Meet the creator who made a huge F key to pay “BIG respects”

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Call of Duty has had a huge impact on gaming, but its greatest contribution to pop culture stems not from Warzone or ‘No Russian’, but 2014’s Advanced Warfare. Sledgehammer Games probably wasn’t expecting that game’s funeral scene to become the franchise’s most enduring legacy, but the now-iconic instruction to ‘Press F to pay respects’ is easily the most memorable moment of its game. Now, one player has created an enormous F key to pay some truly earth-shaking respects.

Earlier this week, Reddit user Jaryd_Giesen posted a video to the r/gaming subreddit. Starting with the momentous mourning scene, the clip pans out to find the F key missing from the player’s keyboard. Fortunately, sitting just off to the right is a huge – and functional – alternative.

Talking to GamesRadar+, Giesen said that beyond the meme itself, there was no direct inspiration for their big F-key: “I’ve just always liked building stuff.” That originally led them to survival games, but eventually they transitioned to real-world tinkering. As for the key itself, “I just think that a giant F is funny, it’s just hilarious in my mind.”

The custom key is mostly 3D-printed, but Giesen custom-made a spring, some electronics, and a smaller switch inside the keycap to help register each click. Despite the simplicity of the parts, Giesen says “I make things pretty jankily so there were a lot of setbacks, breaking of things and hitting my head against a wall for hours on end.” Giesen’s previous projects include a “giant functioning Gameboy Color costume that played Pokemon Yellow (opens in new tab),” and they’re currently working “on a PC with an exposed CPU and GPU that you have to put outside in the rain to cool,” but they’re still “trying to figure out how to not get some nasty zaps.”

The size of the Big F means that an entire keyboard of similarly-sized keys would be “well over three metres” from one side to another, which might make finding an appropriate desk pretty tricky. Fortunately, the sheer power of the Big F makes up for that inconvenience – Giesen says “I could previously single target 4 respects per second, but now I can AOE that with a diameter of like 50 metres. The power that emanates from this thing is godly.”

BRB, re-writing our list of the best gaming keyboards based on how much respect they can put out.