Force Feedback
Feel the game
Force feedback puts motors in a controller so the game can push back. Hard Drivin' had a motorised steering column in 1989, Immersion's Louis Rosenberg pitched the modelled version in 1996, and by 1998 Microsoft and Logitech were shipping wheels and sticks the games had yet to catch up with.
Force feedback puts motors in a controller so that the game can push back: a wheel that judders over kerbs and fights a slide, a stick that kicks with recoil. Atari’s Hard Drivin’ cabinet had a motorised steering column in 1989; Immersion’s Louis Rosenberg pitched the modelled version to Edge in 1996; and by Christmas 1998 PC magazines were reviewing a crop of force-feedback wheels and sticks and complaining that the games had not caught up.
Fast facts
- In the arcade: Hard Drivin’ (Atari Games, 1989) — a “centre-feel steering wheel and column that supply continuous feedback as you drive” (ACE, April 1989).
- The definition: “an input device, like a traditional joystick, but also an output device” — Louis Rosenberg, Immersion (Edge, August 1996).
- On the PC: Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback Pro stick, $149.95 (reviewed November 1997); SideWinder Force Feedback Wheel, $199 (1998); Logitech WingMan Force stick (1998).
- Two standards: Microsoft’s, and Immersion’s I-Force 2.0 licensed to CH Products, Thrustmaster and Logitech — both driven through DirectX (PC Zone, Christmas 1998).
- Distinct from: rumble, which vibrates without resisting; see Rumble Pak.
Hard Drivin’
ACE saw Atari’s cabinet at its world premiere in early 1989, “some three years in development” and without “a hydraulic to be seen” — the effect came through the controls, not the seat. The report describes “the centre-feel steering wheel and column that supply continuous feedback as you drive, juddering over rough ground, or yanking your hands all over the shop if the car spins”. The car had a clutch and a four-speed shift, and the machine remembered the best lap for a head-to-head “Challenge Lap”.
Immersion
Edge’s 1996 survey of controllers put force feedback above every other advance: it “promise[s] to open up whole new ways of experiencing a video or computer game”. Rosenberg, president of Immersion Corp, defined it as “basically a joystick that is an input device, like a traditional joystick, but also an output device”, with “actuators on each of the axes” so “the computer can independently command a force to the X or the Y axis” — “Essentially, it’s a robot … that looks like a joystick that sits on your desk.”
He drew the line between his devices and the arcade at modelling. Cabinets like Daytona USA were “just sending out this canned routine that the player feels” — the same jerk on every wall regardless of speed — whereas “What we can do is really model the dynamics of what it should feel like when a car bumps into a wall, or when a ball hits into a paddle”, “the difference between” “an old PC speaker that just makes buzzes” and “a Sound Blaster”. Edge tried the demos — springs on screen that resisted the stick, a “puddle” that felt like “stirring paint”, two-player Pong with rubber paddles — and judged the combination of visual and physical cues “more truly immersive than any advance in graphics or processor technology Edge has seen”. Greg Stearns of CH Products, one of Immersion’s licensees, put the pitch in a sentence: “Right now we amaze the eyes and the ears. Now, with force feedback, we can add one more thing to the list of ‘feel goods’.”
On the PC
Microsoft’s SideWinder Force Feedback Pro reached Computer Gaming World in November 1997 at $149.95, with motors in the handle for recoil and resistance and effects “such as driving over a rough surface or an idling engine vibration”. A year later the wheels had arrived: CGW’s 1998 holiday guide found none more exciting than Microsoft’s $199 Force Feedback Steering Wheel — “the jarring bump of the road, the grinding of metal on metal, even the simple idling of your motor” — and PC Zone’s Christmas roundup tested three motorised steering wheels among models “from cheapies with a street price of less than £50, through to models costing — gulp — over £150”. Its description is the working definition: “hit a kerb or another car and you’ll feel a sudden impact; suffer a blow-out and the wheel will judder violently; veer off on to grass and you should feel the control slipping.”
Both magazines said the same thing about the software. CGW’s Dave Salvator: “Force-feedback is another one of those technologies in which the hardware is leading the software. Game development lags, but there’s a crop of force-feedback hardware at the ready.” PC Zone: “On the PC, however, we’re very much at the mercy of game designers” — TOCA Touring Car managed “just simple kerb-hit effects”, Ultim@te Race Pro let you “literally feel the car sliding slightly out of control”, and Grand Prix Legends, “racing game of the moment”, supported none of it. The devices needed “bidirectional communication”, which is why Logitech’s WingMan Force made a point of USB, and they split across “two competing standards”: Microsoft’s own and Immersion’s I-Force 2.0, both reached through DirectX so that a game supporting one usually supported the other.