When people think of the origins of first-person games, "Wolfenstein
3D" (May 1992), "Doom" (December 1993) or (for those who think they
know about this sort of thing) "Ultima Underworld" (March 1992) are
usually the names that spring first to mind. And its true; these games
were the ones that - in many ways created the genre as we recognize it
today.

But there were others that are too often overlooked.

Bethesda's "The Terminator" (1991) actually came out before "Ultima
Underworld"; it too boasted a polygonally-rendered map. Playing it
today, you can see a lot of similarities between its 30-year old
engine and modern Bethesda RPG games; it has a bunch of NPCs wandering
about, a large open world, and going through a door pops you into a
separate map instance.

There's Id's own "Catacomb 3D" (November 1991) games, of course;
essentially "Wolfenstein 3D", except with magic spells 'n' orcs
instead of machine guns and Nazis, and all in bilious 16-color EGA
instead of the 'lifelike' 256-colors VGA offered by its more famous
cousin.

Other might point to "Hovertank One" (April 1991), another Id game.
This one preceded even "Catacomb 3D". It is in EGA too, and lacks the
textured walls of "Catacomb 3D" and "Wolfenstein 3D", but otherwise
boasts the same smooth-flowing movement.

But what about games like Spotlight Software's "Total Eclipse" (May
1989). Few remember that one. Released three years before "Ultima
Underworld" its world was rendered in filled (but untextured)
3D-polygons. More an adventure/puzzle game than a shooter, each room
was its own separate instance (largely because moving that many
polygons was too much for the 286 and 386s of the day) but you can see
a little bit of Quake in its maps.

Mindscape's "The Colony" (December 1988) used wire-framed renders to
create its world, but you could move through it just as smoothly as
through any "Doom" map (well, assuming your PC had the horsepower).

Mindware's "Tracker" (1986 on C-64, Jan 1987 on PC) also utilized
wire-frame maps, and limited you to much smaller mazes, but its
shooting mechanics (complete with mouselook!) feel oddly familiar
despite being 36 years old (and preceding "Wolfenstein 3D" by five
years)!

And, of course, there's always Atari's "Battlezone" (November 1980),
which boils down first-person shooting to its most quintessential...
and came out in 1980. And "MazeWar" (1973) came out even before that,
although you needed a mini-computer to run it, and anyway it was never
commercially released. Plus, it wasn't really smooth scrolling,
instead jumping from step to step like "Dungeon Master" or "Eye of the
Beholder". Still, "Maze War" is often credited as the "first
first-person shooter".

Plus, arguments could be made that games like "Test Drive" (or any
in-the-drivers-seat simulator) might also count as a 'first-person'
game. In which case, I think that "Night Driver" was probably the
/first/ first-person game I ever played.

But I guess it all depends on where you draw the line. Still, I think
its unfair to some of the titles I mentioned above to ignore their
part in the development of the genre.

So give a thought to some of these oldies who helped make the
first-person genre what it is today. And maybe share a thought on what
you consider a fair definition of what is - or is not - a first-person
game, and which one was your first.

Hey, look! You can play all (well, almost all) the games I mentioned
above and see for yourself!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
[1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_The_Terminator_1991
[2] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Catacomb_3-D_1992
[3] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Hovertank_1991
[4] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Total_Eclipse_1988
[5] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Colony_The_1988
[6] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Tracker_1987
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghIPGXs3LAo
(couldn't find a playable version of 1980 arcade Battlezone, so watch
this video of it instead)
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wX5L03r-qA
(Maze War, just another video, sorry, but at least you can see what it
is like)
[9] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Test_Drive_1987
[10] https://archive.org/details/arcade_nitedrvr

.... and also ('cause, ya know, I did mention 'em):
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Wolfenstein_3D_1992
https://archive.org/details/doom-play
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Ultima_Underworld_-_The_Stygian_Abyss_1992
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Quake_1996

