![]() Featuring a stick, a button and a sturdy base, it was a stylish and intuitive piece of hardware, allowing a new level of control beyond the basic paddles that came with early Pong-based consoles. ![]() ![]() When the company released its groundbreaking VCS console in 1977, it wasn’t just the machine’s wooden chassis that caught the attention of early gamers – it was the iconic controller. Most of the serious sticks of the home computer era can be traced back to one progenator: the Atari CX10, designed by early Atari employee Steve Bristow, co-creator of Breakout. Those things survived the rigors of the Zzap! office handsomely – which included mammoth Decathlon sessions, extended sessions on Dropzone, and even being hurled against the wall or across the room.” “It was very comfortable to use, extremely responsive and early versions were easy to maintain since you could take them apart and ‘tune them up’ by bending the leaf spring switches to make them even more responsive – something you couldn’t do with the later iterations that had microswitches. “The Kempston Competition Pro was my joystick of choice,” recalls veteran games journalist Julian Rignall, who worked on Commodore magazine Zzap!64. The real experts favoured more expensive options with tough construction and supremely precise directional control. More eccentric designs were also recalled – the squat little Cheetah Bug, the Konix Speedking (also known as the Epyx 500XJ), an ergonomic oddity designed to sit in the palm with the fire buttons on the side. When I asked Twitter users for their favourite ever joysticks, the Quickshot got many mentions but so did the Super Pro Zip Stik and the pastel-coloured Powerplay Cruiser, both rugged, dependable stars of the Amiga era. It was reasonably delicate, though, so a session with a joystic-waggling sports game such as Daley Thompson’s Decathlon could see over-enthusiastic players wrenching the shaft clean off – surely the most Freudian mishap ever to befall a schoolboy. Most of my friends went for the ubiquitous Quickshot II, a great hulking giant of a controller, designed to resemble a fighter jet joystick, complete with multiple fire buttons and an autofire switch so that you could cheat on R-Type. Unlike buying a console, you didn’t get a controller with your machine, so every player had this vital input decision to make from the offset. F or home computer gamers in the 1980s, your choice of joystick was a matter of intense importance and debate.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |