Keyboards have more than 100 keys, but there are four that are most important to people who play video games: W, A, S, and D. There are games that use more than these keys, yes–StarCraft, League of Legends, and World of Warcraft use all sorts of combinations–but the majority of games rely on a small sampling of numbers and letters on the keyboard. There are practical reasons for this, to be sure: Computer games often require one hand on a mouse, the other on a keyboard. There are a ton of keys that are simply out of reach. If you’ve got two hands on the keyboard, you’re probably not playing a video game. But you could be.
Typing games have existed for decades, once largely considered educational tools designed to help kids learn to use a keyboard. Millennials played games like Typer Shark and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in their computer lab classrooms, before computers were commonplace in home offices. As computers, namely laptops, started to proliferate, computer labs started to disappear–and so did the need for educational typing games. But from the ashes of the computer lab, typing games have reemerged, pulling from the educational genres toolbox while putting a new spin on the niche genre.
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, released in 1987 and developed by Software Toolworks, is the quintessential typing game. It wasn’t the first typing game, but it was among the first. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is certainly the most prominent; Mavis herself is the face of the typing genre, even today.