how did the WASD keys become the norm for movement on pc games? Couldnt it have been ESDF or some other set of keys?
In: 1807
The real answer is key rollover.
I am flabergasted that more people dont know this.
Before the days of common cheap mechanical keyboards many cheap membrane boards had a big problem. You couldn’t press many combinations of keys at the same time you were only guaranteed 2 keys at the same time. Also known as 2 key roll over.
However when engineering keyboards engineers had to consider that there were many 3 or more key combinations that might be needed. Such as CTRL ALT DELETE. For this reason engineers would typically do a little extra key roll over for the modifier keys or ones you use often like space. So you would be able to hit 3 or 4 or even 5 keys at the same time if you were pressing SHIFT, ALT, CTRL, TAB.
So naturally it made sense in games which require constant input of many keys to put the keys over by those keys in this case WASD. If you can reach a little ESDF isn’t too bad.
but the real question you should have been asking is why not something else, like YGHJ?
And the answer is still the same but now days you should move over to something like YGHJ for any 1 handed keyboard and mouse game such as most FPS games.
And to be clear various games were using ESDF and many people said that was the thing to do star craft, tribes etc…. Still reachable for people with average or bigger hands, but you have to understand that decisions arent made often just for average they are to get the widest compatibility possible even a child can use WASD but maybe not ESDF.
Any time people tried to use alternative configs they would run into problems and so the issues kept pushing the norm toward WASD. And even today its still an issue if you dont have a NKRO (any key roll over) keyboard that can take 6 or more simultaneous inputs at the same time.
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