of the award(s), Nintendo took its good ol’ time to brag about its Emmy. Sending out a press release just after CES on Jan. 12, 2007, the somewhat slower response allowed enough time for all the facts to come in for a brief, cool-headed and accurate PR response. Bureaucracy might have had something to do with it, but the delay paid off as Sony’s efforts pretty much backfired with online fans.

The Emmy for Nintendo was for its development of the D-pad. If you’ve ever seen the guts of an Atari 2600 joystick, it’s easy to see how that technology could be turned into a stickless, button-based controller. It took the Nintendo tech to work out better specs and put it into the flatter - and far more sturdy - NES/Famicom controllers which reached the US in 1985.

Not to leave the other game-related Emmy winners out of the picture, John Carmack and id Software respectively won for contributions to rendering technology as the lead programmer on Doom and technological leadership in rendering breakthroughs with Quake’s technology. Also, Microsoft won one for DirectX, and Sony grabbed a second Emmy for the Xross Media Bar GUI - originally used on the PSX (media center) and now part of the PSP and PS3.

Read [Nintendo] Site [National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences] Via [Kotaku]