In its most basic sense, the phrase simply means any shooting game that you view as if you were actually in the game. A majority of people use the phrase to describe a very specific genre which id Software spawned with Wolfenstein 3D.
The first FPS game I ever played was Battlezone. “I” was a tank, or rather what I saw before me was a landscape of green lines formed into apparently solid objects. I knew that they were solid because if “I” hit one, I felt a rumble in the periscope-like object I held. There was no story, the game was to avoid getting stuck by the objects in the landscape and to play hide and seek with the enemies lurking within this land. I could blow my enemies up, and they too would blow me up if I didn’t do it first. At some point in the game a large bolt like object would rush at me at speed and destroy “me“ if I wasn’t fast enough!
I longed to drive further into the game-landscape, to see if it had edges or changed after X-virtual miles. But the game took 10 pence’s (not in infinite supply) and other people wanted a go (as it was an arcade game).
Battlezone was a coin-op game from Atari released in 1980. It displayed a wireframe (using vectors rather than raster) view on a horizontal black and white CRT (with colour overlay). The vector technique is similar to games such as Asteroids. The game was designed by Ed Rotberg. A version called Army Battlezone was also designed for use by the US army for tank gunnery training, but only two of them were produced although the gunner yoke developed was later re-used in the Star Wars game.
MIT's Spacewar
Physicist Willy Higinbotham invents the first "video game" at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. His game, a table tennis-like game, was played on an oscilloscope . Mr Higginbotham never patented his version of Pong, which was re-invented (or re-animated?) in 1972.
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/gamestimeline1.html
Most people agree that Video games are descended from MIT's Spacewar.In its original form spacewars was a third person game, but when played using two computers “2½-D" Spacewar“ it became a FPS.
The original FPS was the game Spasim published in spring of 1974. It was a wire-frame 3D universe resembling the 2D game Empire (which became Netrek). Spasim lacked even hidden lines but it was multiplayer over the world-wide PLATO network.
The first flat-polygon (hidden surface) game was the single-player Colony (1987?). It lacked textured walls, floors, etc. Other FPS games of the flat-polygon era include Faceball 2000, and MIDI Maze (for Atari-ST), notable for its networked multiplayer feature (using the MIDI interface, of all things).
Hovercraft 3D.
Other early examples of first person games are Rescue On Fractalus, The Eidolon, Way Out, of course various sims such as Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The first person shooter with colored walls, floors is probably Hovertank 3D (April 1991), but textured walls and the concept of showing the player's hand only appeared in Catacomb 3D (aka The Catacomb Abyss) (late 1991).
But it wasn't until Wolfenstein 3D (1992) from id Software the term first-person shooter had to be invented. Wolfenstein 3D was shortly supplanted (1993) by the genre-defining DOOM, which introduced network multiplayer capabilities.
What's in your head?
One of the most interesting thing for me after reading these interviews with the people who made Spacewars was that that most of the game was actually happening inside the players head.
The background story was all important:
"We had this brand new PDP-l," Steve Russell recalls. "It was the first minicomputer, ridiculously inexpensive for its time. And it was just sitting there. It had a console typewriter that worked right, which was rare, and a paper tape reader and a cathode ray tube display, [There had been CRT displays before, but primarily in the Air Defence System.] Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-Dimensional manoeuvring sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships."
Doc Smith.
"I had just finished reading Doc Smith's Lensman series. He was some sort of scientist but he wrote this really dashing brand of science fiction. The details were very good and it had an excellent pace. His heroes had a strong tendency to get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar. He had some very glowing descriptions of spaceship encounters and space fleet manoeuvres.
