Although the word comes to us from the United States and has little meaning here beyond those who are fans of shooters, the term strafe It is already a classic the RAE of the video game.
Hugged as a word to refer to when you move sideways while shooting, mainly in a FPSthe surprising thing about the term is that its origin has little or nothing to do with the world of video games.
The origin of the word strafe
Although the logical thing would be to go to the birth of the FPS to search for the origin of the word strafe, in reality we have to go much further back. In fact, we could go back to the origins of the Germanic languages, but we will stay halfway.
Specifically, we will put the brakes on 1915 with the use that popularized the word, first in Germany and then in the rest of the world. We owe its explosion to the German poet Ernst Lissauer, who during the First World War coined the term God punish England (God punish England).
The phrase resonated so much among the population that, in addition to becoming a fundamental piece for its military propaganda, became a greeting among the Germans themselves. Still God punish England was answered with a He punishes it (Let him punish him).
When it reached the British people from the hands of its soldiers, the term also ended up finding a place in English. As a verb it meant to punish, to harm, to attack with rage. As a name, it ended up being the perfect definition to name the German attack tactics that were causing them so much damage: the low altitude aircraft attack.
The low flight, firing from the cockpit to sweep a specific area with its artillery, was followed, already in the Second World Wara similar bomb attack that lasted the same term and, by the time the war of Vietnamthe use of helicopters did the rest.
From real to virtual war
Surrounding a position by attacking from the side with a mounted machine gun, in order to concentrate on a static target while you are moving and firing, was also called strafe.
With the video games of the time clinging to the warmongering of the conflict as an imaginary for their pixels like fists, the word ended up jumping from real war to virtual war, not just lip service.
We owe its first use tied to the world of video games to the book Practical Computing of 1987 which can still be consulted at Internet Archive and, from the same year, to the analysis of the game Thunder Blade in a magazine of the time.
After that, with the term already within the collective imagination, id Software included it among the commands of the manual Wolfenstein 3D original. By pressing the Alt key in combination with the left and right arrows we would slide sideways instead of turning.
Nor was it the first FPS nor the first to coin the term, but the one who popularized both and bequeathed us a new word that, increasingly – and I hope it continues to grow along that path instead of the other -, is closer to the world of video games than of the origins and military strategies that popularized it.
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