On 25/02/2023 01:19, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>
> When people think of the origins of first-person games, "Wolfenstein
> 3D" (May 1992), "Doom" (December 1993) or (for those who think they
> know about this sort of thing) "Ultima Underworld" (March 1992) are
> usually the names that spring first to mind. And its true; these games
> were the ones that - in many ways created the genre as we recognize it
> today.
>
> But there were others that are too often overlooked.
>
> Bethesda's "The Terminator" (1991) actually came out before "Ultima
> Underworld"; it too boasted a polygonally-rendered map. Playing it
> today, you can see a lot of similarities between its 30-year old
> engine and modern Bethesda RPG games; it has a bunch of NPCs wandering
> about, a large open world, and going through a door pops you into a
> separate map instance.
>
> There's Id's own "Catacomb 3D" (November 1991) games, of course;
> essentially "Wolfenstein 3D", except with magic spells 'n' orcs
> instead of machine guns and Nazis, and all in bilious 16-color EGA
> instead of the 'lifelike' 256-colors VGA offered by its more famous
> cousin.
>
> Other might point to "Hovertank One" (April 1991), another Id game.
> This one preceded even "Catacomb 3D". It is in EGA too, and lacks the
> textured walls of "Catacomb 3D" and "Wolfenstein 3D", but otherwise
> boasts the same smooth-flowing movement.
>
> But what about games like Spotlight Software's "Total Eclipse" (May
> 1989). Few remember that one. Released three years before "Ultima
> Underworld" its world was rendered in filled (but untextured)
> 3D-polygons. More an adventure/puzzle game than a shooter, each room
> was its own separate instance (largely because moving that many
> polygons was too much for the 286 and 386s of the day) but you can see
> a little bit of Quake in its maps.
>
> Mindscape's "The Colony" (December 1988) used wire-framed renders to
> create its world, but you could move through it just as smoothly as
> through any "Doom" map (well, assuming your PC had the horsepower).
>
> Mindware's "Tracker" (1986 on C-64, Jan 1987 on PC) also utilized
> wire-frame maps, and limited you to much smaller mazes, but its
> shooting mechanics (complete with mouselook!) feel oddly familiar
> despite being 36 years old (and preceding "Wolfenstein 3D" by five
> years)!
>
> And, of course, there's always Atari's "Battlezone" (November 1980),
> which boils down first-person shooting to its most quintessential...
> and came out in 1980. And "MazeWar" (1973) came out even before that,
> although you needed a mini-computer to run it, and anyway it was never
> commercially released. Plus, it wasn't really smooth scrolling,
> instead jumping from step to step like "Dungeon Master" or "Eye of the
> Beholder". Still, "Maze War" is often credited as the "first
> first-person shooter".
>
> Plus, arguments could be made that games like "Test Drive" (or any
> in-the-drivers-seat simulator) might also count as a 'first-person'
> game. In which case, I think that "Night Driver" was probably the
> /first/ first-person game I ever played.
>
> But I guess it all depends on where you draw the line. Still, I think
> its unfair to some of the titles I mentioned above to ignore their
> part in the development of the genre.
>
> So give a thought to some of these oldies who helped make the
> first-person genre what it is today. And maybe share a thought on what
> you consider a fair definition of what is - or is not - a first-person
> game, and which one was your first.
>

Interesting, I tend to associate first person with first person shooter
and not just first person perspective, don't know why. That makes me
think of Doom for the shooter part and then HL:1 that added more than
it's just shooting things but you have a real story. Does that mean they
where the first games to do that, probably not but in my mind they are
the ones that popularised the ideas we still have as a staple of games
today. What was my first FPS, Quake II if I remember correctly. I was
rather disappointed to be honest as this I thought this was supposed to
be the pinnacle of PC games but after a few hours all I thought was so I
just shot things then. HL:1 was very different as to me it wasn't just a
fun game it was also an interesting one that demonstrated what could be
done with PC games when they throw off the shackles of arcade games.

Games from a first person perspective, I certainly played some on the
Speccky 48k but the first one I can remember playing at all outside of
an arcade was 3D Monster Maze on a friend's ZX81. Quite a revelation for
the time.

