First-person shooter is a popular type of electronic game in which the player engages in firefights from the perspective of a character in the game. The player sees the action the way the character would see it—often looking down the barrel of a firearm. First-person shooters are called FPS’s for short. Some FPS’s have science fiction settings with aliens and laser guns. These include the games Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) and Metroid Prime (2002) along with their many sequels. Other first-person shooters feature realistic weapons from historical or modern warfare. These include two series of games that began with Call of Duty (2003) and Medal of Honor (1999). Many popular FPS’s enable players to battle one another through the use of a computer network.
The early 1970’s computer game Maze War is often said to be the first FPS. It was developed by the NASA researchers Steve Colley and Howard Palmer. The game’s simple black-and-white visuals portrayed each player as an eyeball within the walls of a maze.
Wolfenstein 3D, released in 1992, established many of the conventions of the modern first-person shooter. In the game, players engage in gunfights against Nazis in a mazelike castle. The game’s creators—John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack—were inspired partly by the mazes of the popular arcade game Pac-Man (1980). The team’s next game, DOOM (1993), expanded Wolfenstein 3D’s fast-paced gameplay in a science fiction setting infested by demons. In DOOM and the 1996 game Quake, players could modify the game’s levels, sharing their “mods” with others. The FPS genre continued to evolve during the 2000’s. Such FPS games as Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011) focused on the solving of puzzles and physics rather than violence.
