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Using Typing of the Dead as a benchmark for gaming keyboard performance

- Phil Iwaniuk

If you want to find out how good a graphics card is, you fire up the benchmark mode in a nice graphically demanding game. Same goes for a CPU, only you use a more CPU-bound title like Total War: Warhammer. You watch the automated sequence, you note down the numbers that the benchmark spits back out at you, and you use those numbers to rank one component against another.

But when you want to find out how good a peripheral is, Night City can't help you and the efficacy of that Hitman: World of Assassination benchmark with the stately home getting shot to bits is limited at best. It's not that you're going on vibes, exactly, since there are still reasonably empirical aspects like tech specs to compare alongside your subjective experience of the comfort and performance. But in comparison to benching a GPU, it can be frustratingly nebulous to appraise something like a gaming keyboard.

Which is how I came to regularly commune with the quarter-century-old Sega arcade oddity, Typing of the Dead. First released into Japanese arcades in 1999, it was a spin-off from the hugely popular House of the Dead lightgun game. Only instead of a lightgun to shoot the zombies with, this time you had a keyboard.

The titular dead turned up onscreen with a word or phrase overlaid. You typed the word, bullet sounds rang out, and the reanimated corpse fell to the ground as if defeated by your sheer typing accuracy. A year later in 2000, the PC and console releases followed.