Innovation of the Week: Twin-Stick Controls

This week, it's time for an (eventually) revolutionary innovation that has fundamentally shaped how we interact with many games: Twin-Stick Controls. This was an important innovation in that it provided a more immersive, precise and flexible gameplay experience, particularly for 3D games and multidirectional shooters since it would let players move their avatar with one stick and aim with the other. In general this is how they work, though there are a few exceptions like Crazy Climber, Karate Champ and Cyber Sled 1-2 that use them differently.

The first example can be found in the 1975 arcade game Gun Fight (Western Gun) by Taito. This is a single-screen, top down view shooter that pits two players against each other in a gunfight set in the Old West. Upon getting shot, characters tumble to the ground and it looks like their bodies were fried, turning completely black. Each player controls their avatar with a pair of joysticks: an eight-way joystick for movement and another for altering the shooting direction.

Some other notable early examples:

Crazy Climber (1980)

Robotron 2084 (1982)

Karate Champ (1984)

Smash TV (1990)

For consoles, twin-stick controls became popular for 3D games towards the end of the fifth generation, but innovated closer to the beginning of it. On the PS1 the control scheme was introduced via the dual analog joystick (a large, flight stick-style controller) and a few games such as Descent in 1996. On the Saturn the Saturn Twin-Stick was supported by Virtual On and a few other mech games.

In 1997, the dual analog controller was released for PS1. MechWarrior 2, Ace Combat 2, Descent Maximum, and Colony Wars were among the 27 compatible games.

A couple of years later, the control scheme would be popularized by games like Ape Escape, Tomb Raider 3, Resident Evil 3, South Park, Mega Man Legends 2 and Ace Combat 3 (these games supported the dual shock controller, an updated version of the dual analog controller), and to some degree by the N64 games such as Turok and GoldenEye 007, which used the c-buttons or d-pad as a makeshift second stick. GoldenEye 007 for N64 actually did feature twin-stick controls - the problem was that it required two controllers to achieve true twin-stick glory, limiting the multiplayer aspect of the game (the first game to use this idea seems to be Smash TV for NES and SNES).

On PCs, Descent and other games also supported dual flight stick controls since 1995 or perhaps further back. However, keyboard & mouse (KB&M) controls would instead become the standard while twin-stick conrols remained pretty niche (some players also used KB & Joystick for Descent). Full Free Look or mouselook was first introduced by the FPS games Marathon (MAC, 1994) and Terminator: Future Shock (PC, 1995), but aiming with the mouse while moving with the keyboard was actually possible for Doom in 1993 as well via its control setup in DOS (september, 1993 to be precise) - only issue being that vertical mouse movement also controls forward and backward movement so you had to be rather careful with your movement. However the game that eventually popularized the now standard WASD keys for movement and mouse for looking around setup was Quake (PC, 1996), for which the online MP community would change the default arrow keys for movement setup, to WASD as the preferred setup.

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What are your thoughts on twin-stick controls and what are your favorite games that use them? Did you use any of the more oddball setups back in the day?