Twin stick shooters – shoot-’em-ups that use one stick for directional movement and another for directional weapon firing – have been around for a lot longer than you might imagine. The current popularity of the genre was ignited by the release of Geometry Wars over a decade ago, first as a mini game hidden in Project Gotham Racing on Xbox and later as a standalone game in its own right. However, you need to go back 40 years to find the first ever example. It was an arcade game called Gunfight, featuring two cowboys intent on each other’s destruction. It was pretty basic stuff so you have to jump forward to 1984 and another coin-op cabinet called Robotron which, with a lone fighter up against hordes of encroaching robots, set the template for the games that were to come.