That did get me thinking when was the idea of an open world added to
FPSes. The first game I remember doing that was Far Cry but I assume
there was others that pre-dated it.

Descent was my first fps. I'm sure I played Doom, but yeah Descent. I have
played Test Drive on an old 286 or 386 (great game) as well as Battlezone in
an arcade

rms

On Sat, 25 Feb 2023 10:50:57 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

>On 25/02/2023 01:19, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

>That did get me thinking when was the idea of an open world added to
>FPSes. The first game I remember doing that was Far Cry but I assume
>there was others that pre-dated it.

Again, it depends on how you define things. Arguably something like
"Elite" (Sept 1984 on BBC Micro, 1987 for PC) would count, because it
has a first-person view, you shoot things, and it has a huge open
world. But on the other hand, it's also a 'flight sim' (well, space
flight), and a lot of that world is empty space (the game being set in
space ;-).

But Bethesda's "The Terminator" (1991) is a much better fit. It is
definitively a first-person shooter in a form we'd recognize today,
and it featured a large open world. There were buildings you could
enter, cars you could drive, and NPCs you could interact with. The
mission structure was fairly sandbox and open-ended. Both the
technology and the newness of the genre meant it was far more limited
than more modern takes on the concept, but even so it is very
recognizably an 'open world' FPS to modern gamers.

It was really my recent discovery of "Total Eclipse" that prompted the
initial ramble. Here was a game that allowed players to move around
fully 3D-rendered dungeons of the sort that wouldn't be common until
the advent of Quake... but in 1988, eight years prior to the release
of Id's masterpiece. "Total Eclipse" could run on an 8088 XT machine
with 256KB of RAM, for Gods sake!* Admittedly, there are differences
between "Total Eclipse" and "Quake"** but still, it was an impressive
achievement from a game I'd never heard of or seen mentioned when FPS
games were discussed.

So I decided to give it - and a few other games - a shout-out.
Forgotten programmers of these forgotten games, it may be 30+ years
later, and on a forum almost nobody reads anymore, but still, let me
be one of the first to say it: you done good. ;-)

* how well it could run under those conditions is a totally different
question ;-)
**largely in that the former limited you to exploring one room at a
time, with transitions between each chamber)

rms <rsquiresMOO@mooflashmoo.net> wrote:
> Descent was my first fps. I'm sure I played Doom, but yeah Descent. I have
> played Test Drive on an old 286 or 386 (great game) as well as Battlezone in
> an arcade

Mine was Catacomb was my first FPS IIRC.
--
"Sing to the LORD a new song, for he has done marvelous things; his right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him." --Psalm 98:1. 14 yrs. old Debian PC's 115 GB SSD suicided yesterday mawny with da leaking nest. :( Rain, rain, please go away and come back another day.
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org.
/ /\ /\ \ Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail.
| |o o| |
\ _ /
( )

On Sat, 25 Feb 2023 18:38:57 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

>rms <rsquiresMOO@mooflashmoo.net> wrote:
>> Descent was my first fps. I'm sure I played Doom, but yeah Descent. I have
>> played Test Drive on an old 286 or 386 (great game) as well as Battlezone in
>> an arcade
>
>Mine was Catacomb was my first FPS IIRC.

I came across Catacombs on the BBS (or maybe it was an FTP site) after
I discovered Wolf3D and thought it a cheap knock-off by a less
talented developer.

Which, I suppose, was technically true... Id probably learned some
useful tricks making Catacombs that helped make Wolf3D a better game.
Still, for an embarrassingly long time I was unaware of the connection
between the two.

But when it comes to FPS games as we consider them today, "Doom" was
the first one I loved. I appreciated "Wolf3D" for its technical merits
and sure, it was fun... but its mazelike levels did it no favors. I
plowed my way through all the episodes because that's just what I did
back then... but other than the occassional foray into the first few
levels, I've never had any desire to replay the game in its entirity.

