First-person shooter
A first-person shooter or FPS, is a genre of video game where the player views the game world through the eyes of their character and is allowed to move about in the three-dimensional game world, and must shoot at opposing targets. Perhaps the earliest first-person shooter was Maze War in 1973, which used a tile-based movement system. Free-movement FPSes began in the late 1980s with games like MIDI Maze, and, in the early-to-mid-1990s FPSes became especially popular, primarily because of id Software releasing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
The term "first-person shooter" wasn't used until well after the released of Doom, but the name is now retroactively applied to previous games. There are several games which has aspects of the genre, but are given a distinct genre due to their content. Rail shooters and ligh gun games both shooters which frequently use a first-person perspective, but the inability of the player to freely move around in the game world presents a sizable enough change in content to warrant a different genre. Combat flight simulators also involve shooting in the first-person, but their movement system is so different they too are viewed as a unique genre.
I was a huge fan of early first-person shooters, in the early-to-mid-1990s, but I became bored with the genre. It wasn't until the mid-2000s, when I began playing Half-Life, that my interest in them was rekindled.
Games
These are the first-person shooters that are important to me. For the complete list, see the category.
Title | Released | Notes |
---|---|---|
Borderlands | 2009-10-20 | Sci-fi RPG elements. |
Borderlands 2 | 2012-09-18 | |
Doom | 1993-12-10 | |
Doom II: Hell On Earth | 1994-10-10 | |
Wolfenstein 3-D | 1992-05-05 | The first free-movement FPS I played. |
Half-Life | 1998-11-19 | |
Half-Life 2 | 2004-11-16 | |
Half-Life 2: Episode One | 2006-06-01 | |
Half-Life 2: Episode Two | 2007-10-10 | |
Left 4 Dead 2 | 2009-11-17 | Zombie theme. |
Magic Carpet | 1994-??-?? | Middle Eastern setting. |
Magic Carpet 2: The Netherworlds | 1995-??-?? | |
Portal | 2007-10-10 | Puzzle-based FPS. |
Portal 2 | 2011-04-19 |