How did the WASD combination appear?

    For me, WASD is an intuitive keyboard shortcut for games. But the story could go a different way, and we would get an EDSF or ASXC. Let's find out why we play this way.



    Today, WASD seems an inevitable and irreplaceable key combination for games. As soon as mouse control appeared in 3D shooters, it became difficult, at least right-handed, to keep fingers on the arrows. The keys on the left side of the keyboard are more convenient, and there it is easier to get to Shift and Space. But this WASD now seems to be the optimal and only right choice, and twenty years ago few players used this combination.

    At the dawn of shooters, there was no single standard for keyboard control, gamers tried to independently choose the best option. Game developers set various combinations for movement by default, including arrows. The System Shock shooter in 1994 offered ASDX. Descent used AZ to move forward and backward, and it was possible to peek around the corner with QE. Gamers have tried other combinations, such as ZXCV and ESDF.

    The generally accepted WASD standard took several years to firmly enter the everyday life of players around the world. It is not known who was the first to use this combination, but a very significant contribution to its popularization was made by one person - Dennis “Thresh” Fong , the greatest player in Quake.

    Founding father


    Dennis Fong won the personal Ferrari 328 of John Fermack, founder of ID Software, in the first national Quake tournament in 1997. And while he was killing Tom “Entropy” Kimzey, Phong's right hand was on the mouse and his left was on the WASD combination.



    Dennis Fong played Doom with his brother a few years before the championship using only the keyboard. But in Doom, there was no point in the mouse, because looking up and down was not necessary. You directed the weapon towards the enemy, not being guided by its position along the vertical axis.

    Both Dennis Fong and his brother Lyle were great players. But Dennis lost to his brother, who used trackball, so one summer Fong decided to learn how to play with the mouse. And he became invincible. “As soon as I made this transition, my skills increased exponentially,” says Fong, adding that after that he stopped losing.

    This was followed by experiments, for example, WADX. But in the end, Fong found WASD and began to use only this combination. Did he come up with this scheme? Probably no. Other people also tried to use the left side of the keyboard in Doom at the same time. But without Phong's influence, the combination might not have become the standard. There were EDSF, or even the weird ZXC. I wonder what key we would turn on the sight if we went to the ZXC, and to move back click the right mouse button?

    “I'm definitely not going to reap the laurels of the creator of the WASD combination. I stumbled upon her by accident. I am sure that other people at the same time began to use it simply because it seemed convenient to them. But I definitely believe that I helped popularize it for a specific group of gamers, in particular for shooter players, ”says Dennis Fong. This key combination was spelled out in his Thresh's Quake Bible as an “inverted T,” and this “Quake guide” from one of the first esports players mattered. Phong’s opinion was significant even before his career as a player in Quake — before that, he was a Doom champion.

    The first shooters with WASD by default


    The history of modern first-person shooters begins in the 1970s. One of the first games in the genre was Maze War - “War in the Maze”. The game with a first-person view involved moving in a maze, the player could go forward, backward and turn to the sides, with each time - 90 degrees. There was no need for precise aiming at a specific point, you could shoot at the enemy simply by looking in the right direction. This shooter grandfather could be played on Mac, Palm OS, NeXT Computer, Xerox Star.



    Hovertank 3D, one of the first 3D shooters, came out in 1991. They only played in it not for a man, but for a tank that rescues hostages and kills monsters in a maze. It was developed by id Software.



    Two years later, id Software releases Doom, one of the most significant games among first-person shooters. Did this music play in your head too? I am sure that most of you know this game not by hearsay.



    As mentioned above, there was no need for a mouse in Doom. It was enough arrows and keys to shoot and change weapons. The mouse appeared later. At the same time, Quake is not the first game in which they began to use it, before it was Marathon . But she became less influential compared to the legendary Quake.

    In 1997, among the options were, for example, A Shift ZX, where A is forward and Z is backward. In 1999, System Shock 2 was released, where the movement was carried out by the WADX square, and you could sit on the S.



    But people asked questionsabout how Thresh plays, how his controls are configured: “After the demo of Phong’s winning game, I was stunned because this guy is moving so fast in Quake! It rotates 180 degrees so quickly that I don’t think it can be done with the mouse. I think he set up the keyboard for rocket jumps and this spread. ”

    John Carmack, one of the creators of Quake, added a Phong name configuration to the second part of the game. But it is unlikely that this made the layout of the most popular shooter in the world. In Quake 2, WASD was still as a separate layout. But in the 1998 Half-Life, for the first time for a shooter, the WASD combination left the bench and became the default control.



    In 1998, the Starsiege Tribes shooter was released, where WASD again defaults. Quake 3 in 1999 finally added WASD to its default settings. Then there were other shooters, but it was Half-Life, Starsiege Tribes, and Quake 3 that made the main contribution to the popularity of the layout. In 2004, World of Warcraft came out with the same default settings, and if WASD had not yet been the main one for everyone, the combination after WoW would definitely have come into use by millions of gamers.

    The same option for the movement was used as early as 1981 Castle Wolfenstein, but it was a 2D game with a left view. Today, the combination is used not only in shooters - it is a way to control the camera in strategies.



    If you play shooters and use this configuration, you must understand its advantages. When you hold your fingers on the WAD, ready at any time to shift the middle one to S to move backward, your little finger easily reaches Shift, and the thumb to the gap. And at the same time, you can easily change weapons to keys 1-4, if during the game it is necessary.

    What if not WASD?


    The WASD combination is located on the left side of the keyboard, and it is used when the mouse is in the right hand. But if you are left-handed, then shifting the control from the usual arrows located on the right to the left side of the keyboard loses its meaning. Therefore, it is likely that you use the arrows and the keys surrounding them to control the character in the game.

    Fallout 4 uses WASD by default. But there are people who switch the layout to ESDF. Players in this case are faced with a problem : the E key is designed to collect loot. And they collect everything that they see - because they go to this key, but you can’t change this setting in the game. Reddit users in the thread at the link above note that 10% of all gamers play on ESDF.

    Interestingly, Gabe Newell, the founder and CEO of Valve, does not use WASD. Its logic is that games should not take your hands away from their position in normal printing. Therefore, it also uses a right-flipped inverted T - ESDF. Another Half-Life developer, game designer Dario Casali, prefers ASXC.

    There are other options. Someone prefers RDFG. There are fans of TFGH. Even 5RTY and EDAF seem more convenient to some. And in whose camp are you?

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    If not WASD, then what?


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