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
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, with PC gaming still being fairly new, you’d often see a wide range of control schemes. Standards like that simply didn’t exist yet.
It was basically lots of trial and error by lots of different people. Gamers that did well in competitive gaming shared their configurations and their fans would copy them, hoping they’d have similar success.
From a functional perspective, the upside down T-shape of WASD is fairly comfortable and it’s close to function keys like shift, control, tab and the first few number keys.
That said, there’s no particular reason why it couldn’t have been ESDF. With the F key being the default starting position for the left hand index finger, it does make a compelling reason to use it over WASD.
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