good article, except none of the chips in any of the controls are microcontrollers. looks like the author is confusing IC with microcontroller. he even correctly points out that the NES one is a shift register.
In his defence, most people starting with tinkering nowadays start off with something like an Arduino (8-bit or even 32-bit micro) and there's not much besides the micro on those boards... which easily explains the confusion about the nomenclature, mixing up the subset (µC) with the superset (IC).
