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Steven Spielberg is ‘a big PC Gamer’ — loves shooters, and insists on keyboard and mouse
(www.tomshardware.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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On PC, I game exclusively with trackballs and have since the nineties. I've never not been given the side eye when someone found out that's how I play.
When was this magical time during which they were popular?
I remember a friend had one of those things, it was some experience lol
I think one of my uncles and one of my teachers had one too, but it's been like 24 years or so.
They were also featured heavily on just about every computer expo we went to during that time, I think it was a pretty short period that they were marketed but I remember seeing them everywhere for that time. Like it was the hype at the moment, like how 3D screens and VR had been hyped really hard for a short while and then just died down kinda quickly.
Well, fair enough that you were exposed to them. I didn't have a lot of friends, especially not those even remotely into any kind of tech, as a kid; I think I first heard of trackballs from a programming teacher in about 1996 and bought one to try out of curiosity. Ever since then I've used one whenever it was an option.
I've even mostly used the same model. If you look in my comment history, you can see I recently mentioned that most of what I use is Kensington Orbits. I've tried other models, but they don't work for me.
The one PC gaming exception for me is Minecraft. In that game you have to right-click a lot (as I'm sure you know) and I guess I haven't developed the muscles for that because it makes my wrist very tired very quickly. Still, I play a lot of FPS games and have no problem holding the right click for zoom and such; only quick, repetitive right-clicking causes problems for me.
edit: To address your original comment, I have one friend who uses a trackball at work but a regular mouse for anything else. Other than that, I rarely meet anyone who has even heard of them, let alone used them, let alone consistently done so.
I guess everyone can develop a device preference.
I remember playing Red Alert on 90s Toshiba Satellite Pro laptops with the cursor nipple in the middle of the keyboard, I got pretty good at using the nipple (lmao). But they didn't really come back on newer laptop models after that.
Same seemed to happen with most trackball hype, although I knew they were still around. I don't recall if it was one with the ball on top or on the left side, all I remember not being able to ever scroll in the direction I needed because the angle was always off for me.
Another thing from that time that stuck with me is that gaming joysticks were more common. I had one for some favorite games, but because I used it so much I am now crippled with the "Invert Y" syndrome. Whenever I play games with controllers I will have to invert the Y axis, because that's what makes most sense based on the joysticks from back then.