Actually, I did buy a more expensive joystick once, but that was a couple of years after the end of the Atari VCS era. It was the worst possible decision: It was a 'Quickjoy', a brand known for its bad robustness, but it had a larger base (the standard Quickjoy could only really be used if I used the left hand to hold the base down on the table) and a clock. I guess it was the latter which made it expensive. A completely useless gimmick, of course, and the actual joystick broke after two or three weeks

Really?! Judging from some broken keys and a couple of dead mice, I killed while doing similar tasks, my guess would be have been around five, maybe ten… Well maybe there is something to it, that those games were just created to increase joystick sales.

Me, probably two dozen. It didn't help that I didn't learn and kept buying the cheapest ones instead of investing a little bit more once.

OK, in my whole gaming career I owned just one joystick (which broke while playing space-flight sims btw.) so I have to ask: How bad were games like this really for the controllers? How many joystick did you actually kill this way?

Feel free to share anything about The Activision Decathlon (1983) here!