From Fallout to Bioshock and RPG to action game, the first-person shooter genre has defined a wide array of video games. But which one came first? And are these even the first first-person shooters?
After all, throughout the s, first-person shooters were known as " DOOM Clones," rather than entries within a larger genre. However, while DOOM may have popularized the genre, it was not the original first-person shooter. Quake followed both those titles in and innovated on the FPS genre, shifting shooters away from sprite-based graphics and introducing fully rendered 3D worlds and fast-paced gunplay. According to Polygon , Maze War was developed by high school students during a NASA work-study program and later expanded upon when they went to college, and it pioneered many of the features that have become synonymous with first-person shooters.
The intro sees Gordon Freeman riding a monorail through Black Mesa, gleaning information about the location and your character from PA announcements and the sight of other employees at work. Half-Life created a blueprint many FPS campaign developers would adopt in the new millennium. Together with the all-seeing, omnipresent AI manipulators of Marathon and the acclaimed cyberpunk RPG System Shock, the G-Man betrays a genre becoming increasingly aware of itself, and eager to turn its own structural constraints into a source of drama.
Spielberg himself also has a robust association with game development: he co-founded DreamWorks Interactive with Microsoft in to work on adaptations of movies like Small Soldiers. Launched in to strong sales, the game was a watershed moment in several respects. On the one hand, its more earnest, grounded approach opened the genre up to players put off by the lurid sci-fi or pulp comic settings of games like Doom and Wolfenstein. On the other, it facilitated tense discussions about the right of videogame developers to depict such events, and the possibility that violent games spark violent behaviour.
Medal of Honor released a few months after the Columbine massacre in Colorado, an atrocity that gave rise to a moral panic over videogame violence. Fearful of a backlash, DreamWorks Interactive removed all blood from the game before launch. It also attracted a heated reaction from the US Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and its president voiced his concerns to Spielberg in person.
Like Quake, the game was designed to be modded easily and extensively. Also like Quake, its multiplayer left something to be desired at launch. Based on the DigiPen game Narbacular Drop, Portal casts you as a human lab rat armed with a gun that creates portals, lost in a shifting mechanical labyrinth run by a malicious, yet utterly inept, AI. Where Quake and Unreal Tournament dealt in cartoon bazookas and evaporating torsos, another release, Counter-Strike, set its sights on military realism.
A Half-Life mod created by attic developers Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, it saw teams of terrorists and counter-terrorists struggling to arm or defuse bombs and rescue or maintain custody of VIPs, customising their loadouts with currency earned at the end of each round. Perhaps the definitive esport shooter, its objective-based modes and tactics-driven design are integral to the DNA of competitive multiplayer today.
Its crowded encounters were far more open-ended than in most competitors, woven around delightful AI variables like Grunt footsoldiers kamikaze-rushing the player after you kill their leader.
Battlefield: saw up to 64 players tussling for capture points on enormous, open maps. Where other shooters taught players to keep pushing forward, Far Cry allowed you to run amok in a vast tropical environment, using the undergrowth for cover while tracking unsuspecting soldiers through your binoculars.
The result, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, unlocked a brand-new vocabulary for the first-person shooter. It traded the mud and everyman heroics of WW2 experiences for a slick, cheerfully amoral celebration of western military hardware and urban combat tactics—arming the player with laser sights, ghillie suits, Stinger launchers and drones. But what it is mostly remembered for today is the multiplayer. More intriguing was the universe of cruelty and hubris it sketched.
More intriguing was the universe of cruelty and hubris it sketched, a labyrinth of leaking glass tunnels and domed Art Deco plazas.
It also formed part of an ongoing conversation about games as a means of rousing empathy or exploring moral quandaries. It was soon eclipsed, however, by the Far Cry series, which Crytek had by now sold to Ubisoft. Drawing on his experiences with the Splinter Cell games, designer Clint Hocking set out to create a brutal, Heart of Darkness-esque sandbox in which players fought malaria, self-propagating fire and bullets simultaneously.
The results were arresting, but also frustrating, thanks to a patchy narrative, alternately dim or eagle-eyed AI and an unfair enemy respawning system. From Doom onwards, the FPS has enjoyed a fruitful rapport with horror games. Most of the biggest names include a level or two that takes inspiration from the likes of Resident Evil.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has its spooky hoverbike trip through a quarantined Detroit, Half-Life 2 has its legendary Ravenholm level and Far Cry includes fever dreams where the designers are free to invoke the paranormal. A number of studios also work across genres.
Players unconvinced by Far Cry or Crysis had a number of rival open world shooters to choose from. One of them was the Stalker series, inaugurated by Ukrainian developer GSC Game World in , in which scavengers pick their way through radioactive ruins while keeping a look out for monstrous creatures and invisible, fatal anomalies.
With the mainframe, they could offload this work to a central machine that would coordinate all moves and broadcast them to all players. Thompson added code to keep track of scores and graphics that would show missiles travelling down a corridor. And Lebling also wrote a maze editor, which allowed players to create new maps.
But the standard maze got the most use. Word got around in the lab, which had eight Imlacs. People came from other levels in the building just to play Maze. Twenty years before Doom death matches took over local networks in college dorm rooms, MIT students were doing the same thing on computers meant for cutting-edge research. Spurred on by this popularity, the pair kept adding new features. They enjoyed playing Maze , but their true passion was making it better, learning more and impressing their friends.
They added a top-down view that you could switch into to see the whole maze and better plan your routes, but the caveat was that, while you were looking at that, someone could sneak up on you fairly easily.
Thompson added cheats that made it possible to pass through walls while Lebling wrote robot players. You could start up a bunch of robots. If you wanted to play by yourself with seven robots you could have done it. And people would do that and the robots would wander around the maze and shoot you. The robots were too good for many players. There was a bit of feedback going on there.
Nevertheless, Lebling notes, the robots were no substitute for human players. The very best Maze player, Ken Harrenstien, soon rewrote much of the program on the mainframe to make it more efficient, while Charles Frankston did the same on the Imlacs portion.
This made it more feasible for two or more simultaneous Maze games to run through the PDP mainframe. Meanwhile, another man in their research group, Tak To, wrote a program called Maze Watcher, which allowed people to watch matches on an Evans and Sutherland LDS-1 graphics display computer.
Oh no! It was slow — the ARPANET of the time was only a kilobit network, which is a few orders of magnitude slower than the megabytes and even gigabytes that a fast internet connection manages today. But it was wonderful. Perhaps even a little too wonderful. Lab directors J. Licklider and Al Vezza worried well before then that Maze would be seen as too frivolous. They discouraged Maze play in the lab, which was funded by DARPA, to keep things serious and to keep the Imlacs available for serious work.
To combat this, the directors banned Maze. Despite that they had been spotted on multiple occasions playing and enjoying the game, too. It was a futile endeavor. The computers were on a network, so people would simply copy it over from another machine or hide away some code that would download the program again. Things soon escalated, and someone added a daemon program — a program that runs in the background to look for instances of Maze and crash them.
This Maze Guncher could be easily defeated by either recompiling the Maze code with a different signature or by taking advantage of the fact that the system had no security whatsoever to disable the Guncher daemon. In the fall of , Greg Thompson, Mark Horowitz and George Woltman enrolled in an electrical engineering digital hardware design class together. For their class project, Thompson suggested they make a system designed to run just Maze.
The trio determined that it would be easier to build the game if they made it more complicated. Whereas the original Maze was effectively a two-dimensional maze that was drawn in line segments, the new version was fully 3-D. In the hardware version of Maze , you could turn in any direction inside a byby cube that had four floors in each dimension.
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