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How One Company Is Bringing Old Video Games Back From the Dead (fastcompany.com)
harrymcc writes: Night Dive Studios is successfully reviving old video games — not the highest-profile best-sellers of the past, but cult classics such as System Shock 2, The 7th Guest, Strife, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. It's a job that involves an enormous amount of detective work to track down rights holders as well as the expected technical challenges. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman tells the story of how the company stumbled upon its thriving business. "Kick didn’t have money on hand to buy the rights, so he scraped together contract work with independent developers and funneled the proceeds into the project. ... Some efforts fall apart even without the involvement of media conglomerates. In early 2014, Kick tried to revive Dark Seed, a point-and-click adventure game that featured artwork by H.R. Giger. But after Giger’s sudden death, demands from the artist’s estate escalated, and the negotiations derailed. ... But for every one of those failures, there’s a case where a developer or publisher is thrilled to have a creation back on store shelves."
Nope, it was serious. As I recall, the W-A-S-D and mouse thing started with Quake. Back in those days, gamers used the keyboard exclusively, so you used used your left hand for pulling the trigger (ctrl or alt) and activate (spacebar) and your right hand for navigation, either using the arrows or the numberpad. Left and right actually turned you left and right, respectively. To strafe, you had to hold shift down, then the arrow.
As for the page up / page down business for aiming up and down - it was pretty innovative and useful, especially in those tall shafts in common usage throughout the empire. It is even more impressive if you consider that Doom ('93) and Doom 2 ('94) didn't have any aiming mechanism at all. You just pointed your gun in the general direction, and if the monster was in the line of fire (and on screen), the bullets would jump up and get him. When Quake came out in '96, it standardized the W-A-S-D keys with mouselook (and mouse aiming). Unreal also used the same playstyle. I suspect that one of the iD folks came up with this as a playstyle, and everyone else there quickly adopted it, because the mouselook people were stompin' the crap out of the keyboarders.