(I'm trying to remember my initial impressions of "Doom". I think my
first ones were not entirely favorable - oh look, "Wolf3D" but with
stairs - but that sentiment didn't last very long once I really
started playing it. The game had so much more atmosphere than Wolf3D
that I still play it to this day.)

Still, it's fun to see what its predecessors were like. I wonder what
gaming might have looked like if Carmack et al. hadn't been around?
Because even though they didn't create the genre, their techniques did
revolutionize it; the Id games were faster and slicker than anything
before. Would FPS games have become the dominant genre if the sluggish
movement and controls of its competitors had been our introduction to
it?

On 25/02/2023 17:00, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Feb 2023 10:50:57 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
>
>> On 25/02/2023 01:19, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>
>
>> That did get me thinking when was the idea of an open world added to
>> FPSes. The first game I remember doing that was Far Cry but I assume
>> there was others that pre-dated it.
>
> Again, it depends on how you define things. Arguably something like
> "Elite" (Sept 1984 on BBC Micro, 1987 for PC) would count, because it
> has a first-person view, you shoot things, and it has a huge open
> world. But on the other hand, it's also a 'flight sim' (well, space
> flight), and a lot of that world is empty space (the game being set in
> space ;-).
>
> But Bethesda's "The Terminator" (1991) is a much better fit. It is
> definitively a first-person shooter in a form we'd recognize today,
> and it featured a large open world. There were buildings you could
> enter, cars you could drive, and NPCs you could interact with. The
> mission structure was fairly sandbox and open-ended. Both the
> technology and the newness of the genre meant it was far more limited
> than more modern takes on the concept, but even so it is very
> recognizably an 'open world' FPS to modern gamers.
>
> It was really my recent discovery of "Total Eclipse" that prompted the
> initial ramble. Here was a game that allowed players to move around
> fully 3D-rendered dungeons of the sort that wouldn't be common until
> the advent of Quake... but in 1988, eight years prior to the release
> of Id's masterpiece. "Total Eclipse" could run on an 8088 XT machine
> with 256KB of RAM, for Gods sake!* Admittedly, there are differences
> between "Total Eclipse" and "Quake"** but still, it was an impressive
> achievement from a game I'd never heard of or seen mentioned when FPS
> games were discussed.
>
> So I decided to give it - and a few other games - a shout-out.
> Forgotten programmers of these forgotten games, it may be 30+ years
> later, and on a forum almost nobody reads anymore, but still, let me
> be one of the first to say it: you done good. ;-)
>

The only ones you've mentioned that I've heard of is Elite although I've
never played it. As you say whether it was an open world or not depends
on what the definition is but I think of it more as rouge-lite in that
almost the entire world is procedurally generated.

I would of course add that if someone wanted to call it open world I
wouldn't have a problem with it.

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>When people think of the origins of first-person games, "Wolfenstein
>3D" (May 1992), "Doom" (December 1993) or (for those who think they
>know about this sort of thing) "Ultima Underworld" (March 1992) are
>usually the names that spring first to mind. And its true; these games
>were the ones that - in many ways created the genre as we recognize it
>today.

I'd say these these games are recognized by people think they know
about this sort of thing as the first 3d textured games with 360 degree
of movement. No one thinks of them the original "first person" games,
although Wolfenstein 3D is often decribed at the first firest person
shooter. While that's not strictly true, it definitely was the game
that popularized and defined the FPS genre. Before Wolfenstein 3D no
one would've known by what you meant by FPS, even in the frames per
second sense.

--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca:11068/
db //

On Mon, 27 Feb 2023 20:24:48 -0000 (UTC), rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
(Ross Ridge) wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>>When people think of the origins of first-person games, "Wolfenstein
>>3D" (May 1992), "Doom" (December 1993) or (for those who think they
>>know about this sort of thing) "Ultima Underworld" (March 1992) are
>>usually the names that spring first to mind. And its true; these games
>>were the ones that - in many ways created the genre as we recognize it
>>today.
>
>I'd say these these games are recognized by people think they know
>about this sort of thing as the first 3d textured games with 360 degree
>of movement. No one thinks of them the original "first person" games,
>although Wolfenstein 3D is often decribed at the first firest person
>shooter. While that's not strictly true, it definitely was the game
>that popularized and defined the FPS genre. Before Wolfenstein 3D no
>one would've known by what you meant by FPS, even in the frames per
>second sense.

