// PC GAMER — GAMING
Sometimes you have to take a break from work to pay respects to the PC flight stick that ruled the '90s
It may not look like much now, but the CH Products FlightStick was a champion in its day.
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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.
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.
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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.