Bang!
Shooting in games became popular quite early in the history of computer games. One of the first games, Spacewar! (1961), focussed on shooting at your opponent's rocket while flying around in space.
The genre of shooters encompasses many games in which the focus is on shooting. Because of the diversity of these games, the genre is often subdivided into sub-genres. The following sections will discuss some of these sub-genres in more detail. As the first shooter game, Spacewar! already included many elements common to all games in the shooter genre. In addition to the obvious points - moving around while aiming and shooting at enemies - it was also the first documented case of "modding". Modding is short for modifying, where players take a game's source code and / or assets and tweak them, modifying the game to their tastes. Today, modding is very popular amongst players of first person shooters.
In the early days of consoles, light gun games were a popular genre. In these games, players used a light gun device to aim and shoot at targets on the screen. The first of these games was included with the Brown Box prototype in 1968.
In a shoot 'em up game, the player tries to shoot his way as far as possible through an often infinite series of levels. Usually the goal is to get the highest score, where points are earned for every enemy shot. Some sources claim it was the first, some are more careful and say 'one of the first'. No source could be found that mentioned an earlier shoot 'em up...One of the first (and certainly most popular) shoot 'em up games was Space Invaders, released in 1978. In this game waves of "invaders" were slowly descending down the screen. The player moved a gun on the bottom row of the screen, firing upward at the invaders while avoiding the missiles they fired back down. If the player cleared the screen, a new wave would begin which would descent even faster than the previous one. If the invaders reached the bottom row, the game was over, and if the player was lucky, his brand new high score would be displayed to whoever played the game next.
The high score concept was later improved upon by Asteroids (1979), which was the first game1 to include a high score table into which top players could enter their initials.
Galaxian (released in 1979 by Namco) was the first2 arcade game to feature real colour graphics. Previous games had often used coloured overlays placed on the screen to simulate colour. Other improvements were made by Defender (1980), which was the first shooter with a side-scrolling background, and Zaxxon (1982), which was the first isometric 3D shoot 'em up3. Defender was also the first game to feature a radar4; an on-screen window showing what happened off-screen.
The best-known sub-genre of shooters is that of first person shooters (or FPS). In these games the player views the three-dimensional game world through the eyes of the main character.
It is not clear exactly which game was the first FPS5. Maze War was developed as a simple maze game in 1973, multiplayer capabilities and shooting were added later. Spasim, short for space simulation, was released in 1974. It was a networked wireframe 3D multiplayer game set in space. This would make it fit better in the genre of space sims, as most modern FPS games are based on walking rather than flying, often in constricted environments such as mazes or buildings.
It was id software's Wolfenstein 3D (1992) however which really defined the modern FPS genre. The game featured VGA graphics, texture-mapped walls and support for sound cards. Textured walls had been seen before in id software's Catacomb 3D (1991), which was also the first game to show the player's Which later games replaced with the player's gun. (Catacomb 3D was a game that featured magic as the means to attack enemies).hand on screen. Wolfenstein itself was soon surpassed by id software's Doom (1993). Wikipedia:
While still using sprites to render in-game opponents, Doom added texture-mapping to the floor and ceiling, and removed some of the restrictions of earlier games. Walls could vary in height, with floor and ceiling changing levels to create cavernous spaces and raised platforms. In some areas, Doom removed the ceiling altogether to create the outdoor environments that were generally lacking in previous genre games. However, there were still significant limitations on the environment; all surfaces were strictly horizontal or vertical, and a map could not "stack" floors one above another.
Doom also included networking capabilities and became the first mass market game to do so. It became so popular that many games of its genre were called "Doom clones" afterwards.
While it offered a 3D view of the world, Doom's world still was not fully three dimensional. The first shooter to present the player with a fully polygonal 3D world was Descent (1995). In this game the player controlled a small flying craft that could move through maze-like tunnels while shooting enemy robots. Because of the design of the game's levels and because the player had complete freedom of motion, it was easy to lose track of which direction was up, occasionally leading to confusion.
Another big leap forward in the genre was the release of Quake in 1996, which coincided with the arrival of 3D accelerator hardware for the PC. Like Descent before it, Quake featured a true 3D world, complete with texture-mapped polygonal enemies and light-mapping.
The Quake series also caused a split6 in the FPS genre. While some FPS games started focussing on presenting believable environments and storyline as a backdrop to the shooting (e.g. Half-life, released in 1998), others completely removed these elements. Games like Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena (both released in 1999) concentrated on the multiplayer component of the game, allowing players to compete against each other in large "Deathmatch is a form of multiplayer FPS in which a player's score is directly related to the number of other players he has killed.deathmatches".
Half-life is also important because it gave birth to the most popular "mod" known today: Counter Strike (1999, still updated occasionally), which had around 100.000 players playing at the time of writing. Modding had occurred on most FPS games released before it, Doom and Quake being the most popular. Valve software (the developers of Half-life) took it to a new level by recruiting mod-teams to work on commercial versions of their modifications.
It is not clear whether most games that could be called third person shooters really fit into the shooter genre. The reason for this is that most of these games use the third person perspective to help the player with platform and / or adventure elements that are added to these games.