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This is an index of notable commercial first-person shooter video games, sorted alphabetically by title. The developer, platform, and release date are provided where available. The developer, platform, and release date are provided where available.
TitleDeveloperPlatform (s)Release DateEA Redwood Shores, EA CanadaPS2, Xbox, GCN2002-03-15Eurocom, Gearbox SoftwareWIN, PS2, Xbox, GCN, GBA, OSX2002-09-02Treyarch, BeenoxWIN, PS3, X360, Wii2008-10-31WIN, PS3, X360, WiiU2012-10-16 [1]- Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
- The beginning: Maze War, Spasism, WayOut. To think about the shooter’s origins is to think about labyrinths. Among the earliest pioneers of first-person videogaming is 1973’s Maze, a game cobbled together by high school students Greg Thompson, Steve Colley and Howard Palmer during a NASA work-study program, using Imlac PDS-1 and PDS-4 minicomputers.
- Into the '90s: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D. id’s career as a first-person developer began with Hovertank 3D in 1991. A cockpit sim brought to life with ray casting and featuring animated 2D sprites, it featured players searching for civilians to rescue and tentacular UFOs to blow up.
- Going 3D: Metal Head, Descent, Quake. By the mid-’90s, developers had begun to shift from so-called ‘pseudo-3D’ techniques such as ray casting to fully-polygonal worlds, capitalising on the spread of 3D hardware acceleration and the arrival of the first mass-market graphics processing units.
- A new millennium: Unreal, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty. One of the greatest influences on first-person shooters at the turn of the millennium wasn’t a game, but a film: Steven Spielberg’s World War 2 epic, Saving Private Ryan.
- See Through Your Eyes
- Insert Coin
- Maze Runner
- Hungry Like The Wolf
- Big F***Ing Game
- Children of Doom
- Pushing Polygons
- Man on Man
- Telling Stories
- The Real World
Computer graphics was unexplored country in the 1970s. Once systems moved from punchcards to pixels on a screen, programmers started figuring out ways to make those pixels do interesting things. Historians agree that the first real attempt at a first-person shooter came in 1973 with Maze Warfor the Imlac PDS-1 computers installed at the NASA Ames R...
Any history of video games has to start in the arcades. In the 1980s, this was the gamer’s primary destination, with hardware on the bleeding edge pushing new and innovative developments in game design. Although we typically associate FPS gameplay with home computers, the arcades did see a few precursors to the genre, as well as some interesting ta...
The first real home computer FPS was MIDI Maze, released for the Atari STby Hybrid Arts in 1987. It put players in the role of a Pac-Man-like orb in a right-angled maze, able to move in any direction and shoot deadly bubbles at other Pacs. What made MIDI Maze so fascinating was its networking capability. Using the MIDI in and out ports typically de...
We’re almost a thousand words into this and we haven’t even hit Doom yet. Stay calm, buddy. Now’s the time when we meet the guys who would transform the world of first-person shooting forever. iD Software was founded by John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack, all employees of publisher Softdisk. John Carmack’s technical genius enab...
The success of Wolfenstein freed iD to follow their bliss, and they wanted more. Their next game would be bigger, faster, bloodier, and scarier, powered by Carmack’s incredibly ambitious engine. With a couple of side stops to make Hovertank 3-D (faster rendering) and Catacomb 3-D (mapping textures to surfaces), they had all the tools they needed. T...
Apogee’s Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold had the misfortune of being released one week before Doom, and it was already outdated by the time it hit shelves. It still saw a sequel, Blake Stone: Planet Strike. Both were competent but unexciting takes on a formula that was already growing stale. The first big wave of shooters followed Doom‘s release, with ...
The primary limitation for games built on the Doom engine was its insistence on using sprites for character and object art. They never quite meshed with the primitive polygonal worlds, but computers of the time couldn’t render both environment and inhabitants readily in 3D. Once that changed, things could get very interesting. iD was once again the...
Competitive multiplayer was a big part of first-person gaming from the very beginning, but the rise of the national Internet infrastructure made finding people to play with incredibly easy in the late 1990s, especially on college campuses wired with lightning-fast T1 lines. Epic dropped Unreal Tournamentin 1999, one of the first purely multiplayer-...
Most early first-person shooters were pretty light on the narrative. Players shot everything that moved and solved simple puzzles every so often, but characterization and plot weren’t a major concern. The release of Half-Lifein 1998 forced the industry to up its game in a serious way. Valve’s breakthrough featured physicist Gordon Freeman, a silent...
As technology improved, the simulated world of first-person shooters became more and more realistic. Gamers weren’t satisfied moving around a flat plane shooting and flipping switches. They wanted to really inhabit these fantasy worlds, and to do that developers needed physics. That would open a whole new can of worms, both good and bad. One of the...
- Contributing Writer
Jan 7, 2010 · Planetside (PC, Sony, 2003) The path of the MMOFPS, or Massively Multiplayer Online First-Person Shooter, was paved in 2000 with 10Six, a Sega game that mixed FPS and RTS elements and boasted a ...
May 1, 2017 · Instead, the best shooters of the late '90s still resided on the PC. 1998's Half-Life, for example, was the first game from developer Valve. Deeply cinematic, superbly written and designed, and ...
Sep 8, 2023 · In the early 1990s, as the World Wide Web began to weave its way into households, another revolution was taking place: the birth of the First-Person Shooter (FPS) genre in video gaming. FPS games, characterized by a perspective where players experience the game world through the eyes of their avatars, introduced a level of immersion previously unattained in video games.
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Apr 30, 2022 · The First-person Shooter or FPS is a subgenre of action-packed shooter video games typically centered on combat involving guns and other weapons that fire projectiles from a first-person perspective. These games are often an entry point into video games these days, with games like the Call of Duty and Halo franchises which are huge hits for ...