"The Boise leaped upon the Nevian, every weapon aflame. But, as Costigan had expected, Nerado's vessel was completely ready far any emergency. And, unlike her sister-ship, she was manned by scientists well-versed in the fundamental theory of the weapons with which they fought. Beams, rods and lances of energy flamed and flared; planes and pencils cut, slashed and stabbed; defensive screens glowed redly or flashed suddenly into intensely brilliant, coruscating incandescence. Crimson opacity struggled sullenly against violet curtains of annihilation. Material projectiles and torpedoes were launched under full-beam control; only to be exploded harmlessly in mid-space, to be blasted into nothingness or to disappear innocuously against impenetrable polycyclic screens." - "Doc" Smith: Triplanetary (1948)Steve Russell: "By picking a world which people weren't familiar with, we could alter a number of parameters of the world in the interests of making a good game and of making it possible to get it onto a computer. We made a great deal of compromises from some of our original grand plans in order to make it work well.
"One of the important things in Spacewar is the pace. It's relatively fast-paced, and that makes it an interesting game. It seems to be a reasonable compromise between action - pushing buttons - and thought. Thought does help you, and there are some tactical considerations, but just plain fast reflexes also help.
"It was quite interesting to fiddle with the parameters, which of course I had to do to get it to be a really good game. By changing the parameters you could change it anywhere from essentially just random, where it was pure luck, to something where skill and ex- experience counted above everything else. The normal choice is somewhere between those two. With Spacewar an experienced player can beat an amateur for maybe 20 to 50 games and then the amateur begins to win a little."
The pride of any hacker with a new program is its "features." Fresh forms of Spacewar with exotic new features proliferated. As Russell explains it, everything at MIT had priority over Spacewar, but it was an educational computer after all, and developing new programs (of Spacewar) was educational, and then those programs needed testing... The initial game of simply two spaceships and their torpedoes didn't last long. Gravity was introduced. Then Peter Samson wrote in the starfield with a program called "Expensive Planetarium" (MIT's first text display had been called "Expensive Typewriter"). Russell: "Having a background was important to give some idea of range and so on. Our Spacewar did not have gravity affecting the torpedoes - our explanation was that they were photon bombs and that they weren't affected by gravity. Subsequent versions on newer computers have got enough compute time so that they can afford to use gravity for the torpedoes, and that makes it a more interesting game." And then there came a - startling development called Hyperspace - when your situation got desperate you could push both turn buttons at once and go into hyperspace: disappear from the screen for a few seconds and then reappear at a random new position... maybe.
Then "2½-D" Spacewar, played on two consoles. Instead of being God viewing the whole battle, you're a mere pilot with a view put the front of your spaceship and the difficult task of finding your enemy. (Perspective could be compressed so that even though far away the other ship would be large enough to see.)
Adding incentive, MIT introduced an electric shock to go with the explosion of your ship…..
Spasim+Multiplayer.
In 1969 Rick Blomme wrote a two-player version of MIT's Spacewar for the PLATO service. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was one of the first time-sharing systems, dedicated to experimenting with new ways to use computers for education.
Originally built in the late 1960's at the University of Illinois/Urbana, it turned into a system that, by 1972, could host about 1,000 simultaneous users. PLATO featured plenty of games over the years, but Spasim (space simulation) was a 32-player 3D networked game involving 4 planetary systems with up to 8 players per planetary system, it was released in March 1974 and is claimed to be the very first first-person shooter and a reward of US$500 is put up to anyone who can document an example of a multi-player 3D virtual reality game prior to Spasim.
In Spasim the players flew around in space and to each other they appeared as wire-frame space ships. Their positions was updated about every second.
Research indicates this was the first true multiplayer game on the system. It is also interesting to note that PLATO had graphics capability, as evidenced by Airfight,a two-person 3D dogfighting simulation that first appeared on PLATO around 1973. Note that Blomme’s Spacewar was done two years before the first commercially available arcade videogame, Computer Space, which was pretty much… Spacewar. 1969 was also the year ARPAnet was founded.
http://www.netvalley.com/intval1.html
1990 to 2003.
It is at this point that first person shooter games begin to use graphics. An attempt to get the imagined version of spacewars, full of textures, sounds and pretty lights to appear on your computer screen rather than the simple wire frame.
