Typing games are cool again thanks to unexpected changes

Keyboards have more than 100 keys, but four keys are most important to people who play video games: W, A, S, and D. Some games use more than these keys, and yes, StarCraft, League of Legends, and World of Warcraft use various combinations, but most games rely on a small set of numbers and letters on the keyboard. Of course, there are practical reasons for this: Computer games often require one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard. There are tons of keys that are simply out of reach. If you're typing on a keyboard with two hands, you're probably not playing a video game. but you Can yes.

Typing games have been around for decades and were once widely considered educational tools designed to help children learn to use a keyboard. Before computers were commonplace in home offices, millennials were playing games like Typer Shark and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in computer lab classrooms. As computers (i.e. laptops) began to become commonplace, computer labs began to disappear, and with them the need for educational typing games disappeared. But from the ashes of the computer lab, typing games have re-emerged, emerging from the educational genre's toolbox while injecting new meaning into the niche genre.

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing was released in 1987 and developed by Software Toolworks, this Typical typing game. This is not the first typing game, but it is one of the earliest typing games. Mavis Beacon teaching typing is definitely the standout. Even today, Mewes himself is a figurehead in the world of typing.

“I think the idea of having the best typing teacher in the world right next to you, correcting mistakes and offering encouragement, is what Mavis Beacon Teaches is about,” game developer Michael Duffy told GameSpot. One of the big draws of Typing. The 'game' sensibilities we successfully employed in Chessmaster – both graphically and musically – made the rote learning of new motor skills a lot of fun. Typing hands that showed their finger positions were innovative in the primitive graphics era, and allowed people to not look at their hands while typing, but the illusion of Mewes himself was a big draw. “

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing has several games that make it more than just a typing program: Road Race, Space Junk, and Ragtime. Each one is largely the same—a prompt for input scrolling across the screen—but with different effects applied. Quick knotting can make text scroll faster in a road race; accurate typing helps shoot more stuff in space junk; ragtime requires players to tap the rhythm with a metronome. Small tweaks to how typing affects these game states make them satisfying, and the same practices that make typing feel responsive and tactile in games continue to push typing games forward.

Z-Type is a classic typing shooter originally developed by Dominic Szablewski in just one week. He said his game is attractive because of the immediate feedback. Z-Type is an arcade-style space game in which players must shoot enemy spaceships. If they hit you, you're screwed. It's played in turns, and each turn brings more enemies coming at you faster and faster. This is a typing game because each enemy ship has a word and some letters to shoot. When you hit the first letter of the word, your spaceship fires. So when you type a lot of letters – for example, letters that spell “condescending” – explosions abound.

“It was really cool to type/shoot and see a lot of explosions,” Szablewski said. “The timing, sound effects and graphics have to be just right to make it feel good. I spent a lot of time fiddling with these things until I got something I liked. It's hard to put into words, but once you have a good gameplay loop, it just clicks.”

“I like games that are 'easy to learn, hard to master,'” he continued. “Once you get better at these games, you can reach this almost Zen-like state where you completely forget that your actions are just 'flowing' without thought.” ” Z-Type is perfect for creating that feeling – it feels really good to be good at this game.

That's the feeling Elecom developer Mike Smith hopes to achieve in his upcoming typing game Keys of Fury. “I'm really excited about the idea of ​​making an amazing typing game,” he told GameSpot.

Following classics like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Z-Type, Smith's Keys of Fury was demoed at the recent Steam Next Fest and is part of the next generation of typing games. Recent popular typing games such as Nanotale and Keyboard Sports. Developers are pushing the boundaries of typing games, often mixing genres to create something entirely new. In Keys of Fury, typing leads to action-packed combat. Real-time strategy meets typing in Touch Type Tale from Pumperknickle Studio. Outer Brain Studios' Blood Typers used typing to power its survival horror game, and in Glyphica: Typing Survival, typing is how you fight off waves of enemies in roguelite rounds, much like a souped-up Z-Type. Final Sentence blends the battle royale mode with the genre, eventually topping the Steam Next Fest charts.

A keyboard is more than just a tool for gaming; This is the core of it. “I wanted every keystroke to matter so you could get as much satisfaction from pressing the 'punch' button on your controller,” Smith said. “I wanted every keystroke to matter. To have that immediate, satisfying attack and sound effect.”

