TRIGGER HAPPY PC

The rise and fall of the joystick

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How our hands have set in place over time. Our muscles and tendons have grown around the WASD keys like the roots of an old tree, permanently warped into the recesses, little finger instinctively hovering over left shift. The same goes for our controllers, a presence once viewed with suspicion on our desks as an interloper from console shores, but now an essential, instinctual way to reach into a game and impose your will on it.

But there was a time when that domain, the territory where we rested our digits, was up for grabs. Even before mouselook, and the days of warring keyboard control layouts, one peripheral was at the centre of many a setup, and made you feel like a fighter pilot.

There's no consensus on who first coined the term 'joystick', but you can find instances of it as far back as 1909 in the diaries of pilots describing the instruments at their flight schools. No mention of them trying to get one working with Doom, though. By 1926 a two-axis joystick had been patented by one CB Mirick, with the intended usage of piloting remote aircraft.

AXIS POWERS

It would be a few more decades before they started turning up in electronic games, though, not least because it would also be a few more decades until electronic games existed. By 1969 Sega had developed a joystick with a trigger to use with arcade game