For me the lineage of FPS games reads like this:
Wolfenstein 3D 1992
Doom 1993
Quake 1996
Half-Life 1998
Quake Arena 1999
Halo 2003 (pc version)
The multiplayer aspects of FPS remain fairly simple, generally capture the flag team games or simple death match. There is also cooperative play which allows a group of players to work through either the original single player game together. There is no “persistent” world based on a FPS. You cannot own land, develop your character and accumulate skill points for magic.
Another characteristic of FPS is the ability, either designed or hacked-in, for players and enthusiasts to create their own levels or indeed overall graphical appearance for distribution to other players (normally, this distribution must be done for free in order to abide by the developers license). This has contributed to the longevity both of the genre and of individual games. Some games now include the software the designers used to make levels. Many modifications exist on-line and the on-line games associated with the single player games may range from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Role Play.
Role play doesn’t happen much in FPS games, I know of at least one Half-Life modification where role play can happen, but generally the lack of interactivity in the virtual environment, plus the lack of persistence means that the most fun thing you can do is to shoot things.
Of course on-line players make patterns from trip mines, jump on each other’s heads and engage in all sorts of activities that would be prohibitively dangerous in a real environment. Players like to use the un-real physics embedded in a game, so rocket jumping (aiming ones rocket launcher at ones feet and then simultaneously jumping and firing, propels you something like 30 foot into the air….and doesn’t “kill” you). So on-line play is far from humourless.
Meanwhile the FPS always puts the player in a hostile environment. Sub-genres include the stealth-based game (also known as a "first-person sneaker") and the tactical shooter, which use a similar viewpoint and mechanics, but respectively emphasise avoiding detection and team-based tactics. These are now regarded as being distinct from FPSs in computer games magazines. Thief exemplifies the stealth-based game; Rainbow 6, Ghost Recon, and other games based on novels by Tom Clancy are seminal tactical shooters.
Why Play?
For many, the appeal of the FPS lies in immersive frantic blasting with a touch of verisimilitude, humour, puzzle-solving and claustrophobia. For others, the single player mode in story oriented games can have compelling narratives which allow for added element of drama in the games.FPS are among the most demanding users of computing resources, persuading many users to upgrade computers that are still suitable for more mundane tasks. This is reflected in the use of such games as benchmarks to demonstrate a certain computer's power, and in particular of a graphics card. id Software is regarded as, if not the ultimate creator of the FPS genre, certainly the popularise and refiner of it, with the Quake series regarded by many as the definitive games of the genre.
Quake in 1996 was revolutionary because it used 3D polygons not only for the scenery but also for all the players and monsters, and also incorporated the use of lightmaps and real-time light-sourcing, as opposed to the sector-based static lighting used in games of the past. It was also the first game to really kick-start the independent 3D graphics card revolution, "GLQuake" being the first application to truly demonstrate the capabilities of the 3DFX "Voodoo" chipset at the time.
Mouse-Look is one of the most important things to ever happen in FPS. Mouse-look first appeared in Quake (but you had to keep the mouse-look key pressed in at all times.
Or add this to the console:
Open the console by pressing the tilde ~ key ( on my system, this is the key to the left of the 1 on the top row of the keyboard)
Enter the command +mlook
Press Enter
Close the console by pressing the ~ key again
But mouse-look can be set as default in Quake2. By mouse-look I mean that the mouse controls the players head (in the game). This means that you can look around a virtual landscape by moving the mouse. It also means that you move in the direction you are looking at which allows you to move rapidly and fluidly through the environment. Quake to Halo the number of keys needed to play the game and the importance of mouse-look remain more or less the same.
Keys and movement.
Forwards B
Backwards C
Strafe left V
Strafe right N
Jump (space)
Crouch (alt)
Reload X
Change weapon (mouse wheel)
Primary fire mouse 1
Secondary fire mouse 2
Zoom Z
Use M
Story.
The FPS has pushed computer graphics to the point where a game is an almost cinematic experience in which you play the lead character.
