While the Quickshot I was a successful product, Spectravideo felt there was much more potential in this market. Legend has it that real gamers worked at the company, who—not just as businessmen or marketers but as practicing fighter pilots and world-saving heroes—quickly realized which direction product development should take.
On one hand, they assessed that the product's appearance greatly contributes to the atmosphere of games—so they further developed the "ergonomic joystick" concept and by 1983 created the Quickshot II joystick, whose grip was modeled after real helicopter controls, including the fire buttons.
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The true legend, the Quickshot II, aka the SVI-102
On the other hand, based not only on their own experience but also by asking potential customers—the gamers (yes, including kids!)—what the biggest challenge was when using joysticks. It's unknown if it was an internal idea or came from a customer—but the feature we associated with Quickshot products for decades was born: the world's first joystick with an Autofire function.
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The Quickshot II's Autofire switch
The idea was a hit; the Quickshot II dominated with its automatic firing. Although exact numbers are not known or not from reliable sources, it's roughly understood that Spectravideo sold a total of over 42 million units of various Quickshot joysticks (including later products) by 1999. According to some estimates, this made them about an order of magnitude ahead of their major competitor, the Kempston Competition Pro controller.
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The true legend, the Quickshot II, aka the SVI-102
Of course, the autofire function isn't just about shorting the fire button wires with a switch—voilà. They used a much more sophisticated solution: an oscillator opens and closes the circuit about ten times per second, as if we were pressing the fire button very rapidly. This required integrating a small piece of electronics, which increased manufacturing costs. Thanks to this, the Quickshot II wasn't playing in the cheap league. For Spectravideo, this also meant they didn't have to discard the successful first version; they could continue offering it in a lower price range while marketing the second version as a quasi-premium product. While the Quickshot I was advertised in the UK for just under £10, the Quickshot II's price approached the £15 mark.
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Quickshot I and II - who wouldn't have imagined themselves in a combat helicopter over the Vietnamese jungle with such a grip?
However, success doesn't mean the Quickshot II was a much more reliable, durable product. The basic construction didn't change from the Quickshot I, so the disc contact failure issue was still expected during the most exciting battle scenes. Naturally, Spectravideo had an answer for this too—the next year brought the Quickshot II Plus, which jumped an order of magnitude in reliability. More on that next time.
