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
I started off on the Spectrum and BBC. The BBC tended to use zx for left and right, and ;/ (Which were above each other, rather than the typical 103-key PC slant) to go up and down.
The Spectrum tended to use QA for up/down, and OP for left/right.
Migrating to the PC, arrow keys, WASD and ESDF were commonly in use throughout quite a range of timeperiods. Doom used the arrow keys with ALT as a strafe modifier.
As others have mentioned, Quake, the Quake-engine (IDTech 2) and games that ran on that engine (Hexen II being a notable example) really popularised the mouse-look, WASD-move with the heel of the left-hand hitting Control to modify and the pinky to hit Shift for the other modifier.
Before this period, a lot of people felt that mice were, like many view gamepad controls today, slow, cumbersome and unusuable; not as refined and controlled as a keyboard interface. I can remember discussions with friends when Doom came out, because I used a mouse for preference to look (it was possible, though hard to configure). When later games, like Quake, came out, the use of a mouse became more normalised. Around the era of Unreal Tournament, the idea of using just keys was quite insane.
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