Thirty years ago, Atari released Battlezone - one of the very first games to feature proper 3D vector graphics. Its game play is instantly recognisable to today’s gamers. You drive your tank around a landscape which features stationary terrain, moving enemies, and a pretty mountainscape in the background. Of course, today’s terrain is much more detailed, some of today’s enemies could be fresh from West Point, and today’s mountainscapes are rendered in glorious 24-bit Technicolor instead of by using a green line. And, of course, today’s control methods are much... um, worse?

So, how does one drive a tank? Well, if you’ve been brought up with 3D shooters, you’ll assume that a tank is controlled in the same manner as everything else in the universe – that is to say that you have a control to go forwards, one to go backwards, a way of rotating it, and possibly some means of making it go sideways whilst still facing forwards. But that’s not how you drive a tank at all. A tank has a track on each side which can be made to rotate forwards or backwards at a speed of the driver’s choosing. Make them both go forwards at top speed and you go forwards at top speed. Make them go in opposite directions at top speed and you turn quickly on the spot. Make one go forwards a bit faster than the other and you turn as you go.

Sure, you can replicate this with an up-down-left-right control, and this abstraction had been around for many years even when Battlezone was released. It makes perfect sense in the world of the 2D grid; the world of the linear straightjacket and the ubiquitous spreadsheet. But Battlezone’s designers didn’t live in a 2D world. They wanted you to feel like you were driving a tank around. So they gave you two levers – one to make the left track go forwards or backwards, and one to do the same for the right track. Oh, and naturally there’s a button to fire the gun. OK, so you couldn’t make the turret swivel, but to be fair, the game did only have 40K of RAM...

Fourteen years ago, id Software released Quake – one of the very first FPS games to feature six degrees of freedom. Its game play is instantly recognisable to today’s gamers. OK, I won’t go into detail this time - if you don’t know what Quake is, it’s about time you went and played it, but here’s the thing – in Quake, and in the vast majority of FPSs that have come afterwards, you play a human, or at least some sort of bipedal humanoid. And humans don’t move through smooth continuous impulsion. I sure as hell don’t sidestep right at a constant metre per second whilst rotating left at 45 degrees per second in order to get from my hallway to my fridge for a nice cold can of cider at the end of the day.

Human movement is discrete; spiky; jerky even – and the smooth linearity of a humanoid avatar - especially when combined with its apparent ability to run and jump ad infinitum - is a terrible blow to gaming immersion once you’ve noticed how wrong it is. I hope I haven’t spoiled it for you now, kind of like ruining Muse for everybody by pointing out how annoying the singer’s rasping, gasping breath intakes are, or explaining that none of Michael McIntyre’s jokes are actually funny if you stop and think about them, no matter how much he might wave his hands in opposing circles.

Of course, there are both practicality and desirability limits to realistic control movement. You don’t want to micromanage your metatarsal, and even if you did, there are around 750 muscles in the human body and I don’t want to see the PS3 controller for that. But maybe, just maybe, a sidestep could be a side-step – you accelerate, move a fixed distance sideways, then come to rest. Your head probably tilts a bit whilst you’re doing it, and because your feet are further apart, your viewpoint will be lower too. Hey presto, you stop feeling like you’re stuck in a very pretty version of Asteroids and start feeling like a real person in a real world again! One small sidestep for man - one giant leap for video games.

This is not to belittle Quake, which makes up for this relatively minor shortcoming by being quite revolutionary in many other ways. No, the problem is the laziness and lack of creativity that comes after. “Hey, can we have it like Quake, but with swords / lasers / a film franchise?” The vast majority of games, as technology advances, do the same thing, but more so. Ooh, more guns, prettier graphics, bigger levels. Er, same game though.

Maybe it’s time to try something new?

There is a sad corollary to this. Thanks to Atari, you can play Battlezone for free online... but they’ve changed the controls to up, down, left, and right!