The story to the game fused to follow the usual format for id Software's FPS games: Portals to a realm of evil beings have opened up, and you are the only person who can journey through them to close the rift. In the specific case of Quake, the other realm is inspired by several influences, notably that of H. P.Lovecraft (the end game nasty being Shub-Niggurath herself.)
Doom.
In DOOM, you're a space marine, one of Earth's toughest, hardened in combat and trained for action. Three years ago you assaulted a superior officer for ordering his soldiers to fire upon civilians. He and his body cast were shipped to Pearl Harbour, while you were transferred to Mars, home of the Union Aerospace Corporation. The UAC is a multi-planetary conglomerate with radioactive waste facilities on Mars and its two moons, Phobos and Deimos. With no action for fifty million miles, your day consisted of suckin' dust and watchin' restricted flicks in the rec room. For the last four years the military, UAC's biggest supplier, has used the remote facilities on Phobos and Deimos to conduct various secret projects, including research on inter-dimensional space travel. So far they have been able to open gateways between Phobos and Deimos, throwing a few gadgets into one and watching them come out the other. Recently however, the gateways have grown dangerously unstable. Military "volunteers" entering them have either disappeared or been stricken with a strange form of insanity--babbling vulgarities, bludgeoning anything that breathes, and finally suffering an untimely death of full-body explosion. Matching heads with torsos to send home to the folks became a full-time job. Latest military reports state that the research is suffering a small setback, but everything is under control. A few hours ago, Mars received a garbled message from Phobos. "We require immediate military support. "Something fraggin' evil is coming out of the gateways!" "Computer systems have gone berserk!" "We can't contr..AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHH!!!!!!!!!" "........." The rest was incoherent. Soon afterwards, Deimos simply vanished from the sky. Since then, attempts to establish contact with either moon have been unsuccessful. You and your buddies, the only combat troop for fifty million miles were sent up pronto to Phobos. You were ordered to secure the perimeter of the base while the rest of the team went inside. For several hours, your radio picked up the sounds of combat: guns firing, men yelling orders, screams, bones cracking, then finally silence. Seems your buddies are dead. Things aren't looking too good. You'll never navigate off the planet on your own. Plus, all the heavy weapons have been taken by the assault team leaving you only with a pistol. If only you could get your hands around a plasma rifle or even a shotgun you could take a few down on your way out. Whatever killed your buddies deserves a couple of pellets in the forehead. Securing your helmet, you exit the landing pod. Hopefully you can find more substantial firepower somewhere within the station. As you walk through the main entrance of the base, you hear animal-like growls echoing throughout the distant corridors. They know you're here. There's no turning back now.
Half-Life.
Deep in the bowels of the Black Mesa Research Labs, a decommissioned missile base, a top secret project is underway. Information about the project is strictly on a "need-to-know" basis, and as a low level research associate you (Gordon Freeman) "need to know" very little. Each morning you ride the train to work from the employee dorms, you put on your environmental protection suit, you enter the test chamber, and you run stress tests on whatever odd devices have been delivered from some other nameless part of the Black Mesa compound. But this morning is different. This morning, your test lab is suddenly the most important place on Earth-because something is going seriously wrong. Maybe it's sabotage-maybe it's an accident. Whatever the reason, reality is getting all bent out of shape. One minute you're doing your job, pressing buttons. The next thing you know, you're staring into an alien world. Something huge with too many arms is taking a bite out of your partner's face. An explosion of unearthly light....then darkness. Disaster. Sirens wailing. People screaming. And everywhere you turn, people are dying--being eaten. Monsters are everywhere. Monsters--there's no better word for them. You head fro the surface, to get the hell away from ground zero, but the usual routes are impassable--damaged by the disaster, infested with headcrabs and houndeyes and increasingly larger and hungrier creatures. Madness is the order of the day. You enlist the help of traumatized scientists and trigger-happy guards to get through high security zones, sneaking and fighting your way through ruined missile silos and Cold War cafeterias, through darkened air ducts and subterranean railways where you must ride a missile transport sled straight into the jaws of slavering nightmare. When you finally come in sight of the surface, you realize the aliens aren't your only enemies--for now the government forces have arrived with heavy-weapons goons, squadrons of ruthless containment troops, and stealthy assassin gals. Their orders seem to be that when it comes to Black Mesa labs, nothing must get out alive....and especially not you, the guy who made it all go bad. So much for the cavalry. When your own species turns against you, where do you turn? You've uprooted a bunch of nasty government secrets. You've found a portal to another world, and an alien light comes shining through. Can it get any worse over there? Some things you just have to see for yourself.
