The joy of sticks: let's celebrate the return of the specialist gaming controller

With the return of epic space shooters and the rise of virtual reality, elaborate game controllers are on the way back

I can remember my first proper joystick. It was the mid-80s and my dad had brought us a Commodore 64, "to do homework on and stuff". He wasn't fooling anyone, least of all himself; this sexy chunk of brown plastic was for gaming and we all knew it. Soon though, we got fed up of playing Chuckie Egg with keyboard controls, so using my birthday money, I bought a Quickshot II - the 1980s computer peripheral equivalent of a Ford Escort GTI: slightly naff, but showy and desirable.

The Quickshot II looked sort of like a real flight stick, with its gigantic red trigger buttons on the shaft, and its chunky base, complete with four sucker pads so you could stick it to the ugly MDF computer desk that you bought from Do It All. I spent countless hours playing Elite with that thing, pretending I was Han Solo, outsmarting pirate vessels throughout the galaxy. It was, to be honest, a crap joystick, really. It was brittle and insensitive, a bit like me at that age - and if you got carried away, it was easy to wrench the shaft off. And, anyway, real gamers preferred an arcade-style stick, like the Competition Pro, with its squat, sturdy build and micro-switches for precise control.