Pedant mode engaged:

Actually, even after the advent of Wolfenstein 3D, nobody would have
recognized "FPS" as first-person shooter. That term didn't come into
common parlance until the late 90s; prior to that they were all just
"Doom- (or Wolf3D-) clones". If they were pigeonholed, they were
simply called 'shooters'.

(I say this fairly confidently, having scanned innumerable box-covers
and read a lot of magazine reviews of the time in the building up of
my Ultimate DOS Game Collection. I can't say exactly when the term
"First-Person Shooter" or "FPS" was used, but it wasn't the usual
terminology until 2 or 3 years AD - anno Doom. ;-)

FPS as frames-per-second was probably more familiar. I don't know how
often it was used as an initialism, but a number of games - primarily
console shooters - boasted about achieving smooth 60 frame-per-second
gameplay.

In any event, both "The Terminator" and "Tracker" were recognizably
first-person shooters as we regard them today. The most significant
change that Wolf3D brought to the genre was its use of textured walls,
a feat possible not only thanks to the skill of John Carmack, but the
vastly increased speeds of the computers of the day.

(and even then, for most people getting a smooth, full-screen gameplay
wasn't a given. There's a reason Wolf3D lets you reduce its screen
down to the size of postage stamp ;-)

JAB <noway@nochance.com> writes:

> Games from a first person perspective, I certainly played some on the
> Speccky 48k but the first one I can remember playing at all outside of
> an arcade was 3D Monster Maze on a friend's ZX81. Quite a revelation
> for the time.

ZX Spectrum 3D games I remember are:

Driller (1987):
<https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/software/games/driller-incentive-software-ltd>

Dark Side (1988):
<https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/software/games/dark-side-incentive-software-ltd>

On Sat, 04 Mar 2023 03:23:15 +0100, Nomen Nescio <nobody@neodome.net>
wrote:

>
>JAB <noway@nochance.com> writes:
>
>> Games from a first person perspective, I certainly played some on the
>> Speccky 48k but the first one I can remember playing at all outside of
>> an arcade was 3D Monster Maze on a friend's ZX81. Quite a revelation
>> for the time.
>
>ZX Spectrum 3D games I remember are:
>
>Driller (1987):
><https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/software/games/driller-incentive-software-ltd>
>
>Dark Side (1988):
><https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/software/games/dark-side-incentive-software-ltd>

Impressive. Not so much for the technology, which was better done
earlier and elsewhere, but that they managed to do it on a Speccy and
within 48 kilobytes of memory.

Which of course made me wonder... did anyone ever get QUAKE running on
a ZX Spectrum? Not Doom, because at this point I just assume that if
it has a microprocessor in it, there's a Doom port for it... but
Quake? That's less common.

And yes. Yes they did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1leK1PJb9o

Sure, it's not like it's recognizable as Quake (not without a lot of
squinting) but it's still an impressive port. But then, with general
purpose computers the biggest difference between old and new isn't
what they can run, but how fast they can process and how much data
they can manipulate at once. So if you make deep enough cuts, you can
get almost any program to run on an 8-bit. ;-)

(Which is sort of an opposite Theseus's ship problem: how much can you
take away and still claim similarity between the two states? If I
strip down the ship to take away the mast, the oars, the deck, the
hull, the ribs and have only a chunk of the keel left, is is still
Theusus's pleasure yacht? ;-)

On 04/03/2023 16:30, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> Impressive. Not so much for the technology, which was better done
> earlier and elsewhere, but that they managed to do it on a Speccy and
> within 48 kilobytes of memory.

It's one of the reasons I felt there was a level of excitement in that
era. There's was a rapid advance in games as developers further pushed
the capabilities of the technology. Now it feels more like don't worry
about that just whack a £1k+ GPU in and everything will be fine.