This week’s blog brought to you by History.

Which game genre is my favorite?  Do I like to be strategic in real time, or be massive with multiple players on the “line”, or do I like to be the first person to shoot things in first-person?  Well first-person shooters are definitely my favorite.  According to Jason Rybka on About.com, “a first person shooter, commonly called FPS in the gaming arena, is a game in which the player sees the action on the screen as if he or she were looking through the eyes of the main character he or she is playing. As suspected, the shooter section of the term indicates that the majority of game play in these games will require the use of rifle- or pistol-type weaponry.” In other words, you blow ish up. The first FPSs were created around 1973 with Spasim and Maze War, but the term first-person shooter, as it is understood today, didn’t emerge until the early 1990s when Vanilla Ice was topping the charts.

Spasim was a space simulation game where players moved through a wire-frame 3D universe.  Networked with 32-players, the game involved 4 planetary systems with up to 8 players per planetary system.  In Spasim the players appeared as wire-frame space ships flying around in space.  Their positions were updated about every second (we call this lag).  Maze War had single player and multiplayer capabilities.  The single player mode involved the player exploring a maze of corridors, rendered using fixed perspective.  In the multiplayer mode, with two machines networked together, the players could explore the maze and shoot at each other.  The player’s character appeared as a large eyeball, which was awesome!

Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, home computer and arcade game availability grew rapidly.  According to Wikipedia, Tail Gunner “was the first commercial shooter game to provide a first-person perspective.”  In the game, players could not move through the simulated world, but fought off triangular-shaped space ship opponents from a fixed point in space.  Another game, Battlezone, was known for its resounding commercial success in the 1980s as it became the earliest widely-available FPS game in arcades.  Battlezone was a tank combat simulator, which allowed players to move around the game world with computer-controlled enemies.  These simple, unrealistic games were setting the foundation for something beautiful.

In the early 1990s the FPS game genre developed tremendously with the release of Wolfenstein 3D. In Wolfenstein 3D, the player is an American soldier, BJ Blazkowicz, attempting to escape from the Nazi stronghold where many armed officers and attack dogs are on guard.  At the end of each part of the game, the player has to fight a boss.  In one section of the game, Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi regime, is an enemy boss.  He first appears in robotic armor, wielding four chainguns (just like the real Hitler)!  Hitler was proclaimed the 15th greatest boss in video game history by The Phoenix, despite being proclaimed the third worst tyrant in real-life history by the History Channel.

The FPS genre reached new heights with Doom.  Texture-mapping was added to the floor and ceiling, walls could vary in height, and in some areas, Doom removed the ceiling altogether to create the outdoor environments that were generally lacking in previous genre games. “While the graphical enhancements were notable, Doom’s greatest innovation was the introduction of network multiplayer capabilities. While similar multiplayer modes had existed in previous mainframe- or arcade-based games, Doom was the first mass-market game to gain a significant following dedicated to multiplayer (usually, but not exclusively, LAN-based) contests, and guaranteed persistence of the FPS in gaming formats; the real thrill of these already-atmospheric games comes from blasting human opponents, be they friends or strangers, on the Internet. Doom was also one of the earliest FPS games to gain an active community of fans producing add-on maps.” (Wikipedia)

From there, the FPS genre took off, developing better engines and more realistic graphics with more advanced online capabilities.  Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, GoldenEye 007, Half Life, Unreal Tournament, Halo and Painkiller are just a few of the games that emerged from this genre.  It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in thirty years and imagine what will become of gaming in the future.  I look forward to the day when games will be directly plugged into my cerebral cortex and be just like real-life. (Did anyone see that movie eXistenZ...?  What a pile of crap.) Oh yeah, I just realized I included Hitler in last weeks blog, too.