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A Brief History of the FPS

A Brief History of the FPS

The Boom Years

Initially, the FPS was almost exclusively the territory of the PC. In 1996, however, Nintendo's much-ballyhooed Nintendo 64 hit the market. While the system's graphics capabilities were nowhere near the real-time raytracing promised by Nintendo, the console was capable enough to drive an FPS. Sure, the Playstation saw a port of Doom but its lack of any substantial hardware-accelerated 3D rendering severely limited FPS development on the platform. With the Playstation as good as dead for FPS development, UK developer Rareware made full advantage of the Nintendo64, and in 1997 released the first definitive console FPS, Goldeneye 007. Based on the James Bond film of the same name, Goldeneye brought a state-of-the art 3D engine and great FPS gameplay to console gamers.

The mission-based gameplay loosely followed the plot of the movie, with dossiers outlining each mission's objectives; the stacked objectives system gave the game more replay value. Most important of all, multiple usable controller layouts made the game playable. In a departure from the melee of most shooters, players were rewarded for conserving ammunition and avoiding detection by the enemy. What made Goldeneye such a hit with even PC FPS stalwarts was its multiplayer component. With innovative game modes and relatively balanced weapons, the split-screen multiplayer (with up to four players at a time) was a blast – as long as your opponents kept their eyes on their own part of the screen. Near the end of the Nintendo 64's life cycle in 2000, Rareware released Perfect Dark, another critically acclaimed FPS which borrowed many of the element that made Goldeneye a success.

Back on the PC, id Software managed to beat the entire field of Quake-killers to market with the December 1997 release of Quake II. More cohesive in design and with a more unified story, Quake II was received moderately well by gamers for the improved single player experience. The toned-down physics of Quake II turned off fans of the first game, who enjoyed the hyper-fast, twitching gameplay that Quake deathmatch offered. Quake II's legacy was to be engine licensing, with no fewer than 15 developers eventually using id Software's technology to craft commercial games of their own.

Written from scratch but building on the lessons learned from Quake, John Carmack crafted a flexible 3D engine with both hardware-accelerated rendering and a fallback to software rendering for those without dedicated 3D cards. With a 3D card – either a 3DFX-based accelerator or a card with OpenGL support – Quake II was a graphical treat. The use of compiled DLLs for modifications overcame the speed issues associated with QuakeC and allowed programmers to properly debug their increasingly complex add-in code. That the engine itself received greater praise than Quake II's single-player gameplay prompted criticism from the gaming press, some of whom predicted that id Software would scale down and solely produce game engines.

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