A Brief History of the FPS
Visceral, fast-paced and full of action, first-person shooters - or FPS games - have long been the choice for video gaming's elite. Forget mainstream multi-million sellers like The Sims or Super Mario Brothers; FPS titles are the most talked-about and highly anticipated releases on gamers' radars. Self-respecting players wear their FPS accomplishments on their sleeves. Speed runs through Goldeneye, you say? Been there. Completing Half-Life 2 using only the crowbar and the gravity gun? No problem. What other video game genre has fans who've launched developers - socially awkward programming wizards who enjoy math and have an uncanny ability to avoid natural sunlight – to rock-star status? What is it about the first-person shooter that elicits such a fervent fanbase? Perhaps it's the nature of the games themselves: testosterone-driven shoot-'em-ups with an emphasis on action over story and a focus on domination through destruction. Maybe the secret to the success of the FPS is the technology behind the games; rendering engines which produce amazing visuals that push the boundaries of real-time 3D graphics. Or, possibly, the FPS owes its popularity to the legions of fans who are drawn to the play online. The genre offers countless permutations of multiplayer gameplay, from one-on-one frag-fests to squad-based tactical shooters. Whatever the reason, the FPS is unquestionably the most revered genre in video gaming. A walk though the history of the genre with stops at a few memorable and important titles should shed some light on the unmatched popularity of the FPS. The Birth of a Genre
Wolfenstein 3D
In the early 1980s, the tank simulation Battlezone brought the first-person perspective to arcade audiences. In all its wireframe glory, the vector-based monochrome graphics of Battlezone exposed gamers to the immersion that a first-person view can provide in a video game. It took a decade of forgettable first-person titles spanning a number of genres, but a 1992 release from a small shareware developer for the growing PC games market would cement the first-person shooter as a genre unto itself. Wolfenstein 3D, id Software's three-dimensional homage to the Apple II-GS classic Castle Wolfenstein, served as a testament to the hardware capabilities of the IBM PC. While not their premier first-person title – Hovertank and Catacomb 3D were released in 1991 while the group were with publisher Softdisk – Wolfenstein 3D achieved widespread popularity, no doubt thanks to the controversial subject matter (the player is an allied spy escaping capture from Nazis). Long since tired of flight simulators from Redmond and Sierra's endless deluge of adventure games, PC gamers eagerly snatched up copies of Wolfenstein 3D (published, incidentally, by Apogee Software - now 3D Realms - who would later gain fame for a certain irreverent FPS of their own). The success of Wolfenstein 3D on the PC was enough for Nintendo to sanction a port to the SNES console, but the final product was so sanitized - through the complete culling of the Nazi themes, among other changes - that it was a shadow of the PC original.
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