touch input may supplant one or both joysticks.[2] A few games, such as 1981's Vanguard
, don't have a second joystick for shooting, but provide four buttons arranged in a diamond to fire in the cardinal directions.
The twin-stick control scheme was used in arcade games starting with Gun Fight in 1975, but came into prominence with the high-action Robotron: 2084 in 1982. The ubiquity of gamepads with two thumb-controlled sticks overcame the difficulty of playing twin-stick shooters at home and eventually led to a resurgence of the genre following the release of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved in 2005.
History
The 1975 arcade video game Gun Fight (released as Western Gun in Japan) uses one joystick for movement and a second for firing. Each joystick is of different design. Unlike most later twin-stick games, the right stick moves the player's avatar. The 1977 sequel, Boot Hill, uses the same control scheme. Space Dungeon (1981) has a pair of identical joysticks with the now-standard convention of the left for movement and the right for shooting. Mars, a scrolling shooter released in 1981, is also controlled via two 8-way joysticks.[3] The 1981 SNK coin-op Vanguard uses a joystick for movement, but four separate buttons, arranged in a diamond, for firing.[4]
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, an early hit for the Xbox 360, caused a resurgence in 2005.[1] By 2008 the popularity of the genre waned, following a glut of twin-stick shooters with abstract graphics from independent developers who found the simplicity of the genre appealing.[5][6] Twin-stick shooter spin-offs of existing video game franchises have since been made, including Halo: Spartan Assault.[1]
