Many of today's disabled esports players, like Rocky "RockyNoHands" Stoutenburgh, use mouth controllers, which were first used in gaming over 40 years ago.
If you’ve seen an esports competition, chances are that there was a big stage with about 10 gaming PCs, each with a young person behind it wearing a look of intense concentration. They may have been competing for upward of a million dollars, and at the moment of victory, the winning team suddenly started screaming in joy.
Some of those esports players are people with disabilities. Today, esports organizations such as Permastunned and Para Esports shine a spotlight on the accomplishments of competitors with disabilities. They also attract industry support from big-name sponsors.
You might assume that these competitions started on flashy advanced technologies that arrived only in recent years. In fact, video games have enabled people with disabilities to experience new kinds of sporting activities for more than 40 years.
In one notable case, players with physical disabilities competed at pinball and other arcade games in tournaments held in Pittsburgh during the early 1980s. Disability advocates at the time praised how the games gave these players new sources of accomplishment, recognition and community-building. One player, Rob Marince, is central to this long-overlooked story, which I describe in my recent article in ROMchip, a journal of games history.
Empowering a pinball wizard
When an auto accident in 1977 paralyzed Rob from the neck down at the age of 17, his brother Gary took six weeks off from college to design a sip-and-puff controller that would enable Rob to play pinball and arcade games with his breath. Gary had collected parts from amusement manufacturers to assemble this device in order to give Rob some leisure activity and improve his quality of life.
If you’ve seen an esports competition, chances are that there was a big stage with about 10 gaming PCs, each with a young person behind it wearing a look of intense concentration. They may have been competing for upward of a million dollars, and at the moment of victory, the winning team suddenly started screaming in joy.
Some of those esports players are people with disabilities. Today, esports organizations such as Permastunned and Para Esports shine a spotlight on the accomplishments of competitors with disabilities. They also attract industry support from big-name sponsors.
You might assume that these competitions started on flashy advanced technologies that arrived only in recent years. In fact, video games have enabled people with disabilities to experience new kinds of sporting activities for more than 40 years.
In one notable case, players with physical disabilities competed at pinball and other arcade games in tournaments held in Pittsburgh during the early 1980s. Disability advocates at the time praised how the games gave these players new sources of accomplishment, recognition and community-building. One player, Rob Marince, is central to this long-overlooked story, which I describe in my recent article in ROMchip, a journal of games history.
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