When we talk about inverted controls for video games, we’re usually talking about the way the camera moves vertically, called the y-axis. We talk about how the screen should move when the right thumbstick moves up and down. If you’re an inverted y-axis person, like me, you’re expecting the camera to tilt up when you push the thumbstick down—as if the camera is being controlled from the back. People who don’t invert the y-axis expect the opposite: If you push the thumbstick down, you expect the camera to look down, as if the front of the camera is being controlled. My former Polygon colleague Jeffrey Parkin has a great piece—and survey—about this, called “The right and wrong of the right thumbstick.”
As an inverted y-axis person, I’m always digging through video game menus to change the camera settings. I’m also an idiot, and sometimes I forget if the y-axis is vertical or horizontal, and I ended up switching the x-axis inversion instead. It’s always exceptionally jarring; though my brain expects the y-axis to work as if there’s a joystick on the back of a character’s head, I can’t wrap my head around the x-axis inversion. What’s even worse is that I can imagine it if I’m visualizing a joystick on the back of my own head—I “push” the stick to the left and I turn my head right. But when I’m playing a video game, my brain shuts down. When I push the stick to the left in the video game, I expect the game to show me what’s left of my character’s vision.
It scrambles my brain so much that I simply don’t understand how anyone can use a controller with x-axis controls inverted. I expect that some people may feel this way about me and the y-axis.
There’s not a ton of research into the x-axis, but researchers are starting to look into why y-axis inversion is a thing for video game players. From MIT researcher Jennifer Corbett and Northeastern University researcher Jaap Munneke’s 2025 paper “Why axis inversion?:”
The debate over y-axis inversion has persisted, likely due to individual differences and varying gaming experiences. Importantly, multiple literatures in human factors, ergonomics, cognitive science, industry, and medicine all touch on issues relevant to y-axis inversion preferences. However, discrepant or even contradictory terminologies and discordant dissemination methods impede a unified view of the overarching problem space. A clearer cross-disciplinary understanding of the factors underlying inversion preference can serve as a starting point for future empirical investigations in a variety of situations.
For now, we can simply look to history for a reason for seemingly rare x-axis users. (Corbett and Munneke wrote in their paper that “there were very few participants [in their survey] who inverted the x-axis.” Through my own research, there’s more people online confused by the x-axis inversionists, though they certainly do exist.) It could come down to the sorts of games you play—or grew up playing. A bunch of generational hits, like Kingdom Hearts games, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and Super Mario 64, forced players into using x-axis inverted controls—at least to start. Both The Wind Waker and Super Mario 64 use a free camera system, so you can think of the perspective as being filmed through a camera on a tripod or gimbal. When you rotate the camera tripod arm to the left, the camera turns to the right, which can explain the reasoning the developers had for building the games this way. Nintendo even used this sort of reasoning in its game manuals to explain the free camera system. You’re playing the game, yes, but you’re actually “filming” Mario as the Lakitu Bros., who fly around a cloud with a camera attached to a fishing pole. For the Lakitu Bros.’ camera to film something to the right, the fishing pole would be moved to the left. Super Mario Sunshine works this way, too.
A lot of GameCube games were actually using this method for their cameras, but it seemingly fell off as a standard option by the time Halo was all the rage on Xbox consoles. The first-person perspective made the “camera” perspective feel much too abstract; people expected to push the stick to the left to see to the left, as if they’re pointing their eyes.
Of course, a lot of people played Nintendo’s early inverted games—and x-axis inverted games from other developers—but my hypothesis for why it didn’t stick around as a default is in how controllers evolved. GameCube controllers controlled the camera by using buttons and not two thumbsticks. Parkin talks about this in his survey piece, as well as about muscle memory: If you play a lot of games, there are just certain things you expect a controller to do. That muscle memory could be easier to override because of the disconnect between the way a camera moves when using buttons or thumbsticks. There could be enough of a gap there to create space for a different expectation, making it easier to "remap" what a button does in your head, regardless of the game's genre.
I asked people on BlueSky to weigh in, and one person, indeed, responded that they got used to x-axis inversion in Sly and Ratchet & Clank on the PlayStation 2. “Ended up creating a psychological association with ‘3D platfomer’ and ‘horizontal inversion,’” they said. Another person added that the first game they played with x-axis inversion was Super Mario 64, but that they’re able to change their perspective when playing first-person shooters.
Most games offer y-axis inversion these days, but x-axis inversion has become obscure enough that some games don’t offer the option. Alan Wake 2 was released recently with only the option to invert the y-axis, something that was so painful to horizontal invert players that someone permanently modded their PlayStation 5 controller by rewiring the analog stick to be x-axis inverted. However, Remedy did end up adding the feature in—something it called “one of the most requested” pieces of the Anniversary Update. “Inverting either axis can be a matter of preference, but for a lot of players it also presents a usability and accessibility issue,” it said. Options are good!
The statement is confusing, because that implies that a lot of people play in the shadows with the x-axis inverted. Where are you folks? Tell me what got you into it. How does your brain see the camera and screen? Let’s figure out the science behind it, and learn why y-axis inversion doesn’t mean x-axis inversion will click.
