When Commodore released its VIC-20 computer in 1981, one of the peripherals it also released was a matching joystick. Cast in white plastic like the VIC-20, the Commodore VIC-1311 looked like an albino Atari joystick from the same time period. The resemblance was uncanny, and Atari took notice. On October 11, 1982, Atari sued.
The Commodore VIC-1311 and Atari CX40 joysticks
When Commodore designed its VIC-20 computer, it adopted more than one de facto standard from Atari. It used the same five-pin DIN connector for video as Atari did, and used almost the same pinout. An Atari video cable worked perfectly with a VIC-20. Commodore also adopted Atari’s 9-pin joystick connector, using the identical pinout. This allowed Atari joysticks to work on the VIC-20, unmodified. Commodore hoped to sell the VIC-20 as an upgrade to Atari 2600 owners, so this was undoubtedly intentional.
But Commodore wanted to sell a joystick of its own. After all, not everyone who bought a VIC-20 would already own joysticks from another system. And that’s where Commodore got into trouble. Its joystick looked just like an Atari joystick. And I’m not talking a passing resemblance either. The Gemstick was an example of a third party joystick that looked a lot like an Atari joystick.
Commodore’s joystick didn’t resemble the Atari design like the Gemstick. It looked like someone painted an Atari stick white and slapped a Commodore logo on it.
Atari suing Commodore for patent infringement
Atari said the Commodore VIC-1311 joystick infringed on its patents for the Atari CX40 joystick. The VIC-1311, Atari said, looked like the Atari product except for the color, and the inclusion of the Commodore logo on it, but was lower quality and prone to break prematurely. Atari said it didn’t want the broken joysticks to hurt its reputation.
The VIC-1311 doesn’t just look like a white CX40. You have to look very carefully at the two to discern any differences at all between them. There are subtle manufacturer’s marks in different places on each. And it’s clear that Commodore’s printed circuit board is a hand-drawn copy of the Atari PCB. It’s not a perfect copy, but functional, and close enough to be interchangeable with the Atari. That’s the thing about all the VIC-1311 parts. They aren’t perfect copies, but they’re so close that you can swap parts between the Commodore and Atari and everything fits.
Whether Commodore used lower quality plastics that made the ring inside its joystick more prone to breaking than the Atari isn’t something I can verify. But it’s an accusation that sounds very plausible and would be difficult for Commodore to disprove. And in the process of trying to disprove it, they could easily incriminate themselves.
But I can verify you can upgrade a Commodore VIC-1311, or repair a broken one, by swapping Atari parts into it. Better yet, you can swap in the upgraded parts from Best Electronics that make an Atari CX40 more durable and responsive than a brand-new original ever was.
Atari’s injunction
It didn’t take long for Atari to prevail. On November 9, 1982, Atari won a preliminary injunction forcing the VIC-1311 off the market. Commodore permanently removed them from the market soon after. Commodore appealed the ruling, but evidently wasn’t successful. At the time the press noted the ban probably wouldn’t hurt VIC-20 sales since VIC-20 buyers could just buy and use an Atari joystick.
On November 22, 1982, Commodore’s attorney, Richard Blumenthal circulated an internal memo instructing managers that anything picturing the old joystick couldn’t be used and any joysticks that customers returned couldn’t be sold. When asked for comment, chairman Irving Gould reportedly claimed the banned Commodore controllers weren’t popular anyway.
The new Commodore 1311 joystick
A new Commodore 1311 joystick, with the “VIC” prefixed dropped, appeared on the market soon after. It featured a slightly elongated base with the button moved to the middle, making it equally comfortable for right- or left-handed use. But the stick itself took on a more triangular shape than the hexagonal Atari design. Having used both in the 1980s, the Atari stick was much more comfortable to use. And I’m not saying that as a fan of the Atari stick. I thought the Atari CX40 was a mediocre joystick at best. The Commodore 1311 was a cheap piece of junk. The handle was stiff and fit awkwardly in your hand. It was ok enough for educational titles, but too stiff for fast-paced games that required quick reaction times. And if you played games that required sudden movement, it was prone to break.
Internally, the revised Commodore 1311 still worked the same way as the Atari CX40 did, with a printed circuit board with metal domes placed on top, secured with a piece of packing tape. A plastic ring at the end of the stick pressed down on the domes as you moved the stick, allowing movement in eight possible directions by pressing one dome or two. The internal design was so similar that an article in the November 1984 issue of RUN magazine about repairing Commodore 1311 joysticks said you could use all the same tricks to repair an Atari CX40. Besides the ring breaking, another fault the sticks could develop was getting stuck in one direction. This was caused by a dome sticking in the down position. You could cut away the tape to free a deformed dome, pop it back into a concave shape, then tape it back into place.
The new Commodore 1311 wasn’t popular and Commodore discontinued it sometime in 1984, leaving the joystick market to other companies. I always wondered why Commodore didn’t put Amiga’s better joystick design into production after it purchased Amiga in mid-August 1984, but the October 1984 issue of Byte has the answer on page 11. Amiga sold the joysticks to its manufacturing partner, Pride Electronics, before the deal with Commodore.
The Atari XEGS joystick
Somewhat ironically, there is an Atari joystick that closely resembles the Commodore VIC-1311 joystick. In 1987, when Atari released its XE game system, it included a CX40 joystick color matched to the light gray XE case. The resulting joystick very closely resembles a VIC-1311, but of course doesn’t bear a Commodore logo on it. Atari was of course well within its rights to make a CX40 in whatever other color they wanted.
But if you’re familiar with the VIC-1311 and ever come across what looks like a VIC-1311 without a Commodore logo on it and a very slightly different color, it’s probably an Atari XEGS stick. Or if you’re an Atari fan and wondering why something resembling an Atari XEGS stick with a Commodore logo on it exists, now you know why. It’s a Commodore knockoff from 1982.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.