Keyboards are essential for many computer games, so it makes sense that typing as a mechanic could translate to a variety of different types of games. Touch Type Tale, released in 2024 by German developer Pumpernickle Studio's Malte Hoffman, is a perfect blend of typing game elements for a real-time strategy game – RTS games like StarCraft 2 already use a large number of keyboard buttons as various hotkeys. That's how the Pumpernickle team started thinking about the idea: What if you could play a real-time strategy game using just your keyboard? You don't necessarily need a mouse or even a control menu.

While many older typing games focused primarily on typing quickly, in a game like Touch Type Tale, accuracy is more important. “It certainly helps if you type really fast, but there's a limit,” Hoffman told GameSpot. “Beyond that, typing faster doesn't do much for you. Your brain slows down because you're making decisions.” A good typing game offers more than just the opportunity to type quickly, he said.

Button Mash's Final Sentence is another game that rewards accuracy; Battle Royale certainly requires fast typists, but accurate typing is just as important. This is because, like other battle royale games, Final Sentence is a multiplayer online game where only one person can win. The game's setup is pretty intense: A group of 40 to 100 players enter a dimly lit room, each with their own typewriter and gun-wielding man. A typewriter, of course, can type. But what about the guy with the gun? If you make too many mistakes, he'll shoot you. The problem, however, is that if you don't type fast enough, you'll die too. The game was so popular during Steam Next Fest that developer Dmitry Minsky spent the entire event pressing buttons on the game's Amazon Web Services console to add more and more servers.

In fact, it's a lot like the typing mini-game in Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Except for guns. Minsky said he knows there's a large audience for typing trainers like MonkeyType or TypeRacer, where people can test their words per minute. But there's the backspace key there. It's stressful, he said, but you can always correct your mistakes. “The tension is so high here, you can feel it,” Minsky said. “You're always stressed.”

It's this tension that drives Blood Typers, a survival horror game from four-person developer Outer Brain Studios. Blood Typers, which released in February and received a new update in October, was clearly inspired by Typing of the Dead but completely strayed from the high-stress, blood-soaked survival, cooperative game. The feeling of grunting zombies stumbling toward you creates a similar rush and tension: You either type or die.

“Typing is a physical activity,” Blood Typers developer Dmitry Pirag told GameSpot. “The physicality of it complements the horror and makes it feel more immersive because you know you can control every move. It's very skill-based.”

But Pillage said Blood Type has different modes that can change the way players experience difficulty. You can make the typing elements more forgiving, giving you time to hunt and peck at keys, while also bringing up the survival horror elements to make the game more difficult in different ways.

Ultimately, though, if a game's system can't, as Typing Rogue and Gylphica: Typing Survival developer Xuming Zhou put it, “get out of the way and let the player type,” then it doesn't matter how innovative it is. Mixing Roguelite with typing is possible because neither gets in the way of the other, he said, adding, “One is a control system and the other is a progression system.”

“The goal of Glyphica is to enable players to type,” Zhou said. “The roguelike progression system achieves exactly that. Unlike the genre that is defined by a control scheme that might conflict with typing, the roguelike mechanics fit in perfectly and without compromise.”

Glyphica: Typing “Survival” feels like Z-Type in some ways – players control a turret and fire at enemies flying toward you in the center of the screen. Each enemy will have a word displayed above it, and typing that word will mean firing at them. Attack them before they attack you. But Glyphica: Typing Survival adds roguelite elements to the classic game: upgrades, loot, and weapons that scale with the size of your clan. There's a crazy tension between typing skill and speed, mixed with the Roguelite's upgraded dice.

The next generation of typing games is taking what was needed from previous eras. But it's this past that lays the necessary foundation for the future of typing games – a future where keyboards become both peripherals and game mechanics. Zhou said this could be called a revival. “Several typing games have done quite well recently, helping to attract a ready audience for the genre,” he said. “This may give people more confidence in the commercial viability of typing games, thereby reducing the risk for developers to explore them.”

Typing games are still a niche genre, and probably remain so: typing on a keyboard isn't as common as it once was—smartphone and tablet typing have replaced physical keyboards for some people. But a generation has a nostalgia for typing, and it's worth it.

“The thing that ties all these games together is the joy of typing, right?” said Touch Type Tale developer Hoffman. “Typing is satisfying. It's a great mode of connecting with something you've already done (games). There are so many opportunities to explore the space (and) use this great typing input method (to play games).”