FPS: The rise and fall of a genre

First person shooters. The most lucrative genre of video gaming that this generation has produced. You run forwards and shoot things- occasionally you press X to press a button and eventually the game ends and you go back to swearing at people via the internet. For the mostpart these games are hollow shells, linear paths which give the illusion of depth by providing us with great graphics and entertaining (yet shallow) plots.

Things weren't always this way.

The first FPS was arguably Maze War- a little known title released in 1974 which was… Bizarre. You could turn only 90 degrees to the left or right and enemies appeared as eyeballs. It was lacking in many ways, but was something of a precursor to the industry which has now exploded all over the games industry.

The genre was popularised eighteen years later in 1992 with instant classic Wolfenstein 3D. This was hardly Maze War as it allowed for 360 degree motion, featured multiple weapons and an actual plot. Its brand of tongue-in-cheek humour and inclusion of Mecha-Hitler were legendary, as was the nazi-slaying theme. The world was suddenly gripped with FPS fever and numerous clones of the original began to pop up, but none were as successful or memorable as the original Wolfenstein.

The next year, however, was the one which was to change the genre forever when id software (the same guys who brought us Wolfenstein 3D) released Doom. Doom was everything Wolfenstein had been and much, much more- suddenly the maps were complex, multiple-objective labyrinths filled with demonspawn and rock-hard moments of keyboard-smashing entertainment. Doom (and Doom II) are regarded by many to be the best first-person-shooters to have ever emerged from the primordial slime of the industry.

They're glorious. If a little simple. Oh, and they're free now too- so if you fancy actually playing something worthwhile with friends why not CLICK THIS BIT OF TEXT and destroy everything after reading the article?

It wasn't long until game developers were swamping us with variety. Pretty soon we had multiple sub-genres within the overarching label of 'FPS'. You had arena-shooters like Unreal Tournament, puzzle shooters such as Portal, historical shooters like Battlefield 1942, narrative-heavy shooters like Half-Life and even mixed-genre shooter RPGs like Deus Ex. Making an FPS was considered far more financially secure than other genres, even though the market was overcrowded: There was always someone who would buy your game, because- let's face it- men love shooting things.

As visuals improved and the fidelity to reality became closer and closer it also became one of the most scrutinized genres around. The brutal subject matter and fact that one is forced to observe their kills through the eyes of their own personalised murder-avatar brought close observation to the genre by watchdogs, the media and bored housewives with nothing better to do.

Needless to say they've not exactly been banned.

Almost everyone I know who enjoys our glorious pastime owns (or is addicted to) at least one Call of Duty game and with a zillion titles out there to choose from it's hardly surprising that the genre holds up so well. Add to this the latent desire in our hindbrain to murder everyone ever in bloody combat and you've got a cashcow that will give milk forever. Every taste is catered for, from your sci-fi addicts (Halo) to your psychotic murder fetishists (Condemned). Everyone loves to kill.

Shame FPSs are worse than they've ever been really, isn't it?

The online multiplayer first instituted by Atari ST classic Midi Maze (inventor of the Deathmatch) has been corrupted to a level which has boiled it down to crack-cocaine levels of addictiveness. Leveling up, getting 'prestige' and then doing it all again has become such a large part of so many peoples' lives that it's almost insulting to the progenitors of the genre whose vision of "cool shooting games" has been corrupted into a capitalist masterwork.

Perks, killstreak bonuses, undue realism and ridiculous numbers of 13-year-old racist children have turned something I love into a cacophony of retardation which threatens to consume us all. What happened to the days where killing multiple people in quick succession yielded an announcer patting you on the back? That's all I wanted- not some kind of game-ending nuclear missile or remote-controlled bomb.

When did competition get replaced by bragging?

What the hell is teabagging meant to accomplish?

It's not like the industry's not trying to remedy this problem- games are released now with gimmicks in them which set them apart from the slurry of the FPS world, but none come close to the sheer bloodcurdling perfection and excitement that Doom provided. No arena-shooter has ever given me the same rush that Unreal Tournament did. Take Bulletstorm for example- a great little game by the guys who did Gears of War: It's dirt cheap now and if I were you I'd totally buy it just for kicks, but what did it actually do so differently that people would buy it over CoD or Halo?

It gave us a points system and told us to do cool stuff. Oh and the characters yell 'hilarious' catchphrases. It's clearly a game marketed towards people sick of the mediocrity of the current industry, but at heart it still provides us with an overwhelmingly similar game. The trouble is that if you deviate too much from the norm you alienate a vast majority of your audience, so you have to compromise (which in turn alienates the people who were interested in your product for how different it was).

Now I'm not saying Bulletstorm (or Borderlands or any of the other slew of TOTALLY NOT STANDARD FPS games out there) is a bad game (or games, whatever) but it's still hardly an industry-changer. What we need is a revolution. Something like the regenerating health made famous by Halo and now standardised by everyone, or vertical aiming as provided by Quake.

We've just had a recent and totally awesome throwback to the days of yore with id software's latest game RAGE, but is a corridor shooter/kart racer really the chemo that Call of Duty's genre-killing cancer needs? It merges the old with the new and gives us a game which feels like Doom but looks like a next-gen game so why not continue down this road and try new things?

Why not try to give shooters back their soul?

Oh yeah, because we need CoD players' money to fund this change.

Damnit Newell, where's my Half Life 3?

Toby Ellis