The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 1

The origins of the genre. Maze War, Castle Wolfenstein and (of course) Doom.

By Kristan Reed, September 29, 2009

Marathon. Is that beastie an ancestor of the Flood?

Elsewhere, LucasArt’s first Star Wars FPS, Dark Forces, was the first in the genre to make full use of 3D environments – forcing players to look up and down, as well as jump and crouch. It sounds incredible now, but until that point first-person shooters took place on a flat plane: the mouse had yet to be utilised as a looking device.

Around this time, console owners were ‘treated’ to ports of the first wave of PC FPS titles – largely with mixed results. Wolfenstein 3D had its fair share of conversions, but Doom was such a phenomenon, that every platform under the sun got a version, including the SNES, Sega 32X, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, PlayStation and SEGA Saturn.

Dark Forces, aka the death knell of the LucasArts point and click adventure.

Although generally playable, these versions were usually crippled in comparison to the original, and disproportionately expensive – especially once you factored in the shareware origins of the title. For now, the only place to play the first person shooter was the PC. As a cutting edge gaming platform, it couldn’t be beaten – a situation which only seemed to get stronger with every passing year.

Coming up in Part 2: 1996-2000, the revolutionary emergence of 3D acceleration, and the growing importance of consoles.