On several occasions we have mentioned that the keyboard/mouse combination offers a superior experience when gaming, but this idea did not come out of nowhere. Like many other things in the gaming world, this combination went through a long evolutionary process that began with a more prominent role for the keyboard and reached its final form with the “WASD+mouse”. The latest video published by Nostalgia Nerd on YouTube takes us through the origins of WASD and includes some details we honestly didn't expect to see…
Many modern titles have incorporated and improved gamepad support to the point that developers directly recommend using it over keyboard and mouse. Some games benefit greatly from that change (the so-called Metroidvania games come to mind immediately), but others only expose their “port essence” from consoles.
However, when we talk about FPS, WASD is lord and master, accompanied by mouse control with the right hand. Obviously, this doesn't extend to all players (personally, I'm left-handed and prefer IJKL as a replacement), but the question that brings us together today is “why”. Nostalgia Nerd on YouTube invites us to find the answer, and begins with a truth almost forgotten in time: We used to use the arrows.
Why Did Gamers Switch to WASD?
That's right: both Wolfenstein 3D and Doom had mouse support, but the vast majority of users used the arrows. In fact, one of the first examples of WASD+mouse (not to say “the” first) doesn't even belong to the PC world: the game Dark Castle for Apple Mac dates back to 1986, and the player had to use WASD to move the character, as well as move the mouse to change the position of their arm and throw projectiles.
Other systems like the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64 popularized alternative combinations (QAOP or QWPL), but the IBM PC and its clones prioritized the arrows. If we look closely at Wolfenstein 3D, we can see that its default commands concentrate the action on the right side of the keyboard, near the arrows. The reason was logical: computers of that era didn't come with a mouse, and you also had to load a driver that consumed conventional memory. Doom inherited much of that vision; however, John Romero himself confirmed that the optimal way to play is to add the mouse, taking advantage of strafe on the second button.
The real explosion of WASD came with Quake and the incorporation of mouselook support... something that was also first seen on Mac (Marathon, Bungie, 1994). Mouselook had to be manually enabled in Quake with the +MLOOK command, but a later update made it default. The multiplayer scene around Quake gave rise to the first masters... and the first professional gamer: Dennis Fong, much better known as “Thresh”. Yes, the same Thresh who won John Carmack's Ferrari 328 in the Red Annihilation tournament in 1997.
The gaming world was desperate to learn Thresh's secrets, and the most accessible of all was his “rediscovery” of WASD+mouse. With this combination, players could switch weapons faster, reach the spacebar with their thumb, and use Shift or Ctrl with their pinky. WASD became so popular that Quake 2 included it as a preset (thresh.cfg), and Valve made it the default for Half-Life. The rest is history.
