Ah, the Commodore 64. Sixteen on-screen colours, every one a shade of brown. I got one for Christmas in 1982 or 1983 and you’d be forgiven for thinking that we had been entrusted with a thermonuclear device such was the awe in which it was held by my parents. Over the years, I went through many sticks with my 64, most of which seemed to have been built out of the cheapest plastic available with obsolescence as the overriding design factor.

Tape recorder, commandeered telly, brownness. Them were the days.

The machine came with the standard joystick – a (BBC Radio 4 voice…) Commodore 1311. This nasty little bastard was a repackaged standard Atari VCS joystick and was obviously designed by a committee of be-suited fuck-clumps who had never played a game in their lives.

Great place for the fire button there, lads. Now I have to hold it diagonally so that my thumb tendons don’t explode with prolongued use.

Wait – it doesn’t matter. The button has stopped working, now. That’s okay, I’ll just take a hammer and chisel to it each time I want it to register a press.

It looks like a half-sucked sweetie got stuck.

For directional movement, this piece of crap featured the standard, cheapo bubble-switch contacts inside so that each stick lasted for maybe a month of Attack Of The Mutant Camels. Futile attempts would then ensue to repair the busted switch with tin foil. I had to try – the nearest computer shop was over thirty miles away. When you blew out a directional contact, you could use the keyboard for that direction instead - if the game used Port 1. Unfortunately, the keys involved were carefully positioned to be as counter-intuitive as possible.

Early on, I discovered that you could use actual Atari 2600 VCS sticks – the advantage being that they were built like little black and red brick shithouses. They would happily soak up your rage as you bent the stick with clenched teeth after the cheating scum-bastard of a whoremonger of a game had killed you, again. Several of mine had, I am ashamed to say, teeth marks in the actual stick part due to this sort of behaviour. (I have also been known to spit all over the screens of arcade machines in fits of fury in my younger days. Not good).

Up next was the Holy Grail of the Commodore 64 kids in my school – the Spectravideo Quickshot I. It was revolutionary because it looked like a real aircraft stick! With suckers on the base! And it had TWO fire buttons – one a thumb button on top of the stick.

Unfortunately, the fact that the C64 used Atari joystick ports meant that both fire buttons did the same thing. Also, it had approximately a foot of travel in it so trying to play Thing On A Spring or indeed anything involving quick reactions was a clunky-clicky waste of time.

This joystick isn’t mentioned in this feature, but look at it – it’s ace.
Walkie-talkie Metal Mickey madness.

The Quickshot I was followed by the (clever boy) Quickshot II. This was the same idea as the Quickshot I but with more angular styling and a trigger button on top instead on one on the base – making it even more useless than its predecessor for fast action games.

Its secret weapon was the mighty auto-fire. Good idea in theory, but the limited welly of the 64 meant that most shooting games only had one or two bullets onscreen at a time, reducing this feature’s usefulness to little more than a quick rest for your fingers.

Exceptions to this were shooters like DropZone and wank-practicers like Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, Track And Field et al. Why? Because it was possible to wire the auto-fire up to one of the directional (poxy bubble) switches and lay waste to the CPU by turning it on and holding the stick over to the opposite direction. Voila! Speed meter maxed out and all you had to worry about was tapping the fire button to throw or whatever. If you tried playing Daley’s without doing this, the stick would last about a week. Many busted Quickshots were swapped and scavenged at school for working switches and joysticks.

Daley Thompson getting the Land Of The Giants
Chopsticks event all wrong.

The Slik-Stik looked like such a good proposition after the Quickshot. Very tiny and with very tight movement, its Unique Selling Point was that it didn’t use switches, but some sort of greased internal movement with metal contacts instead. Hence the name. Clever words. Cheers. Unfortunately, the greasiness disappeared after a while, and attempts to remedy the situation with mum’s Vaseline were hopeless. File under ‘B’ for “Bin”.

People weren’t afraid of experimentation in the 80’s, and the Konix SpeedKing was a case in point. Designed to fit in the palm, it had a tight little micro-switched stick but the fire button location was a complete pain in the hole. Next!

Finally, I entered Stick Nirvana– the Kempston Competition Pro. Four real micro-switches lent an arcade-style click to movement, and there was a decent big red ball stick on it. Two red arcade-quality fire buttons rounded it off. Beautiful. Almost impossible to break, and, when coupled with Atarisoft Donkey Kong, you could almost believe you were in an arcade.

Then again, I wonder if any of them would have been better than this: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/joystik.html

ONEPUNCHMICKEY, June 2004.

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