I tried playing Quake 2 with a gamepad if you can believe it. Lasted like two or three levels before I finally switched to trying that "wacky mouse aim stuff."

Didn't take long to convert me.

Hmm i can't remember when i played Quake 2 for the first time but i'm pretty sure it was before Unreal but i'm 100% sure Unreal was the first one i used mouse look for. If there was an option to enable autoaim in quake 2, i probably played that before Unreal using only keyboard but i can't remember.

I knew some people back then who played games like Doom with a joystick. Probably not on the highest difficulty setting, though. I was more comfortable with keyboard. Can't really remember when the mouse came into play. Probably with Duke3d and Quake1.

For me it was Quake 2 and finally Quake 1 multiplayer that forced the transition on me. I still prefer old-school style, it might be slower, but I have more fun with it ;-). Simply having both hands on the keyboard feels so good ....

Sacrilege! Doom is the PCest game of PC games, so it MUST be run with a keyboard+mouse combo exclusively! :-P

I definitely played the early FPS'ers with keyboard only. Wasn't it the ALT key or something that you held to strafe? I converted when duke3d came out. I started playing people over dial-up and everyone was wasting me and I thought everybody was cheating. "How can they run circles around me like that! Cheaters!" Then, I met a guy in my local area who played and he showed me the mouse+keyboard combo and I never looked back. Luckily I got comfortable with that setup just before Quake released so I was able to play that one properly. Wasn't Quake probably the first FPS to feel really 3D though? The build engine games looked strange when you looked up and down, but with Quake the engine felt normal for it. If I remember right the build engine games had some autoaim too.

I have recently played Doom 2 on Xbox and the controls were really cool. I used to play Doom on Pc but i remember it as keyboard only game. Maybe something is wrong with my memory or I have played it that way. In any case for me its just more convenient to play Doom with gamepad on the couch/ chair than on keyboard (since I'm stuck with my laptop).

Well, it depends on whether you consider it an FPS but Descent was pretty much the first game in narrow FPS style levels in real full 3D I know of and it pretty much had to be played with a keyboard/mouse combo. Then there was also Terminator: Future Shock from 1995 which is rarely mentioned in those discussions about FPS history. It was released even before Duke and already had full 3D environments and even enemies. I think unlike Duke you really had to play it with a keyboard/mouse combo because of floating and flying enemies, elevations etc. combined with a lack of auto aiming, but I'm not sure about that as I haven't played it in almost ten years.

That's true about Descent, though I don't normally consider it an FPS. I still have an original Skynet CD (not sure if that came before or after Future Shock), but actually I never really played it because it didn't run well enough on my PC back then.

Yeah, considering Descent an FPS is somewhat controversial but heck, in terms of gameplay the only difference between this one and "real" FPS games is that there's no gravity and it shouldn't matter that you're controlling some sort of vessel instead of a human or humanoid. Aside from that it has all the features you'd expect from an FPS game. Either way it pioneered 3D visuals and FPP gameplay.

And Skynet is actually the sequel to Future Shock but it's pretty much "more of the same" with slight improvements. And the stability/performance issues are probably some of the main reasons why these games never got a real chance to gather much fame (although I must admit that also gameplay-wise they couldn't compete with either Doom or Duke). I remember having serious trouble getting them to run on a 200 Mhz machine and I think that even once I got them to run the performance was far from perfect when playing on full details.

For me it was already Duke3D. With original Doom 1-2, I didn't see much point in trying to make the mouse aiming usable. I think by default moving the mouse up/down caused the soldier to move forwards/backwards, which was very irritating, but I'm sure that could be switched off. But as I recall the autoaim in Doom games was anyway so strong that it didn't matter much, at least in single-player. (I tried the mouseaim (sideways) later though, and I guess it was ok.)

I first started playing Duke3D the same way as I had always played Doom games, but being able to tilt head up and down made me eventually try the mouselook... and my god what a difference it made instantly! There wasn't even any learning curve, I felt instantly that I was doing much better in the game with the mouse, than trying to aim with the keyboard.

Simple, the Xbox controller is designed for gaming, a keyboard isn't.

Doom was designed for keyboard only (it had autoaim after all)
Dual joysticks surely :P

This is my optimal setting for DooM:

• WASD to move;
• ↓ to stafe, ← to shoot, → to interact (use), ↑ to run;
• Q to look up, E to look down, F to center view.

So you actually use the strafe modifier + vertical aiming via keyboard? Some people are weeeird.