Shooter
A shooter is a major genre of video game where the player controls a character that can shoot projectiles.
Contents
History
The very first commercial video game Galaxy Game (1971) is a shooter based on the earlier non-commercial shooter, Spacewar! (1962). In fact, most of the earliest commercial video games, those released in the early 1970s in the arcade and on the Magnavox Odyssey, were shooters, but the game to entrench shooters into video game history was Space Invaders (1978) which, shortly after its release, became the most popular video game at the time. All of these games are classified as a fixed shooter, since the player's character is fixed to a specific area on the screen.
As shooters became more popular, they began to become more complex and adopted additional mechanics. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, shooters were evolving into scrolling shooters, platform shooters, and rail shooters, and, by the late 1980s, these were all well-established sub-genres which displaced the early single-screen shooters. In the 1990s, the first-person shooter became all the rage.
Personal
Since shooters were already a well-established genre when I first started playing video games in the mid 1980s, they were among my early favorites.
Games
These are the classic shooters that are important to me. For the complete list, see the category.
Title | Released | Notes |
---|---|---|
Air-Sea Battle | 1977-??-?? | |
Centipede | 1981-06-06 | |
Combat | 1977-09-11 | |
Megamania | 1982-??-?? | |
Millipede | 1982-??-?? | |
Missile Command | 1980-07-?? | |
Outlaw | 1978-??-?? | |
Spider Fighter | 1982-??-?? | |
Yars' Revenge | 1982-??-?? |