Remembering Alan Kotok

Milktoast writes "Alan Kotok, one of the forefathers of gaming, died of a heart attack in May at the age of 64. He helped invent one of the first videogames and game controllers (Spacewar and the Joystick), and has been involved with the W3C for many years. His obituary is hosted at MIT, and there are thoughtful reflections at Ars Technica and Joystick101.org." From the Ars article: "While he didn't write any of the code himself, he did help to build the controller used to fly the ships in the game, and also supplied Stephen Russel with the sine and cosine routines from the DEC. Think about it: he designed a gaming controller when no one knew what that even was."

Comments

Shoulders of giants

[lawpoop]

"While he didn't write any of the code himself, he did help to build the controller used to fly the ships in the game, and also supplied Stephen Russel with the sine and cosine routines from the DEC. Think about it: he designed a gaming controller when no one knew what that even was. " [emphasis mine]

Okay, look, I'm not trying to downplay Kotok's contribution, but is it really fair to say that a game controller was something totally unimaginable? Were there any flying vehicles around back then that were piloted at least in part with some kind of stick? So wouldn't it kind of make sense that you move the ships in a simulation/video game with some kind of stick? If someone walked in him, say, a retired military pilot, would they have said "What the hell are you making? I have no idea!" or "Oh, are you building a controller?"

It seems to me that you could say he stood on the shoulders of giants rather than doing something really revolutionary. I mean, car steering wheels had been around for a while -- is it really such a jump to think that you could control something with a stick?