Why PS1 Games Used Tank Controls (And Why It Actually Made Sense)
If you have ever handed a PS1 controller to someone who never played Resident Evil or Tomb Raider as a kid and watched them try to move, there is a very specific face they make. It happens roughly three seconds after they press up and the character rotates in place instead of walking, or walks off confidently in a direction that is absolutely not where they were pointing.
They look at you. You say "yeah, that's just how it works." They look back at the TV. And then they fall into a hole (and you secretly laugh on the inside like a maniac).
Most people write this off as games being primitive, or the PS1 era being an awkward phase on the way to something better. But tank controls were not a mistake, and for a lot of games, they were the whole point. The hardware forced a solution, and the designers looked at it and realized they could build something around it.
Tank controls are a control scheme where movement is relative to the player character, not the camera. Pressing up moves the character forward in whatever direction they are currently facing. Left and right rotate the body. The camera has no effect on any of this.
Jump to: TL;DR ↓
What Tank Controls Are Actually Doing
The name comes from how real tanks drive. Left rotates the body left, right rotates it right, and forward always means forward in whatever direction the machine is currently facing, no matter where the camera is.
In a video game, up does not mean "move toward the top of the screen." It means "move forward in whatever direction your character is facing right now." The character is the reference point, not the camera. If the camera is behind you, fine, everything lines up. If it is off to the side or looking at you from the front, the controls stay exactly the same, and that is precisely where people fall into holes.
Which raises the obvious question: why would anyone build a game that way?
The PS1 Had a Hardware Problem, and Developers Solved It Beautifully
 |
| The PS1 controller felt so good to use. |
The original PlayStation launched in 1994 with no analog sticks. The Dual Analog did not arrive until 1997 and the DualShock followed shortly after, which means the most formative years of PS1 development happened when designers had to assume most players had a digital d-pad and nothing else.
The hardware also simply was not powerful enough to render detailed 3D spaces and move a camera freely at the same time. So a lot of developers landed on a clever solution: do not let the camera move at all. Lock it down, pre-render the background as a still image, and now the game only has to draw the characters and enemies on top of it. The room suddenly looks far more detailed than the hardware would normally allow. Resident Evil did this. Silent Hill did this. It was how you made the console look better than it actually was.
The catch is that fixed cameras cut constantly. Every door, every room crossing, the angle shifts. And if your controls are camera-relative, every cut is a trap. You push up to walk forward, the camera cuts, and now up is pointing you straight back the way you came. Exactly when you need precision, the controls flip on you.
Tank controls remove this entirely. Because the character is always the reference point, a cut changes nothing. Forward is still forward. The camera can do whatever it wants.
Shinji Mikami, the director of Resident Evil, described exactly this. The team moved to pre-rendered backgrounds to hit their visual targets, which locked in fixed cameras and made cuts unavoidable. He looked at Alone in the Dark, a 1992 PC game using the same approach, and saw the "control issues" it created. He later called the fixed-camera setup "just a workaround" he was not proud of. Tank controls were what made it livable.
When the Limitation Became the Feature
That is the technical explanation. Here is the one that actually matters.
Think about the first zombie you encounter in Resident Evil, the one that is eating someone in a hallway and it turns to face you. You cannot spin and sprint. You have to rotate, hold up, take a step, rotate again. It keeps walking toward you the whole time. That slow rotation is not a flaw. It is why that moment is frightening. You are not a trained combatant. You are a person who is scared, and the controls make you feel exactly that.
The Silent Hill team described their camera as deliberately expressive, a tool for keeping the player unbalanced. You cannot do that with a camera the player controls, because the player will always point it somewhere comfortable. If the camera belongs to the developer, the player needs something stable to hold onto, and tank controls were that thing.
Tomb Raider is a different case and a useful one. The whole game was built around a grid of specific block-sized units, and Lara moved in predictable, consistent steps. You could learn the exact rotation to line up a ledge grab and replicate it in any level, at any camera angle, and it would still work because the controls never changed underneath you. These were not compromises. The controls were part of what the games were doing.
Why They Went Away
Once the tools caught up, the original reasons got weaker and nobody was very sad about it. Analog sticks became standard. Hardware improved enough that cameras did not have to cut constantly. Players expected to control the camera themselves. Ape Escape in 1999 was the first PS1 game to outright require an analog controller and you simply could not play it without one. The manual did not apologize for this. It just told you what controller to buy.
Once a player-controlled camera stays behind the character, the whole problem disappears. And when a problem stops existing, so does the tool that fixed it.
| Era | Camera Type | Why Tank Controls Made Sense |
|---|---|---|
| 1994–1996 | Fixed / pre-rendered | Cuts everywhere, no analog sticks, character-relative movement was the only stable option |
| 1997–1999 | Fixed + early dynamic | Analog arrived but most games still used fixed cameras for visual quality and genre feel |
| 2000 onward | Player-controlled | Camera stays behind character, "up = forward" becomes obvious, tank controls phase out |
They Never Fully Left
 |
| Crow Country is a modern game that feels retro! |
Tank controls did not disappear so much as go underground and wait for someone to make a good argument for them again. It did not take that long.
Crow Country, Signalis, Tormented Souls. A handful of indie horror games that came back to the same answer Capcom and Konami reached in the nineties. Fixed camera. Slow rotation. No instant sprint away from whatever is behind you. Not because it was nostalgic but because it still works. The vulnerability the controls create is not a side effect of the design. It is the design.
When modern players bounce off those games for the same reason they bounce off Resident Evil, it is the same misunderstanding every time.
What Actually Happens When You Go Back
Boot up Resident Evil in DuckStation today and give it fifteen minutes, something happens. Your brain adjusts. The movement becomes readable, the turning becomes deliberate, and you start to understand why the corridor is this width, why the camera is placed here, why the encounter is designed around this exact angle.
The level design and the controls were built together, and they hold together when you let them.
That said, yes. Falling into holes is still annoying. Some things remain true across thirty years.
The controls are not fighting you. They just expect you to know what they are asking!
TL;DR: Tank controls were not a mistake. They were the right answer to a specific problem: fixed cameras that cut constantly, digital d-pads with no analog input, and hardware that could not move a camera freely. The best PS1 games did not work around tank controls. They were built around them. Boot up DuckStation, give it fifteen minutes, and your brain will figure it out.
Sources: PS1 hardware documentation, developer interviews with Shinji Mikami (Capcom), Keiichiro Toyama (Konami), and Andy Gavin (Naughty Dog), and original game manuals.
No comments:
Post a Comment