Twice. Once when I was cleaning under the keys, I snapped off one of the contacts for a switch. -_-

The second time, a dome tore on my laptop and I decided to swap it with a random unused key so it wouldn't feel mushy. In the end, I decided to disconnect the keyboard from the motherboard, which I had done many times before. And it never worked again. Nor did the laptop...

Wiki helps:

Retrobright is a chemical mixture used to remove yellowing from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic computer and electronics cases, including computers that were manufactured by Commodore and Apple in the 1980s and 1990s, and various video game consoles and cartridges.

Out of rage: No!

But 2 mentions for this one:

1) Cleaning and retrobrighting a C64 keyboard requires to carefully remove every single key. I remember as it was yesterday: the mounting-bracket of the C-key got broken by doing so. Oh my dear!

2) Searching through some old computer related stuff in the cellar reveals an USB-keyboard for the PC. By lifting it out of the box it drops to the concrete floor an splatters some keys over it. Bugger!

From that story, it's clear you're not using apple products. When the keyboard stopped working on my wife's notebook, the price tag to replace was ~400€ We took the device back home unfixed and connected a Bluetooth keyboard instead.

I really envy you for staying this calm and just walking away from the game. And I cannot even tell you why I get so emotional about it. Maybe because usually I play games to relax and let off some steam. So when I am kept from venting my anger I am taking it out on the scapegoat, that is the computer.

As for ruining a good keyboard with liquids: Recently I wanted to clean the keyboard of my laptop good and proper. So I heartily sprayed some cleaner on it… until I realized what I was doing. And since drowning the keyboard was not good enough for me, I had to turn on the machine and be absolutely certain that it shorted out. Took me two weeks and about 80€ to replace that part, because nowadays you cannot just switch the keyboard. Everything was glued together, so I had to replace the whole upper part of the notebook. Still an interesting experience to take it apart and putting it all together again. And now it is as good as new and absolutely germ/virus free.

I never take out frustration on the equipment, in fact I've had to get into it with friends who have been using my equipment and took out their frustration in that way.

For me I will turn off the computer/game/whatever and walk away.


However, I have broken a keyboard by spilling liquid on it (bad habit having drinks around the computer - 100% my fault!)

Come to think of it – speaking of heavily used keys – the only game that actually broke some keys on keyboards I used was Quest for Glory: So you want the be a hero. It killed the up cursor and return key. The first one because it was the attack button and got heavily used and the latter because a combination of space+return was needed for grinding those stats.

Broken a keyboard in a rage fit? No, can't claim I did. For sure, keyboards have mechanically failed on me and yes, the correlation with keys heavily used for certain games was strong

My kind of reaction to such situations depend on the game. How far am I? How much fun has it been this far? The more time I've already invested, the more likely I am to persist.

The typical example which comes to mind for me is the Rick Dangerous games. They are notorious for having completely unpredictable traps and even when you know about them, many screens require quite a bit of skill coupled with luck to get through. Some of them, I did dozens of times. Yes, I always played with unlimited lives. No way to save, so it was either persist there and then or admit defeat to be forced to even get to this point again next time around.

Imagine reloading the level for the umpteenth time, going through the motions of repeating the parts you know inside out, you cannot stand to see it anymore, that endless grind. Just to get to that one particular point, that one jump, that one stupid boss fight, that one impossible task you just cannot manage to pull of. Your heart is racing! Maybe this time? Here it comes: Break the cycle and revel in joy and glory. Or be doomed to waste another hour of your life. You just know what to do, but will you be up to it?

No, yet another game over screen…

There is a point in every gamer's life were they have had enough, they got beat and broken by the game. How do you react? Do you silently turn off your your computer? Or show that infernal machine who is boss?

Personally I am of the later kind, or to be more precise: I can be a really furious gamer. Fool me once too often and curses come from my lips, foo me twice too much and I turn into one of those obnoxious keyboard smashers. So far I have not really broken any keyboards or mice, well that is until they were beyond repair. Some bits and pieces tend to come of though, once in a while.

Two particular instances of rage come to my mind, two stories I would like to share.

One is about Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a game I enjoyed immensely. That is until I missed a save point in the latter stages of the game, or to be more precisely I missed the fact that I actually could have saved in the final parts of the game. And there was this one wall jump section that was far too stressful to me, to actually pull it off. So imagine retracing about half an hour of the game, which was one of the harder parts to boot, just to fail and fail and fail again. After hours of agony I eventually timed the jumping right, but the victory was bitter sweet: As relieved as I was, the anger was far too much to really feel that happy about it. Luckily the ending was memorable enough to make for an overall positive impression.

The other one was Bioshock: Infinite a game which is not that hard until the final battle. Which features an escort mission combined with a tower defense scenario and endless waves of tough enemies. Boy that was fun! It might be fitting to repeat a battle dozens of times in a game about time loops, but it took far too long to get anywhere near the end and I did not even get close to finishing off all those enemies which did not get any easier the further I got. I remember hitting the keyboard so hard and throwing it into a corner, that I thought that this was the final nail in its coffin. Luckily it is a lot tougher than I thought and it is still waiting to this day for its final encounter. In the end I turned to cheating and boy was that a relief, and somehow I felt a lot prouder breaking the game's rules than going through that stupid setup as intended.

So: Have you ever broken a keyboard?