Give it a waggle
I convinced people on Twitter recently that my dad had invented the word ‘joystick’
This monthly column, if you can call this belch of words I nervously deliver every month a ‘column’, is a constant reminder that I am now old. Things that I thought happened relatively recently in my life turn out, after a little scrutiny, to have happened decades ago. 30 or 40 years in the past. When I was a teenager, 40 years ago was World War II. Now it’s my childhood.
What’s made me feel old this month is realising that, when I was playing the addictive yet annoying game Gang Beasts with my eight-year-old on the PS4, I asked him what the keys were. Fair play to my kids, they know their old man is old, so they understand such archaic language. For those out of the loop, it refers to old computer games from the mid-eighties that were played on a keyboard. Everyone had their preferred keyboard setup and I think you can tell a lot by a person as to what keys they used. Any sane gamer would have ‘Z’ and ‘X’ as their left and right and ‘:’ and ‘.’ As their up and down. Anything else is just perverted and wrong.
The reason we used keys is because joysticks were rubbish in the Eighties, with a few notable exceptions. For my money, the greatest stick of all time has to be the original Atari one. A solid black beast that sits nicely in the palm of your hand, allowing you to grip it and waggle in front of the TV vigorously. The black is offset by a singular, red button. God knows what it’s made of but I have never heard of one breaking (feel free to correct me on that).
The second greatest joystick is the
Spectravideo Quickshot. It’s less reliable but looks so beautiful. That perfect grip, the two stunning red buttons at the top… it’s a beast. The only thing that lets it down is the autofire, a cheater’s option as far as I’m concerned.
Being a BBC Micro owner, I was denied all of these pleasures because there were hardly any joysticks for the Beeb. I did have some weird rectangular thing that was kind of long and looked old-fashioned even by 1984. But the thing that really ruined it was there was no auto-centering. If you moved the thin stick left, it stayed on the left. It was absolute rubbish, hence me asking my kid about keys.
I convinced people on Twitter recently that my dad had invented the word ‘joystick’. One of my half-sisters who I don’t know that well sent me a message asking if that was true and how proud she was of our father. I felt terrible telling her he didn’t and it was probably invented by a French pilot in 1909.
Hang on, is this the most Freudian piece I’ve submitted to RG? I talk about my kids, my dad and the most phallic of gaming peripherals. I think maybe lockdown is getting to me!