Growing up in the ’90s, good joysticks were strangely hard to come by. The stiff sticks on my local arcade cabinets, already inferior to their Japanese counterparts, always seemed to be so worn down that I’d have to smash them from edge-to-edge just to register an input. And yet the sticks attached to my friend’s dusty Atari 2600, discovered in a box of his parents’ old junk, still managed to make the arcade cabinet sticks look good. Those things were so atrocious it’s a wonder videogames ever took off to begin with.
The Nintendo 64’s analogue stick controller seemed like a marvel, at first—it was responsive, granular, and ushered in a whole era of 3D games. It also went to shit after a few months of use—I probably owned eight of those controllers over the console’s lifetime and destroyed every one. There was only one joystick that never failed me: the beige and black, nondescript PC accessory my dad brought home one day, likely a hand-me-down from one of his computer geek friends.
As far as I was concerned, I was a real pilot when I grabbed that stick to boot up a game like LHX Attack Chopper. Nevermind that a real cockpit has a million buttons and switches, rather than just the trigger and the singular cute lil red button on top (for launching missiles, obviously). The branding was as simplistic as the design: it just said “FlightStick” on it.
I had no idea that the stick belonged to a decades-spanning lineage until I was digging through the very first issue of PC Gamer US—from May 1994—and came across this ad.
There it is, bottom right! That’s my stick!
CH Products, it turns out, was a family business dating back to the 1970s, and was one of the go-to brands for flight enthusiasts throughout the late ’80s and ’90s. Their simpler designs—and connectivity options that gradually disappeared from desktop PCs—seemed to fall out of favor by the 2000s, as competitors like Thrustmaster, Saitek and Logitech made increasingly complex HOTAS setups. But Google them today and you’ll still find loads of flight enthusiasts speaking about CH Products’ rock-solid build quality (one of their later magazine ads even brags “We don’t BREAK for anything!).
Go searching and you’ll also find a Reddit thread where the grandchild of founder Chuck Hayes complains that her mother convinced him to sell the family business, which is why CH Products is no longer around today, even though its website remarkably remains online.
I had no idea what company made the stick back then, or that the CH FlightStick was actually a little older than me—the first model came out in 1987. “At the time of launch flight simulators on the PC were huge, and this peripheral was an incredibly realistic-looking analog joystick,” writes the creator of DOS Days.
As quaint as the thing looks today compared to the best PC joysticks, it really did fly circles around all the console and arcade joysticks I used around the same time.
PC Gamer’s Andy Chalk swears he still has the CH Products FlightStick Pro in a closet somewhere, though sadly it’s no longer easily usable without a game port adapter. But he swears it was great in its heyday:
Despite how much I loved the FlightStick, I don’t remember it staying connected to our PC for long.
The ad that inspired this article was originally published in PC Gamer #1 (US, May 1994).
You can still subscribe to PC Gamer to get new issues of the magazine (in print!) every month.
I think I only played a few games with it before it moved to its permanent home in a box somewhere in our office—either because my dad’s new Pentium PC lacked the relevant port, or more likely because I became obsessed with real-time strategy games like Command & Conquer and didn’t have much more use for the joystick. That seems more likely, considering the Thrustmaster HOTAS I bought for Star Wars: Squadrons has only come out of its drawer once in the six years since I reviewed that game.
These days I take for granted that a game controller is going to have nice-feeling analog sticks on it, even if they aren’t using fancy Hall effect or (even better) tunnel magnetoresistance tech. But 30 years ago, the humble FlightStick was as good as it got. As far as I knew, at least.
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