Thinking about vi and cursor movements in another post I looked up the origins of using W, A, S and D for character movements in games. It seems to go back some 30 years (as I type this in 2025).
I found this reference to it in a 2016 article which talks about a 1996 Quake tournament:
but even then, while it seems “natural” now, it seems there wasn’t a proper standard. It seems to stem from (PC) games starting to use the mouse for directional movement (turning, up/down) rather than moving forwards or backwards.
I wonder how many early attempts were dismissed due to keyboards not being able to reliably detect more than one key pressed at a time?
On my first computer, a vic20 I think it was often AZ and JK. The German layout has Z and Y swapped and it’s sometimes still an issue.
But it depends on the game. Fighting games or flight sims had more than 4 keys. Usually there were some overlays or special keyboards or other special controllers. I still prefer the control keys.
WASD definitely goes back further than the modern style FPS. I think the first really popular game with WASD controls was Dark Castle on the Macintosh. The Mac originally didn’t have arrow keys. Why would anyone want to mess with arrow keys to move the cursor, when you could instead move the mouse and click to move your cursor?
Yeah … that was dumb. Oh, oh so much effort and time wasted in trying to precisely move the mouse pointer to move the cursor just one or two characters to the left.
I remember on the C64, with CRPGs, it was common to have movement similar to IJKM, or an equivalent like @:;/ (which is IJKM but a few keys to the right on a C64 keyboard layout).
I played DOOM without a mouse (of course, everyone did), using the arrow keys for movement. This meant that my right hand was responsible for movement, and my left hand was responsible for action (opening doors, shooting).
When Quake came out, it was fully 3D, and you were supposed to play it with the mouse so you could look up and down to aim at enemies on different elevations. That meant having to switch hands. However, this being a time when the mouse was not yet universal, mouselook was not enabled by default in Quake. I carried on playing with only the keyboard, using the extremely cumbersome “look up” and “look down” keys (I think it was Home and End) to aim at enemies on different planes. This just about worked with Quake, but made the game substantially more difficult.
As games became more fast-paced it simply became impossible to play them without using the mouse. Around about 1996 and Quake 2 I finally threw in the towel and started using the mouse, but with everything else as close to my old control scheme as possible. Whenever I’d install a new game I’d remap all the controls to my setup, and as games got more complicated I’d get more and more irritated trying to find new buttons for all the newfangled actions (like crouching, sprinting, looking around corners, using items, throwing grenades, zooming with scopes). This went on for a fair time, until I finally threw in the towel, I think sometime in the early 2000s. It was either one of the Hitman games or one of the Unreal Tournament games where I finally decided it was more work to keep constantly remapping all the keys than it was to just learn the (now universally accepted) standard system.
Close, but not quite. The left handed controls for Bolo used WAXD rather than WASD. It’s arguably superior because you can curl your thumb to hit X more easily than S.