The Quake and Doom players at Valve-perhaps influenced directly or indirectly by Carmack, Thresh, and other top Doom and Quake players-included WASD in Half-Life’s default keyboard and mouse config, which helped solidify it as the first-person shooter standard. If Thresh's Quake tournament win was WASD's first watershed moment, the second came in 1998 with the release of Half-Life. Carmack may have bundled Thresh’s config with Quake 2, but when it released in 1997 the default controls were still arrow keys. I used it, and I don’t remember hearing Thresh’s name associated with it at the time, though it’s possible his configuration entered my consciousness two or three people removed.Īnd yet games, strangely, took a while to catch up.
By the time Quake 2 was out, WASD was starting to feel like common knowledge. Half-Life was one of the first games to bind WASD to movement by default.Ĭonvenient as it was, Fong doesn’t think the inclusion of his config was the main factor in the rise of WASD, and I’d agree.
Not only could Fong sit down at any computer with Quake 2 and instantly load his configuration, every time he got the question, all he had to say was “type exec thresh.cfg.” “So he ended up building a Thresh stock config into Quake 2.” “Even when I was hanging out with Carmack, wherever, at E3, random people would come up and he would hear them asking me what my configuration was,” says Fong. His play was so impressive, the poster looking for his config speculates that it was impossible for him to turn so fast with a mouse.Īnother legend, Quake programmer John Carmack, took note. It wasn't the case that everyone simply gravitated to the 'obvious' choice of WASD or ESDF, and in another thread, we see how Thresh's performance in the Quake tournament spread his style. Another suggests using the keypad for movement, and someone else says they use A, Shift, Z, X. In one thread from 1997, a poster recommends using Q and E to strafe and A and D to turn. The evidence can be found on old bulletin board systems. Even before his success as a Quake player, Fong was a Doom champion, and so people imitated him, just as the kids at the basketball court by my house spend far too much time trying to hit Steph Curry’s 30-foot shots. As Fong’s celebrity grew, the one question everyone asked him was: “What’s your config?” His answer could be most readily found in Thresh’s Quake Bible, which describes the WASD formation as an “inverted T.” And his guide carried weight.
Fastest hands in the wasd professional#
The very concept of a professional gamer was new at the time, and Fong was well-known on the west coast as the best player around. Quake wasn't the first game to introduce mouselook (Marathon came before it), but it was the most influential. I definitely think I helped popularize it with a certain set of gamers, particularly the ones that played first person shooters." I’m sure other people started using it as well just based on what was comfortable for them. “I’m certainly not going to take credit for the creation of ,” says Fong.
In 1994, System Shock used ASDX, while Descent used AZ for forward/reverse and QE for banking (if you didn't happen to have a joystick).įong tells us he even knew a player who used ZXCV to move. Some early shooters bound movement to the arrow keys.
It might have been EDSF, or stranger configurations like ZXC to strafe and move backwards, and the right mouse button to move forwards. But without Fong's influence, the default could have ended up different. Others were also gravitating to the left side of the keyboard for Doom at the same time. Did he invent the scheme? No, probably not. It took some experimentation-including a strange attempt to move with WADX-but Fong settled on WASD and has been using it since Doom.
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