Wednesday, April 24All That Matters

Why us boomer FPS players use “Inverted”

by arylonthedancer


Why us boomer FPS players use “Inverted”



View Reddit by arylonthedancer – View Source

26 Comments

  • an_achronist

    For me it’s nothing to do with the n64 specifically – it’s more that head goes back, eyes go up. Aiming stick is head on a stick.

    I suppose credit goes to the 64 as it was the first console I used with a stick…I think it was the first console with a stick. I used to rent a 64 from the local video shop for a fiver a night. Good times.

    Reply
  • ChicknSoop

    Yep, most games back then were auto-inverted. Once games started not using inverted controls as the “default” is when I broke the habit.

    Reply
  • Kno_Warah_Mean

    I can’t not play inverted.

    It’s like if you have a joystick on the back of your head. Pull down to look up, push up to look down.

    Reply
  • redditorx13579

    How old are you? GenX myself and absolutely none of the Boomers I know touched any console long enough to have a preference in controls.

    Reply
  • homerAttack

    I played inverted until I rented some game that didn’t give me the option to switch. I brought I with on some weekend trip so it was the only game I was planning on playing. Got used to it and played all weekend. Couldn’t go back to inverted once back home, couldn’t figure it out lol.

    Reply
  • terminalblue

    My mom, a trained pilot, couldn’t play top gun on the NES (this was literally the 80’s and she’s almost 80 now) because the controls were inverted from A Real plane.

    ​

    the rest of us couldn’t play it because the game is garbage.

    Reply
  • gabapenteado

    Hey, here’s my gamedev moment

    I made a shooter. We had a tutorial. You could later check the inverted Y axis in the menu.

    During the tutorial we asked you to “drag Up to look Up”. We changed later to: “drag the screen to look UP”. The trick is that no Matter the direction, the camera would go Up, but we would use your input to auto-check if you wanted inverse axis or not.

    I stole It from one of the halos, i think? Maybe It was GoW.

    Anyway, It worked! More people kept playing after the tutorial because of that.

    Reply
  • trickldowncompressr

    This isn’t a generational thing. It’s just differences in the way people’s brains work.

    Edit: I play inverted, just fyi. I don’t remember it being specifically from flying games or anything, I’ve just always played inverted. Like how some people are just left-handed. I have tried playing “normal” but I just can’t. My brain just thinks in inverted Y axis.

    Reply
  • Restivethought

    Thats not a boomer thing. Its just different ways of thinking. Ones thinking with the physical movement needed to look up. You physically tilt your head back to look up, so they translate that to the camera controls. They see the stick as a top down view of the a persons head. If you want that person to look up you would pull the stick down so the front of the stick (or the persons face) is pointing up.

    The other way is just “I want to look up, so I pushed the most direct translation to ‘up’ on the stick”

    Reply
  • alex_munroe

    Sorry but the controller designed for people with 3 hands isn’t the primary reason for this. Joysticks translating flight controls is. Tilt stick forward to fly down, so felt natural to use the camera in this way as well.

    Reply
  • Evil_Weevill

    Y’all… The youngest boomers around today are 60 years old… They were in their mid 30s when that game came out.

    When did boomer start meaning “anyone over 30?”

    Reply
  • Chiefyaku

    Nope hate inverted. Hated it back in the day, hate it now. I will go for standard any day of the week. Just relearn like how you relearn where different X buttons are on different controllers

    Reply
  • MistahBoweh

    So, first of all, the baby boomer generation was born in the ‘baby boom,’ a period of high birth rate following the end of WWII. Baby boomers were born in the 1950s post-war economy. Meaning, when goldeneye released in 1997, your typical baby boomer was in their mid 40s. Their kids were playing on n64s, not them.

    The term ‘boomer shooter’ is a little disingenuous, but hearkens back to the earliest first person shooters on pc, like DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D. Which, still came out in the 90s, but, at the start of the 90s, and also came out on personal computers and not just entertainment systems. Goldeneye got played on living room televisions, while office workers snuck DOOM onto the pcs in their cubicles.

    Thirdly, inverted controls are all about how some people intuit moving a camera differently. Some people take ‘up’ to pointing the camera up, while others might lift the _back_ of the camera up, resulting in a camera that angles down. Of course, this analogy only works in an era where people are familiar with handheld camcorders, which is why people who play inverted are less and less common.

    It should be added that in the 80s and 90s, flight simulators were extremely popular, as well as flight stick peripherals to control them. On a flight stick, pulling back, toward you, causes the plane to pull up, while pushing forward causes the plane to dive down. It’s the same concept as before with a camcorder. The stick is center mass, and tilting the stick downward causes you to tilt down, while tilting back causes you to lean back. You’re moving the stick the way you want to move, instead of pointing the stick toward where you want to look.

    Lastly, the n64 controller is an abomination and always has been. If this is how anyone first learned to play video games I feel incredibly sorry for you.

    Reply
  • Jibber_Fight

    “Boomer”?! Um no. You literally imagine a bunch of forty year olds playing Goldeneye in the nineties? 🙄

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Like Us
Follow Us
Subscribe Us
Follow Us