Halo.
The Year is 2552. Planet Earth still exists but overpopulation has forced many of her former residents to colonize other worlds. Faster-than-light travel is now a reality, and Earth's unified government, through the United Nations Space Command, has put its full weight behind the colonization effort; millions of humans now live on habitable planets in other solar systems. A keystone of humanity's colonization efforts is the planet Reach, an interstellar naval yard that builds colony ships for civilians and warships for the UNSC's armed forces. Conveniently close to Earth, Reach is also a hub of scientific and military activity.
Thirty-two years ago, contact with the other colony Harvest was lost. A battlegroup sent to investigate was almost completely destroyed; only one badly damaged ship returned to Reach. Its crew told of a seemingly unstoppable alien warship that had effortlessly annihilated their forces. This was humankind's first encounter with a group of aliens they eventually came to know as the Covenant, a collective of alien races united in their fanatical religious devotion. Covenant religious elders declared humanity an affront to the gods, and the Covenant warrior caste waged a holy war upon humanity with gruesome diligence.
After a series of crushing defeats and obliterated colonies, UNSC Admiral Preston Cole established the Cole Protocol; no vessel may inadvertently lead the Covenant to Earth. When forced to withdraw, ships must avoid Earth-bound vectors - even if that means jumping without proper navigational calculations. Vessels in danger of capture must self-destruct.
On Reach, a secret military project to create cyborg super-soldiers takes on newfound importance. The soldiers of the Spartan-II project rack up an impressive record against the Covenant in test deployments, but there are too few of them to turn the tide of the war. Existing Spartan-II soldiers are recalled to Reach for further augmentation The plan: board a Covenant vessel with the improved Spartan-II's and learn the location of the Covenant home world. Two days before the mission begins, Covenant forces strike Reach and annihilate their forces. This was humankind's first encounter with a group of aliens they eventually came to know as the Covenant, a collective of alien races united in their fanatical religious devotion.
Covenant religious elders declared humanity an affront to the gods, and the Covenant warrior caste waged a holy war upon humanity with gruesome diligence. After a series of crushing defeats and obliterated colonies, UNSC Admiral Preston Cole established the Cole Protocol; no vessel may inadvertently lead the Covenant to Earth. When forced to withdraw, ships must avoid Earth-bound vectors - even if that means jumping without proper navigational calculations. Vessels in danger of capture must self-destruct.
On Reach, a secret military project to create cyborg super-soldiers takes on newfound importance. The soldiers of the Spartan-II project rack up an impressive record against the Covenant in test deployments, but there are too few of them to turn the tide of the war. Existing Spartan-II soldiers are recalled to Reach for further augmentation The plan: board a Covenant vessel with the improved Spartan-II's and learn the location of the Covenant home world. Two days before the mission begins, Covenant forces strike Reach and annihilate the colony. The Covenant are now on Earth's doorstep. One ship, the Pillar of Autumn, escapes with the last Spartan-II and makes a blind jump into deep space, hoping to lead the Covenant away from Earth... - Taken from the HALO Instruction Manual.
Story telling.
In many ways Halo is Quake2 re-told post Half-Life. Half-Life took the Quake2 story and re-told it as a horror story, casting you as the poor sap who had been duped into making error after error in your attempt to do the right thing. In Halo you really are a hero…but also something of a freak and as in Half Life there is no happy ending.
