Dennis Fong: on WASD and why keyboard is the best

Dennis Fong, recent inductee into the ESL Hall of Fame and widely regarded as one of, if not the first pro gamers to exist, recently spoke about PC gaming and the control systems available.

During the roundtable interview at QuakeCon Fond said believes that mouse and keyboard is "by far the best control" and that it's "the best way to control your characters in these games", a belief he has maintained from the beginning.

In terms of WASD controls Fong, also known by his player name Thresh, is considered by many as being the key player in making the configuration popular among the gaming fraternity.

"I'm not sure I can take credit for creating it. I just picked what was comfortable for me, but, you know, I think a lot of people give me credit for popularising it because, you know, I was one of the only if not the only like really well known gamer at the time, you know.

"I never lost a tournament for five years in that period, and asking what a pro player's config is is pretty commonplace, even today. So people would ask me all the time and you know I think a lot of them ended up adopting it, including people I used to compete against and so I think that led to its popularity.

"Also, they built Thresh.config into Quake II so any person could just pull up the console in Quake II and type Thresh.config and it would load my config, which is something nice that id Software did for me. So you know no-one knows exactly when it became the standard, it just became the standard. And yeah, you know, I'm sure I get some credit for making it popular".

He continued by saying "there are configurations that might hamper you like certain things are out of reach or the weapons are out of reach or certain keys are not super easy to hit and so I'd always recommend to people to use the right configuration and it happened to be mine because that's what I was comfortable with".