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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

Strange analog stick fact: According to YouTuber Wulff Den, the first ever game that used an analog stick for third-person camera rotation was only Super Mario Sunshine in 2002. A GameCube game that came out more than two years after the release of the PS2, and several years after the N64 and the PS1 Dual Analog controller.

I guess some ideas seem only obvious in hindsight.

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I scoffed when I first read this, but the more I think about it, the more that might be correct.

Mario 64 had third-person camera movement, but it was with the N64's C-buttons, and had fixed angles, not free movement. Since it didn't have a second joystick, that rules out the N64 (some games did allow you to use a second controller as a second analog stick, but I don't think any third person games did so).

Likewise, the Dreamcast didn't have a second stick, so it's ruled out too. That basically leaves us with the PS1 or an early PS2/Gamecube game. Apparently Quake II on PS1 did allow for the second stick to aim, but that's not third person. The closest I can find is Ico on PS2, which allowed for analog stick camera movement, but I think only in the horizontal direction. Mario Sunshine might well be the first for full camera angle movement, which honestly really surprises me.

Just piling on to say that there was also Alien: Resurrection on PS1 that used the modern dual-stick movement/aiming setup. It was one of the first FPSes to do so, at least as the default control scheme. Reviewers at the time mostly hated it and called it awkward, probably because they were comparing non-aim-assisted console FPS controls to PC FPSes of the era, which is kind of fair tbh. The game's difficulty was also probably too high for the time, especially given the brand-new control style.

Yeah but the comment you are replying to, and the one before that, talk about third-person games, not first-person games.

Regarding Alien Resurrection: Turok (another FPS game which came out a few years earlier) also had modern FPS controls as default, though movement was done with the d-pad, as the N64 didn't have two sticks.

And inverted the Y-Axis too, which I still do today thanks to this game, I think.

I don't think that's true, I remember playing both Jak and Daxter and Ico in either 2000 or 2001 and I think both of those had camera control with the right-hand analog stick.

This one says camera rotation for Jak and Daxter is mapped on the R/L buttons: https://jakanddaxter.fandom.com/wiki/Daxter_controls

But Ico indeed used the stick for the camera: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/ICO/Controls

However, I'm not sure whether it was only used for horizontal rotation or full arbitrary rotation (arbitrary combinations of horizontal and vertical) as in Super Mario Sunshine. But it might very well be the first game to have that, not Mario Sunshine.

> This one says camera rotation for Jak and Daxter is mapped on the R/L buttons: https://jakanddaxter.fandom.com/wiki/Daxter_controls

Seems wrong too, archived manual (https://archive.org/details/ps2_Jak_and_Daxter-_The_Precurso...) seems to say "RIGHT ANALOG STICK ... Camera Rotate/Zoom" under the game controls. I think the page you linked to is for another game.

I just looked at a few videos and it seems that the analog stick does indeed move the camera, though apparently only horizontally, not "freely" with arbitrary rotations. I'm not sure though.

How is that different from Super Mario Sunshine? It was probably two decades ago I last played it, but I think it was the same.

No there you can do arbitrary camera rotations, not just horizontal ones. For example, you can view the character from above.

Now you made me unsure, so skimmed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrsWUmiayLM for a bit, which seems to me to confirm it's just horizontal camera movement. But there seems to be a zoom in/out functionality, which would move the camera in/out+vertically, but that's different than rotating around the character freely. The camera also does a ton of vertical movements by itself too, as Mario jumps/falls.

Yeah, I think you are actually right. I must have misremembered it. This source also suggests Mario Sunshine didn't have a "free" rotating camera but a combination of horizontal rotation and zoom: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Sunshine/Controls

I guess then the first game I definitely know that had a free camera was The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which came out a few months after Sunshine. This is also confirmed here: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_The_Wind_...

Of course the question is whether there might have been an earlier game which had it. Regarding Ico, apparently it also allows only horizontal rotation (camera "panning" is horizontal movement): https://strategywiki.org/wiki/ICO/Controls

Turok from 1997 let you use the dpad for movement and stick to look/aim.

Edit: Oh, sorry didn't see you mention third person.

I've read some early reviews of a licensed alien shooter where they complain about how confusing the control scheme is - left stick for movement and right for aim.

Before Halo it wasn't really intuitive I guess?

Yeah, that's another point: the modern first-person controls you describe were once thought to be counterintuitive compared to the old Wolfenstein style controls.

A similar point holds for third-person games: Before Super Mario 64, all third-person games had Wolfenstein style tank controls where left/right rotates the character in place and up/down makes it move forward/backward. E.g. Tomb Raider or Mega Man Legends. The idea to make character movement relative to the camera viewpoint wasn't obvious.

(Though the Tomb Raider developers tried to work around this to a degree by fixing the camera behind the character, which prevented to most counterintuitive control issues Mega Man Legends had, but also meant free camera rotation was impossible.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Resurrection_(video_game...

(For anyone else curious)

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3du770/alien_resurr...

and the particular quote I was thinking of for the record.

That's really strange because that setup was effectively the default for N64 games. Stick under your left thumb for movement and the C buttons under your right thumb for camera control

It's not strange because it's not really true. The default controls both of GoldenEye and Perfect Dark used the stick for moving forward/backward and turning left/right. Turok did use the c buttons for walking and the stick for looking though.

Forgive me sounding like Claude, but you’re absolutely right! I’ve played platformers from that era recently but it’s been a long time since I touched the shooters. I was mixing them up in my recollection. The shooters had a weird mix and for some reason even though Goldeneye had a bunch of control scheme options, none of them let you put all movement on one input and all camera control on the other.

I'm pretty sure both GoldenEye and Perfect Dark had (non default) control options where movements were on the d-pad and camera on the analog stick. For GoldenEye see "Solitaire" and "Goodnight" here: https://goldeneye.fandom.com/wiki/Control_style

I think the problem I had with the left-half controller layout is that it still used A and B but they were hard to press. Same problem with holding 2 controllers in the center. The N64 controller definitely was not the greatest design for shooters. (And now that I've tried to use one more recently, not a great design in general for larger hands... mine don't really fit the center grip)

But the linked page indicates you could use the right half rather than the left half of the controller. So the c-buttons (rather than the left d-pad) for walking and the stick for looking/turning. Turok style. The "Solitaire" preset even has the Z trigger for firing.

Which sounds pretty good. Of course having an actual stick for walking would have been even better, but buttons aren't that bad, considering that PC games still use them for walking to this day.

I'm actually wondering why PC games never converged on a "left joy-con" style controller with a stick and buttons, for one hand, while the other hand holds the mouse. I guess the ordinary keyboard is good enough so there wasn't much pressure to replace it.

> I'm actually wondering why PC games never converged on a "left joy-con" style controller with a stick and buttons, for one hand, while the other hand holds the mouse. I guess the ordinary keyboard is good enough so there wasn't much pressure to replace it.

Really does seem to be a matter of the keyboard being good enough and knowing that most everyone has one connected to their PC. I've just come to accept that I need to prioritize what matters most for a given game. So, selecting between KB+M or controller on a case-by-case basis. I think the only game recently that annoyed me for not fitting one or the other very well was Cyberpunk 2077 because the cars were very touchy and would have been better with analog input.

I also remember one of them having some option to use two controllers at once to have two sticks?

Yep! It was a very cool idea, though you were seriously lacking in easily accessible buttons so I didn't stick with it.

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