Japanese gamer girl’s crazy controller grip shocks Internet, is unintentional blast from the past

Some see it as backwards or upside-down, but others remember it as the AC grip.

If you’ve done much video gaming during the past 20 years, Sony’s PlayStation controller probably seems like an extremely intuitive design. Wrap your hands around the grips, and your left thumb falls naturally to the D-pad and your right over the four diagonally arranged face buttons, with the twin analog sticks also in easy reach of your opposable digits. Meanwhile, your index and middle fingers each have shoulder buttons/triggers immediately underneath them.

Well, at least that’s what happens when most of us pick up a PlayStation controller. It’s a very different story for Japanese Twitter user @shark__5214, as this video shows.

Instead of holding the controller with the buttons facing her, @shark__5214 holds the controller upside-down…or maybe it’s backwards? Either way, it’s definitely not the grip the designers had in mind, and the unorthodox approach has earned her video over seven million views. And it’s not like she’s playing some dating simulator visual novel or other menu-driven game where time isn’t of the essence. She’s playing Fortnite!

▼ Though by her own admission, she’s not very good at the battle royale title.

@shark__5214 says she didn’t set out to flout video gaming tradition. This is simply how she picked up the controller for the first time, and she’s stuck with it. According to her video tweet, she didn’t even know she was doing anything unusual until quite recently.

Weird as it may look, playing this way might not be as difficult as it seems at first glance. Gamers don’t really have to look down at the buttons once they’re familiar with the controller’s layout, and many over-the-shoulder-perspective games allow you to reverse the direction the camera swings when pressing the analog sticks (though character movement would still feel backwards to most people if they used @shark__5214’s grip).

That said, @shark__5214 doesn’t really recommend this grip so strongly to others. In a follow-up tweet, she mentioned that it sometimes causes her pinkies to hurt, at which times she slides her grip over one finger and plays with ring fingers on the analog sticks.

But what’s maybe the biggest surprise of all is that while many of the people watching @shark__5214’s video have never seen someone hold a controller like this before, she actually isn’t the first person to do so. As a matter of fact, there was a time when enough people adopted this technique to earn it its own name among Japanese gamers: AC grip.

Unfortunately, AC stands for Armored Core, a mecha combat game from developer From Software that peaked in popularity and lapsed into stasis before the social media boom, so videos of people using AC grip, as well as discussions of what advantages it offered for the game, are hard to come by. Even still, @shark__5214’s video was enough of a nostalgia trip to propel “AC grip” into the top trending topics on Japanese Twitter, showing that even in a hobby as future-focused as electronic entertainment, eventually everything old becomes new again.

Source: Twitter/@shark__5214 via Kinisoku
Featured image: Twitter/@shark__5214
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Credit:
at 22:09

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