In September 1992 Computer Gaming World reviewed a shareware game from a small company in Texas and struggled to describe it. In Castle Wolfenstein 3-D, wrote Chris Lombardi, “the player is ‘there’ like no game I’ve ever played.” The screen showed what the escaping prisoner B.J. saw, and the castle’s guards turned with “a startled expression and a shout” and ran at him. The magazine warned that the game was “extremely violent”. Within two years its makers, id Software, had followed it with Doom, and every action game seemed to want to be Doom. The press called them Doom clones. The name that stuck was first-person shooter.
Fast facts
- The view: the player sees through the character’s eyes, usually with the weapon at the bottom of the screen.
- Early experiments: Maze War (1973-74) on research computers; Atari’s Battlezone (1980) in a tank; MIDI Maze on the Atari ST; id’s Hovertank One and Catacomb 3-D (1991).
- The template: Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993), both from id Software.
- Early names: “Doom clones”; “first-person shooter” was in print by 1993 and in general use within a few years.
- On the internet: Quake (1996).
- Story told in the first person: Half-Life (1998).
- On consoles: GoldenEye 007 (1997) and Halo (2001); see Console FPS.
Before Wolfenstein
Several games had put the player behind a gun before id did. Maze War, written in 1973-74 on an Imlac PDS-1 computer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, let players wander a 3D maze and shoot each other; at MIT and later at Xerox it ran across networks, and other players appeared as eyeballs. Atari’s 1980 coin-op Battlezone put the player inside a tank on a wireframe battlefield. On the Atari ST, MIDI Maze was a networked maze game, and its makers took the idea to the Game Boy as Faceball 2000.
id worked towards the form through two games it owed its old employer, Softdisk. Hovertank One (1991) put the player in a tank in a maze of flat-coloured walls, and Catacomb 3-D (1991) added textures and a battle mage’s hands. Tom Hall, one of id’s founders, later wrote that either “could be considered the first FPS”.
Wolfenstein 3D and Doom
Wolfenstein 3D went out through Apogee on 5 May 1992, its first episode free to copy. It was built on the Apple II game Castle Wolfenstein, and Computer Gaming World compared its “free-scrolling, texture mapped environment” with Origin’s role-playing game Ultima Underworld. Wolfenstein’s walls sat on a square grid and its floors were flat, but it was fast.
Doom (December 1993) added stairs, lifts, flickering lights, and walls at any angle. It also added the DeathMatch, John Romero’s name for four players hunting each other over an office network, and WAD files that let players build their own levels. Computer Gaming World called it “a virtuoso performance”. By November 1994 the same magazine ran a survey of imitators titled “Doom Toos”: “Every shoot-em-up game aspires to be Doom when it grows up,” it said, and it measured each newcomer against the original. For Descent it asked readers to “imagine Doom on Benzedrine in a vacuum”. Two years later Computer Gaming World still described the action genre as “an industry dominated by DOOM-clones”.
The term “first-person shooter” was already in print. Sierra’s InterAction magazine used it in 1993 for Stellar 7: Draxon’s Revenge, a 3DO shooter from Dynamix, and Computer Gaming World used it in its November 1994 survey. It gradually replaced “Doom clone” as the games stopped looking like copies.
Quake and the internet
Quake (1996) drew its levels and monsters as real 3D polygons, so rooms could sit above rooms and the player could look up and down. Previewing it, Edge said that the market had been “inundated with Doom clones … none matching the frenzied violence and perfectly constructed locations of the bona fide original. Until Quake.” Any owner could run a server and anyone with its internet address could join. id followed it with QuakeWorld, a version rewritten for play over dial-up modems, and players changed the game’s rules with QuakeC. One such modification, Team Fortress, split players into classes. Gathering to play over a network, at LAN parties and the first tournaments, grew up around these games; see the origins of esports.
Story and teams
Valve’s Half-Life (1998) was built on an enhanced Quake engine and told its story of a research-base disaster entirely through the player’s eyes, with no cut-scenes. Scientists, guards and soldiers reacted to what the player did. Computer Gaming World named it Game of the Year, and its free development kit produced Counter-Strike (1999), a team game of terrorists against counter-terrorists made by Minh Le and Jess Cliffe. The immersive sim entry follows a related line, in which games such as System Shock and Deus Ex used the first-person view for role-playing.
Other studios built engines of their own. Ken Silverman’s Build engine gave Duke Nukem 3D (1996) a city full of things to use and break. Epic’s Unreal (1998) was praised for its coloured lighting and monsters that dodged and retreated.
Consoles
Shooters designed for a keyboard and mouse had to be rethought for a joypad. The Console FPS entry tells that story: id’s own Doom on the Jaguar in 1994, the analogue stick in Turok and Rare’s GoldenEye 007 (1997), and Bungie’s Halo (2001), which launched the Xbox with two sticks, a recharging shield and four players round one screen.
Later shooters
The genre carried on after the period. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) built its online play around ranks and unlockables, which Edge called “a truly great online experience”. id returned to speed with Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal (2020). In the late 2010s the battle royale, in which players fight until only one is left standing, grew out of player-made modifications. Wireframe traced it to a Minecraft mod in which up to 48 players fought in an arena, and to mods of DayZ; and by 2018 Fortnite, PUBG and Call of Duty all had a battle royale mode.
Sources
- Chris Lombardi, review of Castle Wolfenstein 3-D, Computer Gaming World issue 98, September 1992: “there” like no other game; the guards; “extremely violent”; the comparison with Ultima Underworld; $50 for six scenarios.
- Fabien Sanglard, Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D (2017): Tom Hall’s foreword (Hovertank One and Catacomb 3-D “could be considered the first FPS”; the choice of Castle Wolfenstein); chapter 1 (release on 5 May 1992). See the id Software entry.
- See the Doom entry for its release, DeathMatch, WAD files and Computer Gaming World’s review (issue 116, March 1994), and for Computer Gaming World issue 148, November 1996 (“an industry dominated by DOOM-clones”).
- Chris Lombardi, “Doom Toos”, Computer Gaming World issue 124, November 1994: “Every shoot-em-up game aspires to be Doom when it grows up”; Descent; “first-person shooter”.
- InterAction (Sierra On-Line), Holiday 1993: Stellar 7: Draxon’s Revenge described as a “first-person shooter”.
- Edge issue 35, August 1996: Quake preview (“inundated with Doom clones”). See the Quake entry for internet play, QuakeWorld, QuakeC and Team Fortress.
- See the Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Duke Nukem 3D and Unreal entries for their sources.
- See the Console FPS entry for the console history, Halo and Call of Duty 4 (Edge issue 183, Christmas 2007).
- K (Italy) issue 33, November 1991: Faceball 2000 from the makers of MIDI Maze.
- Wireframe issue 3, November 2018: battle royale from the Minecraft “Survival Games” mod and DayZ mods; Fortnite, PUBG and Call of Duty’s battle royale mode.
- DigiBarn Computer Museum, “Maze War 30 Year Retrospective” (Vintage Computer Festival 7.0, 2004) (web, secondary): Maze War on the Imlac PDS-1 at NASA Ames in 1973-74, then MIT and Xerox; the eyeball avatars. https://digibarn.com/history/04-VCF7-MazeWar/index.html
- “Maze War”, Wikipedia (web, secondary), citing Greg Thompson’s 2004 talk: the people involved and network play at MIT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War