Halo is associated with books and writers; Larry Niven, Eric S. Nylund and William C. Dietz who have all been responsible for either the concept of the ring world, or for writing the background stories associated with the characters in the game.
Mark Laidlow is known as a cyberpunk writer and played computer games before joining VALVe. Half-life is a novel told in the format of a game. The background information and clues about what to do next are given by the non player characters, generally in the form of speech or action, as would happen in real life.
Halo is more cinematic than any game I have ever seen. There are plenty of machinima moments (cut scenes) that give you background information plus explain what the next mission must be.
Cut scenes give the player time to relax for a moment, to sit back and enjoy the ‘film’ whilst the a game that relies upon the NPCs to move the game forwards is more naturalistic.
Immersion or why you need gigahertz to play FPS!
A 'virtual reality' experience as defined by Jaron Lanie,founder of VPL Research (1989) happens when the user becomes fully immersed in an artificial, three-dimensional world that is completely generated by a computer, for this the user needs something close to a replicated version of the 'virtual reality' environment he is using. For example a car sim' game would require the driver to be sitting inside a [non-functional!] car, wearing a headset that allowed the virtual world and physical world to seem one. In other words, the headset provides totally false information about where the driver is going, whilst rumble pads in the seat and the feel of the steering wheel convince him that the illusion is real.
And yet immersion happens when a player is seeing nothing but a wire-frame representation of a “world”. But obviously pushing the visual quality of a game not only makes the game look more ‘real’ but also creates a work of art.
There's nothing overly revolutionary about the game (Halo) when you analylise it in greater depth, it's just all the things which have made other fpss not particularly stand out from one another have all been enhanced to almost unbelievable proportions, the graphics are amazing - look on the floor you see individual blades of grass swaying in the late afternoon breeze. on one particular level I got killed after examining the beauty and intricacy of the detail in the wall in the corridor I was standing in. this sounds ridiculous but it's true, and for those reading this with the game I insist you check out the corridor walls on the alien ship level. the way light shimmers off the surfaces just shows how the power of the x-box can be used to such trivial, but brilliant effect nonetheless. in outdoor and indoor environments the varying levels you play on are noticeably different from one another and all beautifully re-enacted. In one level you're battling in an alien ship, on another you're on a vast snow-ridden mountain swept environment, and on another you're at the front leading a WWII-esque surge up a tide-swept beach.
Sound is just as important. We are so used to hearing sound coming from all around us that it’s easy to dismiss the importance of sound in games. But the sound provides almost as much information as the graphics. The imagined weight or properties of an object is given to us by the sound it makes when we hit or use it. Personally I just love the sounds of the rockets in Quake3, the shotgun in Half-Life, the whoooomp of Molotov cocktails in Max Payne.
Hence the demanding nature of contempary games.
Physics.
Physics is all about how things break, fall, bounce and move. And physics can be exploited in games that don’t take reality too seriously (such as Quake3, where you can use the plasma gun to help you climb up a wall or jump on your exploding grenade without dying.) Physics is determined by the game engine and can effect the amount of immersion, but it like graphics and sound are not able to make you believe that you are there in the game.
Want to play?
This transition of “self” from the real to the cyber world ultimately depends upon how much you want to believe (or are willing to suspend disbelief) in the parallel reality of the game. A FPS is a save environment to test out how ‘you’ would face hazardous environments. It is the perfect place to see how it feels to be hunted, to hunt and to stand above lethal precipices!
Some games make you feel like a hero, in other games you are a fugitive trying to get to the end of a very bad day….Games like Unreal tournament and Quake3Arena are safe places to practice death match skills before you go out on-line and risk doing serious damage to your ego. But I play because most of the time a game is like watching a film or reading a book, I like to see the story unfold. Going back to Battlezone would be fun…but I’d want mouse-look. That aspect of simply wanting to explore virtual landscapes is still an important part of what makes a game fun.
