9. Strafe-Jumping - Quake (1996)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-H2bKcKUMs
Quake is considered a classic first-person shooter in every sense, up there with the likes of
Doom and
Half-Life for its all-important contributions to the evolution of gaming. And one of the things that
Quake granted the first-person shooter genre is now know widely as "strafe-jumping," a technique that greatly increases a player's velocity when making jumps. Here's how to do it, according to Wikipedia (skip this part if you don't care):
1. The player presses the forward key, preparing to make the first jump. 2. Still keeping the forward key pressed, the player jumps, adding either the move left or the move right key (ergo the strafe in the term, strafe-jumping). The strafe and jump keys must be pressed at the same time. 3. To gain maximum speed, the player must now move the mouse smoothly to around a 85 degree (i.e., turn) in the direction of the strafe, while still holding down the two aforementioned keys. This part is called airstrafing, which is responsible for increase in speed during the jump. 4. For successive strafejumps, the player immediately jumps again on landing, swapping the direction of strafe as well as mouse motion.
But this now widespread feature actually started life as a glitch - one which is now considered standard in pretty much all your favourite first-person shooters, including
Half-Life 2 and
Call of Duty (anything built on the Quake engine, basically). Nowadays, all the "cool" players are strafe-jumping, because it allows gamers to access areas that they might not be able to access normally, perform impressive speed runs, and generally look badass in videos that they upload to YouTube. It's tricky to learn, but the ability to successfully strafe-jump apparently lodges itself into your brain, so once you've mastered it, it's yours forever. Though I'd argue you don't list it as a special skill on your online dating resume. Not that you
need online dating, strafe-jumper.