Keyboards have more than 100 keys, but there are four that are most important to people who play video games: W, A, S, and D. There are games that use more than these keys, yes–StarCraft, League of Legends, and World of Warcraft use all sorts of combinations–but the majority of games rely on a small sampling of numbers and letters on the keyboard. There are practical reasons for this, to be sure: Computer games often require one hand on a mouse, the other on a keyboard. There are a ton of keys that are simply out of reach. If you’ve got two hands on the keyboard, you’re probably not playing a video game. But you could be.
Typing games have existed for decades, once largely considered educational tools designed to help kids learn to use a keyboard. Millennials played games like Typer Shark and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in their computer lab classrooms, before computers were commonplace in home offices. As computers, namely laptops, started to proliferate, computer labs started to disappear–and so did the need for educational typing games. But from the ashes of the computer lab, typing games have reemerged, pulling from the educational genres toolbox while putting a new spin on the niche genre.
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, released in 1987 and developed by Software Toolworks, is the quintessential typing game. It wasn’t the first typing game, but it was among the first. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is certainly the most prominent; Mavis herself is the face of the typing genre, even today.
“I think the high concept–the idea that the world’s best typing teacher was at your side, correcting mistakes and offering encouragement–was a big part of the appeal [of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing,” developer on the game Michael Duffy told GameSpot. “The ‘game’ sensibilities that we successfully employed in Chessmaster–graphics and music–made the rote repetition required to learn a new motor skill fun. The typing hands showing finger placement were highly innovative in a time of primitive graphics, and kept people from looking at their hands while typing. But the illusion of Mavis herself was a big draw.”
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing had several games that made it more than just a typing program: Road Race, Space Junk, and Ragtime. Each of these were largely the same–typing a prompt that scrolled across the screens–but applied different effects. Tying fast made the text scroll faster in Road Race; accurate typing helped shoot more stuff in Space Junk; and Ragtime required the player to type in rhythm with a metronome. The small tweaks to how typing impacted the states of these games is what makes them satisfying, and those same practices in making typing feel responsive and tactile in games continues to drive what makes a typing game good.
Z-Type is a classic type-to-shoot game originally developed in just one week by Dominic Szablewski. He said his game is appealing because of the immediate feedback. Z-Type is an arcade-style space game in which players must shoot enemy spaceships. If they hit you, you’re done. It plays in rounds, with each round adding more enemies coming at you faster and faster. What makes this a typing game is that each of the enemy spaceships has a word, and some shoot letters. When you hit the first letter of a word, your spaceship shoots. So when you hit a lot of letters–typing about the letters that spell “condescending,” for instance–explosions abound.
“Typing/shooting and seeing lots of explosions is just cool,” Szablewski said. “The timing, sound effects, and graphics have to be just right to make it feel good. I spent a lot of time fiddling with these things until I had something that I liked. It’s very hard to put into words, but once you have a good game loop, it just clicks.”
He continued: “I love games that are ‘easy to learn, hard to master.’ Once you get better at these games, you can reach this almost zen-like state where you totally forget where your actions just ‘flow’ without thinking.” Z-Type is perfect at creating that feeling–it just feels really good to be good at this game.
It’s exactly the feeling Elecom developer Mike Smith wanted to employ in his upcoming typing beat ’em up Keys of Fury. “I got very excited about the idea of making a typing game that was face-meltingly awesome,” he told GameSpot.
