In its January 1995 issue Edge reviewed Doom on Atari’s Jaguar and named the problem every console shooter would have to solve. “As aficionados of the game will confirm, the best way to play Doom is with a mouse and keyboard. Obviously, this isn’t possible with a joypad-based system.” id Software’s own conversion was, Edge judged, “acceptable, if not perfect”: most moves were easy, but “you can’t turn around and run away quite as quickly as you’d like.” Over the next seven years console developers stopped apologising for the joypad and built games around it, with auto-aim, an analogue stick for each hand and split-screen matches for four players on one television.
Fast facts
- Early first-person shooting on consoles: Faceball 2000 (Game Boy, 1991); Wolfenstein 3D and Doom conversions from 1994.
- Analogue stick: Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64, 1997.
- Two sticks: the PlayStation’s DualShock (1997) and the PlayStation 2 and Xbox pads after it.
- Landmark: Halo, the Xbox’s launch game, 2001.
- Online: Halo 2 on Xbox Live (2004) and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007).
Before Doom
Shooting in the first person reached Nintendo’s machines before Doom did. Bullet-Proof Software’s Faceball 2000 for the Game Boy came from the makers of MIDI Maze, a networked maze game for the Atari ST, and put the player inside a maze hunting smiley faces called Smiloids. Its advertising promised “first-person perspective, with 3D graphics and 360° maneuvering” and play against friends through the Game Link cable or the Four Player Adapter. Game Informer named it the best handheld game of 1992. id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D reached the Super NES and the Jaguar in 1994.
Doom comes to the consoles
Doom was the game every console maker wanted. Edge reported in its review that Nintendo had bought the rights for a version of its own coded by Williams, that Sega had it for the 32X, and that the Saturn was getting Doom II. The Jaguar got there first, with a conversion by id itself, priced at £60. Edge thought it “virtually indistinguishable from the PC game”, running “at about the same speed on the Jaguar as it does on a 486/50 PC”, and saw one advantage over the original: “you can view it on the biggest telly you can get your hands on, rather than on a cramped 14” PC monitor”.
The analogue stick
The Nintendo 64’s controller had a single analogue stick and a cluster of four C-buttons, and its shooters divided the work between them in different ways. Acclaim’s Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (1997) put movement on the C-buttons and aiming on the stick. That layout became a reference point: a year later N64 Magazine described another game as using a “Turok-style set-up using the C-buttons for movement and the analogue stick for direction”. Turok went into the British all-formats chart at number two in its week of release.
Rare’s GoldenEye 007 followed in August 1997 and let players choose. Edge listed “numerous control configurations”, among them “a Turok-like setting (handy for those familiar with Acclaim’s title)” and a dual-analogue option “which requires players to hold a joypad in each hand - one controlling Bond’s movements, the other in charge of aiming duties”. It was not the most intuitive choice, Edge thought, but “it’s worth persevering with as it offers certain advantages over the single-controller system”. Holding two controllers was a clumsy fix, and it showed what players wanted: a stick for moving and a stick for looking.
GoldenEye also helped the player. Looking back in Edge in 2003, a reader wrote that the game “provided a generous amount of auto-aiming to make up for its slightly less forgiving aiming system”. Its four-player split-screen mode, added late in development, became what the GoldenEye entry describes: the game groups of friends played round one television, setting their own rules.
Two sticks
Sony put two analogue sticks on its PlayStation pad in 1997, and the DualShock became the standard pad. The PlayStation 2 and the Xbox both shipped with two sticks, and by 2001 conversions were judged on how well they used them. Edge said of Half-Life on the PlayStation 2 that although “it’s not as easy to play without a keyboard and mouse, the implementation of the dual analogue controls, enhanced by a handy lock-on function, ensures that console gamers will quickly come to terms with the controls”.
Halo
Bungie’s Halo launched with the Xbox in North America on 15 November 2001, and Edge gave it ten out of ten. Its rules suited a pad. The Master Chief carried only two weapons at a time. His shield recharged moments after he stopped taking damage, so finding cover while it recovered was, Edge said, vital. Four players could share one screen, and linking Xboxes raised the count to 16. “GoldenEye was the standard for multiplayer console combat,” Edge wrote. “It has been surpassed.”
The same reader who praised GoldenEye’s auto-aim put Halo’s success down to tuning, not assistance: “Halo’s perfect analogue stick pitch and forgiving levels of accuracy negated what little auto-aiming was present in the game”, helped by a reticle “a little wider than a few pixels, so as to forgive often sluggish analogue stick movement”. The same letter complained that Free Radical Design, founded by members of the GoldenEye team, had left its crosshair out of TimeSplitters 2 and cut auto-aim “to minimum use”, leaving players “punching walls”.
Online
The next step was the internet. Halo 2 (2004) took the series online through Xbox Live. Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) moved its series from the Second World War to a war in “the near future”, as Edge put it, with a single-player campaign of about six hours. Edge gave it nine out of ten and said that its “thrillingly unforgiving multiplayer”, with “a compelling ranking system and stream of unlockables”, made it “a truly great online experience”.
Sources
- K (Italy) issue 33, November 1991: Faceball 2000 coming to the Game Boy from the creators of MIDI Maze.
- Game Informer issue 3, January 1992: Bullet-Proof Software advertisement for FaceBall 2000; issue 8, January 1993: “Best Hand Held Video Game: Faceball 2000”.
- Nintendo Magazine System (UK) issue 17, February 1994: Wolfenstein 3D on the Super NES.
- Edge issue 16, January 1995, pp. 78–79: Doom (Jaguar) review: id’s conversion, £60, the other console versions planned, Atari holding Doom back to give its Wolfenstein and Alien Vs Predator a chance, the speed, the control, the television.
- Edge issue 45, May 1997: Turok enters the ChartTrack all-formats chart at number two.
- N64 Magazine issue 15, May 1998: the “Turok-style set-up”.
- Edge issue 48, August 1997, pp. 66–68: GoldenEye 007 review: the control configurations and the two-pad dual-analogue option.
- Edge issue 105, Christmas 2001: Halo review (ten out of ten; two weapons; the recharging shield; split-screen and 16 players; “It has been surpassed”); Half-Life (PlayStation 2) review, the dual analogue controls and lock-on.
- Edge issue 106, January 2002, p. 8: the Xbox’s US launch on 15 November 2001.
- Edge issue 119, January 2003, p. 128: reader’s letter on aiming in GoldenEye, Halo and TimeSplitters 2.
- See the Halo and Xbox Live entries for Halo 2 and its online play.
- Edge issue 183, Christmas 2007, p. 88: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare review (nine out of ten; the six-hour campaign; the online ranking system).