For home computer gamers in the 1980s, your choice of joystick was a matter of intense importance and debate. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
The real experts favoured more expensive options with tough construction and supremely precise directional control. “The Kempston Competition Pro was my joystick of choice,” recalls veteran games journalist Julian Rignall, who worked on Commodore magazine Zzap!64. “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. And they were nigh on indestructible. 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.”
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. 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. 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. Rival consoles such as Intellevision and Colecovision experimented with more complex pads resembling bizarre 1970s telephones, but it was the original Atari CX10 and later CX40 that would go on to inspire a generation of game controllers.
Three years later, Pac-Man arrived in arcades using a ball-top joystick instead of buttons for the direction controls and the coin-op industry never looked back. The arcades of the 80s and 9os were alive with the sound of joystick microswitches clicking as players wrenched their way past enemies and obstacles. It became a ritual to test the stick for rigidity and reliability before committing your 10 pence pieces for that all-important Gradius high score attempt.
But for home users, everything changed when the mass market began to shift from computer games to video games and Nintendo launched the NES, a hugely successful console that came with two flat joypads, inspired by the company’s Game & Watch handhelds. These were cheaper to produce and package, but they also featured multiple buttons to facilitate new types of console games that required a wider range of inputs. The pads were also designed to be held in the hands in front of the family TV rather than planted on a desktop in front of a computer. The concept stuck. Look at your Xbox Series X or PlayStation controller and you see the influence of the NES: a D-Pad, main button array, and extra buttons for start, pause and other game management purposes. It’s all still there.
But even after the NES made joypads the default controllers for home consoles, the joystick stuck around as a specialist alternative, especially with fighting games, shoot-’em-ups (or “shmups”) and flight sims. The NES itself had the Advantage arcade controller, designed to be used on a tabletop and widely considered to be one of its best ever accessories. Sega ensured there were excellent arcade sticks for the Mega Drive, Saturn and Dreamcast – the latter’s Agetec controller is considered one of the greatest ever made, a supremely comfortable and highly customisable piece of kit. It’s now found a secondary life as a brilliant accessibility controller, and has been utilised by gaming charity SpecialEffect to help players with conditions such as cerebral palsy play games they couldn’t have with a standard joypad.
In the modern era, there is a large dedicated community of specialist joystick users, supporting a thriving hardware market. So what benefits do they provide, apart from that feel of arcade authenticity? For fighting games such as Street Fighter, the smoother stick rotations and large programmable buttons allow intuitive access to special moves and combos, while many models also have restricted gates, so the stick’s circular rotation allows precise four or eight-way movement. For shmups, you get much more precise 2D spatial control than with a D-pad or stubby analogue stick, allowing you to weave between bullets and enemies.
As the success of Street Fighter 6 has shown, there is still a mass market for arcade genres. “Fighting and shooting games have never gone away but over the last five years there’s been a growing audience for arcade-style games and retro gaming,” says games journalist and arcade enthusiast Will Freeman. “But it’s not just nostalgia – Steam is full of new indie shmups, inspired by classic titles. I quite like the term nowstalgia – modernised takes on classic games. So there are loads of reasons to own sticks – if you’re controlling something on a 2D plane, it makes sense. I bought a new shmup the other day with no keyboard support – you have to use a stick.”
For years, veteran Japanese accessory maker Hori was the go-to supplier, making excellent sticks from the PlayStation- and Saturn-era onwards – its Real Arcade Pro and Fighting Stick ranges are still among the best available, with high quality parts and intuitive button arrays. But mainstream accessory manufacturers such as Razer and Mad Catz now make very decent intermediate arcade controllers, while the excellent budget manufacturer 8BitDo has released its own entry-level arcade sticks for the Xbox, PC and Switch. They’re extremely good, featuring lots of buttons with customisable inputs, turbo-fire functionality, audio controls and wireless connectivity. I’ve tested the Xbox version on shooters and fighting games, and it performed really well for both.
There’s also a new class of stick manufacturer – companies such as Nacon, Qanba, Mayflash and PDP, creator of the top of the range Victrix – serving the needs of dedicated modern enthusiasts, who treat arcade sticks the way hi-fi enthusiasts treat turntables and are willing to pay upwards of $400 for a high-end model. The scene has a vast vocabulary of technical terms. People talk about throw, which is how far the stick moves from the centre to the extreme, and engage, which is the point in that movement that the contact is registered by the game. There’s also resilience, which is how quickly the stick returns to its neutral position. “As a shmup player I want really short throw and engage because I want it to respond immediately,” says Freeman. “But a long engage might serve a fighting game player who wants to get circular moves.”
The best sticks are highly customisable to the specific preferences of the owner – you can swap out the stick, the gate, or the buttons. And the companies that made the controller components for classic arcade machines (Sanwa, Seimitsu and Happ) are still around. As Freeman puts it: “You don’t need to solder, and the parts are standardised – it’s like skateboarding: you might want this type of bearing and this softness of wheels, but all trucks fit all boards. In a way it’s kind of ridiculous – you buy an expensive stick to take all the parts out.”
The joystick remains an iconic symbol of gaming, despite the ascendancy of the console control pad. For modern gamers obsessed with shmups, fighters or indeed flight sims (that’s a whole separate article), it’s still a vital, customisable tool. For veterans, it’s something nostalgic. And if my Twitter is anything to go by, the Quickshot still reigns. “They were often the first joysticks people had and tended to be reasonably priced so stick in people’s memory,” says Paul Andrews whose company Retro Games owns the licence to the Quickshot brand. “The first joystick I had was the Quickshot 1, it had suckers on the bottom so you could suction it down to the table or unit, and that made it so much easier to use, especially if, like in my case, I was also trying to use the keys on my ZX Spectrum at the same time!”
Andrews hinted that modern Quickshot joysticks could soon be going into production, introducing a new generation to the delights of this fabled design classic, or perhaps simply reminding past users about a simpler era of game controls. For other players, arcade-style sticks never really went away. When Street Fighter 6 arrived, I was excited to play, not just because of the positive reviews, but because it would give me the opportunity to dust down my expensive arcade fighting controller and experience Capcom’s great fighting series as God intended – with a stick.
