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Mar 17, 2024 · The first successfully marketed FPS was an arcade game called Battlezone, a major piece of gaming history developed by Atari and released in 1980. Catacomb 3-D , also released by id in 1991, made the important step of returning to a character-based FPS concept.
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Computer graphics was unexplored country in the 1970s. Once systems moved from punchcards to pixels on a screen, programmers started figuring out ways to make those pixels do interesting things. Historians agree that the first real attempt at a first-person shooter came in 1973 with Maze Warfor the Imlac PDS-1 computers installed at the NASA Ames R...
Any history of video games has to start in the arcades. In the 1980s, this was the gamer’s primary destination, with hardware on the bleeding edge pushing new and innovative developments in game design. Although we typically associate FPS gameplay with home computers, the arcades did see a few precursors to the genre, as well as some interesting ta...
The first real home computer FPS was MIDI Maze, released for the Atari STby Hybrid Arts in 1987. It put players in the role of a Pac-Man-like orb in a right-angled maze, able to move in any direction and shoot deadly bubbles at other Pacs. What made MIDI Maze so fascinating was its networking capability. Using the MIDI in and out ports typically de...
We’re almost a thousand words into this and we haven’t even hit Doom yet. Stay calm, buddy. Now’s the time when we meet the guys who would transform the world of first-person shooting forever. iD Software was founded by John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack, all employees of publisher Softdisk. John Carmack’s technical genius enab...
The success of Wolfenstein freed iD to follow their bliss, and they wanted more. Their next game would be bigger, faster, bloodier, and scarier, powered by Carmack’s incredibly ambitious engine. With a couple of side stops to make Hovertank 3-D (faster rendering) and Catacomb 3-D (mapping textures to surfaces), they had all the tools they needed. T...
Apogee’s Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold had the misfortune of being released one week before Doom, and it was already outdated by the time it hit shelves. It still saw a sequel, Blake Stone: Planet Strike. Both were competent but unexciting takes on a formula that was already growing stale. The first big wave of shooters followed Doom‘s release, with ...
The primary limitation for games built on the Doom engine was its insistence on using sprites for character and object art. They never quite meshed with the primitive polygonal worlds, but computers of the time couldn’t render both environment and inhabitants readily in 3D. Once that changed, things could get very interesting. iD was once again the...
Competitive multiplayer was a big part of first-person gaming from the very beginning, but the rise of the national Internet infrastructure made finding people to play with incredibly easy in the late 1990s, especially on college campuses wired with lightning-fast T1 lines. Epic dropped Unreal Tournamentin 1999, one of the first purely multiplayer-...
Most early first-person shooters were pretty light on the narrative. Players shot everything that moved and solved simple puzzles every so often, but characterization and plot weren’t a major concern. The release of Half-Lifein 1998 forced the industry to up its game in a serious way. Valve’s breakthrough featured physicist Gordon Freeman, a silent...
As technology improved, the simulated world of first-person shooters became more and more realistic. Gamers weren’t satisfied moving around a flat plane shooting and flipping switches. They wanted to really inhabit these fantasy worlds, and to do that developers needed physics. That would open a whole new can of worms, both good and bad. One of the...
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- Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
- The beginning: Maze War, Spasism, WayOut. To think about the shooter’s origins is to think about labyrinths. Among the earliest pioneers of first-person videogaming is 1973’s Maze, a game cobbled together by high school students Greg Thompson, Steve Colley and Howard Palmer during a NASA work-study program, using Imlac PDS-1 and PDS-4 minicomputers.
- Into the '90s: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D. id’s career as a first-person developer began with Hovertank 3D in 1991. A cockpit sim brought to life with ray casting and featuring animated 2D sprites, it featured players searching for civilians to rescue and tentacular UFOs to blow up.
- Going 3D: Metal Head, Descent, Quake. By the mid-’90s, developers had begun to shift from so-called ‘pseudo-3D’ techniques such as ray casting to fully-polygonal worlds, capitalising on the spread of 3D hardware acceleration and the arrival of the first mass-market graphics processing units.
- A new millennium: Unreal, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty. One of the greatest influences on first-person shooters at the turn of the millennium wasn’t a game, but a film: Steven Spielberg’s World War 2 epic, Saving Private Ryan.
Doom has been considered the most important first-person shooter ever made. It was highly influential not only on subsequent shooter games but on video gaming in general, and has been made available on almost every video gaming system since.
- Maze War. 1973/1974. Platforms. Imlac PDS-1, PDP-10, Xerox Star. Developer. Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, Howard Palmer, Dave Lebling, Jim Guyton, Mike Wahrman.
- Spasim. 1974. Platforms. PLATO Mainframe Computer. Developer. Jim Bowery. Spasim, developed by Jim Bowery, holds a significant place in gaming history as one of the earliest examples of multiplayer FPS games.
- Star Ship. 1977. Platform(s) Atari 2600. Developer(s) Atari. Publisher(s) Star Ship, developed by Atari, emerged as an early arcade machine release and introduced players to the thrilling world of first-person space combat.
- Cosmic Conflict. 1978. Platform(s) Magnavox Odyssey 2. Developer(s) Philips. Publisher(s) Philips , Magnavox. Cosmic Conflict, developed by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood, made its mark as an early multiplayer FPS game released on the PLATO computer system.
May 21, 2015 · Two decades before id Software changed the game industry with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, Colley, Palmer and MIT students Greg Thompson and Dave Lebling invented the first-person shooter.
Apr 30, 2022 · The first real attempt at an FPS game was in 1973 with Maze War being installed at the NASA Ames Research Center. Players could move through a 3D maze slowly, while also shooting other players who appeared as eyeballs. Sure, it didn’t look flashy, but it was new and the concept unprecedented. Maze War. The 80s.
