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As mentioned previously in another clumsily-written article, 3D games were mostly limited to novelty and suffered the crippling lack of computing horsepower. Still, they were uncommon enough to pique the interest of nerds such as young budding designers John Carmack, Tom Hall and John Romero. These three are pretty much triple-handedly responsible for your Mountain Dew-fueled Halo and Call of Duty marathon sessions, but I'm getting ahead of myself.



Before id Software was formed, the trio worked for a little software publishing company called Softdisk, who released a handful of titles before being relegated to complete obscurity. During these days, 2D platformers were pretty hot shit because of the success of Super Mario Bros. so the dudes at Softdisk, thanks to Carmack, made a breakthrough in figuring out how to bring Mario to EGA displays once thought incapable of smooth scrolling graphics. Here's a really fantastic article on the birth of Commander Keen and the early days of id. When Nintendo denied permission to port Super Mario 3 to the PC platform, they used what they learned to make a number of platformers, chief among them Commander Keen (this technology also led to Duke Nukum).

With help from Apogee, id released Wolfenstein 3D on May 5, 1992 using the tricks learned from Hovertank 3D and the Catacomb titles. Almost immediately orders began pouring in and the money would allow id Software to eventually self-publish their own games. The game was so successful that a number of other development teams contracted the engine for use in games such as Corridor 7, Blake Stone, and Rise of the Triad.



The gameplay of Wolfenstein 3D isn't really that far removed from MazeWar, with the player in charge of running through simple mazes of uniform height and 90 degree corners and sometimes shooting a dude. The level design is very simplistic even compared to Ultima Underworld, a title released a few months earlier, but the simplicity allowed the game to run on a larger variety of computers. The sequel Spear of Destiny would be released a little bit later, but by the time I had the chance to buy it Doom was available, so I tend to think of it as the lame lost brother.



Today, Wolfenstein's legacy has been lessened somewhat by the monumental success of Doom and Doom II, but it's impossible to deny the game its value as an important and influential piece of gaming history. And to think, the franchise started as a two-dimensional espionage game.

Those of you old enough to remember or too young to have played it new can pick up copies of the game very cheaply (also freely if you just want a taste), and it has no problem running in DOSBox if you're like me and love command line. A short Google search brought me this source port if you find the idea of messing with DOSBox a little daunting. I haven't actually messed with that port so if it takes a big poo poo all over your computer then I'd say that's what you get for being a sacrilegious weenie.



Also try these great flavors of Wolfenstein Engine!
Blake Stone
Corridor 7
Operation Body Count
Rise of the Triad

FPS Pre-history

Let me preface this entire thing by stating that MineCraft is the greatest and worst thing ever conceived. It's the most fun game I've played in quite a while and because of this I've not been writing my articles. I'd apologize, but no one reads this anyway. The guy who made MineCraft goes by the nickname "Notch" and has made over two million dollars on his game since last September so if my glowing praise of this game doesn't convince you maybe some hard numbers will. Go to here immediately and get your 'craft on.

This is what I was supposed to be writing

First Person Shooters and I go pretty far back. To the beginning, actually. In the 1980's games were mostly played from a sort of omniscient viewpoint. Games were generally either viewed from above the action (Pac-Man/River Raid) or to the side (Mario Bros./Mountain King). There were a few exceptions here and there with the text-based adventure, racing genres and assorted miscellaneous titles but for the most part visual immersion wasn't a huge consideration.



In the mid-80's my experience playing games was limited to platformers like Conan or the popular arcade games such as Q*Bert or Choplifter, along with the games listed above. So when, in 1987, a kid decided to show me Maze War running on his Xerox I didn't know what the fuck. Here's a video showing gameplay on a different model computer to the one my neighbor had. He also didn't have another Xerox to play with so it was just lonesome wandering around an empty maze. As far as I was concerned there wasn't anything remotely like it and I wanted more. Unfortunately I have ADD and Mario Bros. and later Sonic the Hedgehog stole my gaze for few years.



I didn't realize until a few years ago that MazeWar was the first FPS ever, but it certainly wasn't the only first-person game you could play during the 80's, only the most important. British lads got a taste of first person mazery in 3D Monster Maze, a much better game for the single player involving a vicious tyrannosaurus on the prowl for chubby, pimply meat. In arcades I'd played the wireframe-only vector glory of Battlezone, an early tank game where it's shot or be shottened. I was never very good at it.

Honestly, the 80's were very spotty at best for first person games, let alone the variety focused on lethal projectiles. It wouldn't be until the dawn of the grunge and g-funk era that this genre would begin showing its potential as a contender for players' hearts, minds and souls. The mad geniuses over at id were busy preparing one of the most important games in history by learning how exactly to go about it. Both Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D were released in 1991 and gave PC gamers a taste of the future. Almost a year later, Wolfenstein 3D would hit shelves and give everyone else a case of the what the fucks.

Notes: Try this Conan music out. The Atari 800 version sounded better and was the one I played all the time. I realize I'm missing quite a few first person games made in the late 80's (especially some of the Interplay adventure/RPG games like The Bard's Tale) but I'm not intending this to be encyclopedic.