Push forward and the character walks the way it is facing. Push left or right and it turns on the spot. Pull back and it shuffles slowly backwards. That is the whole of the scheme now called “tank controls”, and in many 3D games of the 1990s it was how you steered a person with a joypad or a keyboard: the investigators of Alone in the Dark, Jill Valentine in Resident Evil, Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, Manny Calavera in Grim Fandango. Some reviewers praised it as part of the tension and others cursed it, and designers kept it for years. The name came much later: the magazines of the time called it “character-relative” or “rotate/walk forward”, and “tank controls” appears in print for it only in 2012.
Fast facts
- How it works: forward walks along the character’s facing, left and right rotate it in place; Steven Poole called it the “‘rotate/walk forward’ paradigm” (Edge, March 2001).
- Early use: Alone in the Dark (1992), walked with the cursor keys.
- Made famous by: Resident Evil (1996), where “you can run forwards but only retreat in painfully slow steps” (Edge, June 1996).
- Also used by: Tomb Raider (1996), Grim Fandango (1998) and Shenmue, among others.
- Kept on purpose: Resident Evil 4 (2005) still had no side-step, because “it hurt the game balance” (Hiroyuki Kobayashi, Edge, February 2005).
- The name: used of a game character by Edge in February 2012, about Grim Fandango. Earlier, “tank controls” meant the controls of a tank.
How it works
Most 2D games move a character in the direction the player pushes: press right and the sprite goes right across the screen. That is camera-relative, or screen-relative, control. Tank controls are character-relative. The stick or keys do not say “go that way on the screen” but “walk forwards” and “turn”. The player has to think from inside the character, like a driver who can only steer and accelerate.
That independence from the camera is what made the scheme fit the games that used it. When a fixed camera cuts to a new angle, “right” on the screen may suddenly point somewhere else in the room. Under tank controls, a player holding forward keeps walking forward through the cut. The cost is that turning takes time, and so does backing away. Hyper’s reviewer described the result in 2004, complaining about a fighting game that copied it: “a control scheme reminiscent of Resident Evil in which they have to painstakingly turn on the spot before moving in a new direction”.
Fixed cameras
Alone in the Dark put polygon characters in front of pre-rendered backgrounds and cut between camera positions as the player moved. Chris Lombardi’s preview in Computer Gaming World (February 1993) is mostly about that: “As one’s character moves about a room, one’s perspective will change many times”, and “While many rooms have only two such camera views, some have up to nine!” He also named the cost. “Gamers should be warned, however, that the unique cinematic angles sometimes get too clever. Swift changes in the viewpoint can occasionally be disastrous when the player’s character is in combat mode. At the very least, these shifts can be disorienting.” The game was played from the keypad, because “the game often requires fine movements which make mouse control inappropriate”.
Peter Olafson’s Compute review (July 1993) described the view as “as if you’re watching your character from a trapdoor just above and to the side”, shifting “sometimes a number of times, depending on where you’re standing”, and found the game “very easy to control. The keyboard interface is almost as transparent as the game’s ethereal critters.” Neither writer spelled out which key did what. By 1996 Edge could take it for granted: reviewing Time Commando, a later game from Alone in the Dark’s designer Frédérick Raynal, it said walking around “using the cursor keys à la Alone in the Dark” was “bearable”.
Resident Evil
Edge drew the line of descent in June 1996, the month it reviewed Resident Evil: “The 3D virtual world created by Infogrames in Alone in The Dark opened up an entirely new way for developers to deliver gaming universes. Although recently it has been imitated successfully by Capcom with Resident Evil…” The review found “precise, confident control of the player character”, and listed among the things “geared towards suspense” the “skewed camera angles” and “the fact that you can run forwards but only retreat in painfully slow steps.”
Paul Valles, in Computer and Video Games the following month, read the same restrictions as the point: “Both Jill and Chris respond instantly to commands, and their restrictions enhance player involvement as opposed to limiting it - they walk slowly backward, and take time recovering between gun shots or knife swipes. It all adds to the tension.”
That verdict did not last. A 2010 Retro Gamer hardware guide, explaining why 1996 was the year the console makers “turned to analogue sticks for help”, put it as “remember how dire the controls were in Resident Evil.”
Lara, Manny and Shenmue
The scheme was not only for horror. Steven Poole, writing his “Trigger Happy” column in Edge in March 2001, called it “the ‘rotate/walk forward’ paradigm familiar from Tomb Raider, Resident Evil et al.” He defended it for Tomb Raider: “There is a good reason for the rotate/walk system in the early Tomb Raider games, which is that success depends critically on very precise positioning and jumping.” His target was Sega’s Shenmue, which put the same scheme on the Dreamcast’s D-pad and left the analogue stick to look around. “This is an elderly system that the N64’s analogue stick was supposed to consign to history. Four years on, to relegate the Dreamcast’s analogue stick to the secondary function of ‘look’ is nuts.”
LucasArts’ Grim Fandango shows designers treating it as one choice among two. Early in 1998 Tim Schafer told PC Games that the team was “debating whether you’ll drive Manny with screen-relative controls or character-relative controls. ‘I like them both, and we’ll probably put both of them in.’” The finished game offered both. Computer and Video Games warned adventure players that without a mouse “it plays more like Resident Evil” and “takes time to get used to”. Computer Gaming World’s Thierry Nguyen found Manny “a bear to control at times”, and complained that “sometimes Manny would suddenly turn around for no real reason and walk down a path I didn’t choose”.
