Fernando’s posterous

The historic reason? Well, it has the same roots as:

• the meme "pwn"
• TeamFortress
• Gamespy (and its spinoffs, like FilePlanet)
• ShackNews
• Dedicated servers (as opposed to listen servers, where the host plays)

When Quake was released 13 years ago in 1996, the default keys were very different: Up, down, left, right were on the directional keys, fire was on control, and alt was strafe, which got itself from Doom/Wolf3D, which in turn got itself from older DOS iD games like the Commander Keen series.

Quake was released just as Windows95 took off, which is significant because Quake was natively a DOS game. In fact, running Quake in Windows usually left players without any sounds, and you'd lose a ton of FPS on those 100 to 166 Mhz Pentium 1s, if you didn't crash first.

However, because Quake took off just as Windows 95 was released, it had implemented winsock support... in other words, you could play over the internet if you knew the IP of a server, which you'd know by heart because there was only about a dozen decent ones running the Linux dedicated binary. You'd only find these on static web sites, as there were no server browsers, another invention of the Quake community (in the form of Qspy).

Unlike Doom, you didn't need to mess with Kali to play Quake over the internet.

As a result, Quake's community grew, as did its mods, including a little known mod with four playable classes called TeamFortress. It might've been five, I forget now - there was a release that upped the classes to the original six and then version 2 added the spy and engineer). The crazy thing about TF1 was that it was a wonderful single player game as well, allowing you to functionally play all 4 episodes of Quake 1 with any given TF class.

Quake wasn't the only popular shooter, but because of winsock and the impeccable timing of cheap 14.4 and 28.8 kilobaud modems and the modification support iD provided, it became the first professionally competitive game ever. The community spawned Qspy (now Gamespy), Cyberathelete Professional League (and CAL), sCary's Shack (now ShackNews), and probably more than is evident (sites like Voodoo3D, FiringSquad, Tweak3D all had their roots in Quake).

Because of this and the CPL, Quake created the first for-money tournament, and its darling was a player named Thresh. He emerged as an early prodigy of Quake, winning a series of these tournaments, and receiving huge sponsorship deals. He became the first famous professional gamer, where playing Quake and promoting hardware was his full time job.

Even up to Thresh's victory, arrow keys + ctrl was often used competitively, with elaborate scripting for quick turns. However, people noticed his control scheme - he used the mouse, something that was unusual, because Quake's contemporaries, Duke3D and Heretic/Hexen, all had awful mouse support.

His dominance in CPL led to everyone copying his control scheme of WASD + mouse, which took several years before it became canon, with tutorials on PlanetQuake. I think Quake2 was the first shooter to officially use WASD, which signalled the paradigm shift in computer game control, something that wouldn't change until games were ported from PlayStation 2 and Xbox when the gamepads of pre 1995 suddenly became popular again.

Anyway, somewhere in this, QuakeWorld gets released, which invents client-side prediction and native Windows support, and the rest is FPS history, namely in a game called HalfLife, which had both QuakeWorld's client-side prediction and WASD, alongside Quake 2.

Thresh later founds the site FiringSquad. Former FiringSquad editors then ended up creating the IM program Xfire.

And where did "pwn" come from? PlanetQuake's Lowtax coined that term in his comic column, where he'd personify a newbie named "JeffK" and spew "l33t" talk. Later, he had a nasty falling out with PlanetQuake. He then founds a little website you may have heard called SomethingAwful.

As for ESDF (a far superior control scheme), I think WASD is a bad habit the industry can't kick, mostly because games don't require many keys anymore. Quake TeamFortress was what led me to switch to ESDF - I used up every single key on the left side of the keyboard and was also using IJKL for things like the scout's motion scanner. Games simply don't require 20+ keys anymore with all purpose "use" and "reload" keys. Except for sims.

For competitive FPS, ESDF is far better - unlike WASD, your fingers never leave the movement keys as your pinkie can control 6 actions (Q, A, Z, capslock, tab, and shift) while you still move in all 4 directions. When WASD players reload with R, they can't strafe right unless you bind it to capslock/tab/shift. Crouch, reload, and use are best mapped to your pinkie.

tl;dr: It's from Quake 1's competitive scene and yes ESDF is far better because you can move in all 4 directions while hitting reload.