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First-Person Shooter

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It's like you're right there, killin' Nat-zis.

"Far distant eyes look out through yours."
Vortigaunt to Gordon Freeman, Half-Life 2

First-Person Shooter is a videogame subgenre of shooters and a really popular form of them. Its basic style of play is exactly what the name says: the players see things in first person, from the eyes of the character, and the action revolves around shooting within a three-dimensional environment. Its basic input commands control movement, aiming, shooting and environment/NPC interaction. Depending on the subgenre (see below), other controls may be required such as inventory display and item usage.

These games have origins in flight Simulation Games, dating as far back as Sega's Jet Rocket (1970), the Ur-Example of the genre, as well as Adventure Game and Role-Playing Game titles which were played in the first-person perspective, but weren't quite 3D because they were rendered in discrete steps, view of the surroundings, typically a dungeon, and which had sensible and consistent worlds, NPC interaction, relatively few artificial restrictions, plotlines, and puzzles. Several games of this type were full 3D with freedom of movement, notably Action RPG titles Star Cruiser (1988) and Ultima Underworld (1992).

As for the genre per se, it was first popularized by id Software, via the Trope Maker Wolfenstein 3-D (1992) and especially the Trope Codifier Doom (1993); indeed, before the genre's name finally crystallized, many following games were referred to as "Doom Clones"; these games boast full freedom of movement in pseudo-3D environments (unlike fellow first-person genres Light Gun Game and Rail Shooter), and Doom even had a hand in the introduction to game modding and multiplayer play to the then-nascent genre. Two later games, Bungie's Marathon (1994) for Apple Macintosh and 3D Realms's Duke Nukem 3D (1995) introduced vertical aiming and vertical movement to the mix, as well as the "mouse look" feature, environmental interaction and (in the case of the former) more intricate story that tried to avert both Excuse Plot and A Space Marine Is You.

But it wasn't until the advent of actual 3D game engines with Quake, also from Id Software, in 1996, and Epic Games's Unreal and especially Valve Software's Half-Life in 1998 that the genre took off, expanding its possibilities well beyond what was thought possible. Id's game further refined and popularized "mouse look", game modding (thanks to the dedicated QuakeC programming language) and online play (with the Quakeworld and Threewave CTF game mods). Epic's offering not only introduced the world to the now-ubiquitous Unreal Engine, but also popularized the Secondary Fire feature which a lot of games use nowadays, and pulled off the genre from its cramped spaces and into the open world, with its lush environments paving the way for more games to follow its footsteps. Meanwhile, Valve's game introduced Video Game Set Pieces replacing cutscenes, physics-based puzzles and friendly allied NPCs, and its intricate and complex story and more grounding in realism paved the way for other companies to follow suit. Other games from the era such as SiN (1998) and Starsiege: Tribes, while not as groundbreaking as the previously mentioned games, also had contributions of their own such as vehicle driving sections, which eventually became commonplace.

At the same time, while the genre was dominating the PC world, two games paved the way for the console market: Rare's GoldenEye (one of those games that defied The Problem with Licensed Games and showed how well an FPS could work on console) and especially Bungie's Halo: Combat Evolved, which finally found a way to make Competitive Multiplayer work in these machines and also left the door open for the flourishment of the genre.

And all of this doesn't count the countless innovations on the multiplayer side. While Doom and Quake made significant contributions to it, it wasn't until the end of The '90s, with the release of three gamesnote , that the multiplayer FPS scene finally entered the nascent e-Sports scene: first, it was one of the fiercest videogame rivalries ever, with Epic Games's Unreal Tournament and Id Software's Quake III: Arena, both released in 1999 and with only two days of difference, two games that took their respective franchise's multiplayer side and distilled them to their most basic elements, giving birth to what was known as the "Arena Shooter" subgenre, as well as popularizing many tropes still present in today's multiplayer games. The third game, perhaps one of the most important of the period, is Counter-Strike, a Game Mod for Half-Life that puts two squads in realistic environments with diverse objectives in round-based matches. The mod featured localized damage; unprotected shots to the head usually put an end to any player's avatar and a buyout section where players could buy weapons, ammo and items. It paved the way for more realistic shooters, among them the Call of Duty series.

Since then, companies have been trying to expand the genre to different degrees of success, even giving birth to subgenres as wildly different and mixing it with every other genre out there, but that maintains the genre's core elements; see the subgenres for more info on them.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not always about shooting the first person you see.

See also: Standard FPS Guns and Fackler Scale of FPS Realism. If a game never breaks from the first-person perspective of the player character, that's Unbroken First-Person Perspective. Some Third Person Shooters have similar gameplay.

Contrast Fixed Camera (in terms of perspective).


Subgenres spawned by the First-Person Shooter genre include


Examples of this genre:


 
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Alternative Title(s): FPS, First Person Shooters

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Close Range

Close Range is a universally beloved first person shooter where all you do is shoot people point-blank in the face.

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