Rooted to the spot
Resident Evil 4 (2005) moved the camera over Leon Kennedy’s shoulder and dropped the fixed angles, but kept part of the old scheme. Edge’s review caption: “Holding R draws your weapon, whereupon you manipulate a laser-style sight with the same stick you use for movement, ensuring that in some respects this plays just like previous Resident Evils since you’re rooted to the spot when shooting.”
That was a decision, and Hiroyuki Kobayashi, the game’s producer, explained it to Edge a month earlier. Asked whether changes since the Tokyo Game Show build came from player feedback, he said many did: the knife on one button, reloading on two. Then: “One request we did not add was the side step. We tested it, but it hurt the game balance, making it less RE and more of a simple shooter. You could dodge most of the enemy attacks, and there was no more anxiousness over what could be waiting around corners, as you could look without exposing yourself entirely.”
A reader, Richard Cross, wrote to Edge two issues later to say the review had “spent 125 words berating the dreadful control system” and then excused it as the product of “extensive playtesting”. His letter is the clearest period statement of how the scheme felt to someone who hated it: “I cannot forgive a game that expects you to defend yourself against multiple enemies but doesn’t let you look around corners, step left or right, and that glues you to the spot giving you a 45-degree aiming ‘cone’ whenever you want to fire a gun”. Or: “If I drove a car whose steering wheel only turned 45 degrees from left to right, I guess it would certainly keep me on my toes”. Edge replied that the review’s claim came from Kobayashi himself, in the issue 146 interview.
The name
“Tank controls” first meant exactly that. In 1991 Jonathan Griffiths, designing the tank strategy game Campaign for Empire, told The One that planes and ships could not be driven in his game because they were “totally incompatible with tank controls. ‘With a tank … you can turn left, turn right and shoot.’” A tank turns in place and drives along the way its hull points, which is the scheme described above.
Magazine writers of the 1990s and 2000s described the scheme without naming it after tanks, as “character-relative” or “rotate/walk forward”. Edge used the word in February 2012, in a retrospective on Grim Fandango that called the interface, “with its equally quirky tank ‘character-relative’ and ‘camera-relative’ choice of controls”, the game’s worst trait. A month later, in the same series, Rhys Cadle of Climax used it of Resident Evil 4, describing a Silent Hill: Origins build that had set out to copy that game: “some of the things that didn’t work 100 per cent in Resident Evil 4, like that control scheme, with the offset character and the tank controls, is great in open spaces, but if you put it in a corridor then it’s not so good.”
By then the scheme was being retired. Edge’s Resident Evil 6 preview (August 2012) noted that “the old tank controls were designed to avoid empowering players with too much freedom of movement”, Kobayashi’s side-step argument restated. Its review that December opened with “The tank controls are out, replaced by a dual-analogue setup that’s ornamented with a set of evasive dives and rolls. After the intensely pressurised action of Resident Evil 4 and 5, it’s a change that feels overdue”.
Sources
- Kati Hamza, Campaign preview, The One issue 37, October 1991, p. 39: Jonathan Griffiths on “tank controls”.
- Chris Lombardi, “The Shape of Things to Come”, Computer Gaming World issue 103, February 1993, p. 30: Alone in the Dark preview (camera angles, keypad control).
- Peter Olafson, Alone in the Dark review, Compute issue 154, July 1993, p. 78.
- Edge issue 33, June 1996: Resident Evil review (nine out of ten; the slow retreat) and The City of Lost Children preview (Alone in the Dark “imitated successfully by Capcom”).
- Paul Valles, second opinion in the Resident Evil review, Computer and Video Games issue 176, July 1996, pp. 52–56.
- Edge issue 36, September 1996: Time Commando review (cursor keys “à la Alone in the Dark”).
- PC Games (US), June 1998, p. 43: Grim Fandango preview (Tim Schafer on screen-relative and character-relative controls).
- Computer and Video Games issue 206, January 1999: Grim Fandango review (“more like Resident Evil”).
- Thierry Nguyen, Grim Fandango review, Computer Gaming World issue 175, February 1999, p. 206.
- Steven Poole, “Trigger Happy”, Edge issue 95, March 2001: Shenmue, Tomb Raider and the “rotate/walk forward” paradigm.
- Hyper issue 127, May 2004: One Must Fall: Battlegrounds review (“turn on the spot before moving in a new direction”).
- Edge issue 146, February 2005, pp. 40–43: “Revival Horror”, interview with Hiroyuki Kobayashi (the side-step).
- Edge issue 147, March 2005, p. 76: Resident Evil 4 review.
- Edge issue 149, May 2005, p. 126: letter from Richard Cross and Edge’s reply.
- Retro Gamer, Videogames Hardware Handbook 1977–2001 volume 2, 2010: controllers feature.
- Edge issue 237, February 2012, p. 100, “The Untouchables”: Grim Fandango (“quirky tank ‘character-relative’ and ‘camera-relative’ choice of controls”).
- Edge issue 238, March 2012, “The Untouchables”: Rhys Cadle on Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill: Origins.
- Edge issue 243, August 2012, p. 70: Resident Evil 6 preview.
- Edge issue 247, December 2012, p. 94: Resident Evil 6 review.