If you were a gamer in the 90's, there is a very good chance that you beared witness to the start of the First Person Shooter genre. In 1991, Wolfenstein 3D gave us something to practice with. While it may not have been the absolute first of its kind, it was the one that set the standard of its time. Id Software had already created Hovertank 3D, and that was an interesting precursor John Carmack attempted. It did fairly well but it was not the three dimensional experience that he wanted. He wanted something much more akin to Virtual Reality as a concept. Games such as Maze from 1973, or Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss also dabbled with the concept, but Wolfenstein 3D was the one that truly stood the test of time by comparison.
Doom, however, is the one a lot of people will point at when you say the first FPS game. Whether they know it's true or not. Doom came in 1993 with the Shareware version, Knee Deep in the Dead and it literally changed the game scene for everyone. Wolfenstein had already done some amazing damage, but Doom broke its spine and rebuilt it from the ground up. There's plenty of information on Planet Virtua when it comes to Doom. Then came an upsurge of First Person Shooters (or "Doom Clones" as they were called at the time) and they were bloody and gory because Doom did it.
Mortal Kombat brought plenty of blood to the fighting game scene and there came plenty of knockoffs. Doom, strangely, had a lot of successful knockoffs by comparison to MK. Many will tell you that there are plenty of terrible Doom knockoffs that came very soon after its release. Heretic, which was under the productive eye of John Romero himself, was a lot of fun, as was Hexen. It brought about a lot of great fantastic elements, while also having a headache-inducing portal/switch mechanic that should not have seen the light of day.
Then came Rise of the Triad in 1995 and Duke Nukem 3D in 1996, from Apogee, who renamed themselves between games to 3D Realms. Both of them were super violent, both of them had a wide array of weapons and were episodic along with being chocked full of tongue-in-cheek humor. Duke Nukem, however, was given a lot of flak for its humor because of the very dark elements it also employed. We will not discuss those here in great detail. Suffice to say, both games were successful and even included many elements that both Wolfenstein and Doom did not. Mechanics like dual wielding pistols, pipe bombs, highly interactive level decorations and many other elements put these games on the map, though, their current status in the genre has been tarnished to the point of extinction.
Blood is, by far, one of the greatest underground successes when it comes to First Person Shooters. It is exceedingly difficult, but also brings about a theme of the macabre that was never seen before. The elements it employs for such creative level designs as a moving train or a carnival of demons and corpses really spiced up the game and its beautiful array of very hard and fast moving monster pits. Duke Nukem and Rise of the Triad are available in their entirety now, and this has had a remastering in the form of Fresh Supply. All three of these collections are a treasure trove of First Person Goodness and they are all highly recommended.
Then there's Doom 2, but that was just more of a good thing and is quite devisive among Doom fans. This was also just a precursor to the company's development of their brand new game. This also came alongside the release of Ultimate Doom, which was a retail packaging of Doom's first three episodes with the inclusion of Thy Flesh Consumed. In the flood of "Doom Clones", Id decided to add to it, along with the ability of fans to create their own Doom maps and levels. By this point, gamers were swimming in digital blood and guts.
If you want to see some really terrible FPS games, they exist in droves, but the highest concentration can be found with Capstone. Tekwar, Operation Body Count, Corridor 7: Alien Invasion, and Witchaven can all be viewed in something of a conga line of awful games that tried to cash in on Doom's success. They clearly had no idea what made them popular and have been largely ignored outside of some very entertaining game reviews throughout the internet.
There were plenty more when it came to First Person Shooters, but all of it came to a standstill when Id Software created Quake. This brought a halt to the FPS Genre in a way that shook the gaming community once again and forced it into the 3D era for real this time. This era brought about a legendary stock of titles that can be played and enjoyed today. Join me next time as we take a look at what came when John Carmack created an engine that let you see an entire new world
