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
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The popularity of the WASD configuration was basically popularized by one Quake player Denis “Thresh” Fong who won Romero’s Ferrari at a quakecon in 1997.
https://www.pcgamer.com/how-wasd-became-the-standard-pc-control-scheme/
From then on the WASD configuration become widely adopted and then subsequent generations of FPS games (SIN, Half-life) used that as a default making it the norm.
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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.
Back in the day most people used the arrow keys. I always assumed it was because of the close proximity of more keys by moving it to wasd
I specifically remember my uncle playing doom in mid 90s and using the mouse to move … like pushing forward to go forward and right and left to turn. It looked so tedious I never wanted to even ask to play. Years later I got my 1st PC which came with Half Life. There was no other way to play but WASD by then.
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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