Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/17/a-three-minute-journey-through-the-history-of-first-person-shooters.html
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I’d never seen Maze War before, just rumors and maybe a static image or two, but it sure looks like what we were prototyping on repurposed Centuri Aztarac arcade hardware in 1985 or so at Nova Games. Sadly, we never got the chance to go further with it. (Me, being me, I wanted to do a game and allow networking multiple arcade machines together. That would have sucked the quarters out of pockets!)
(You do not want to know how many Aztaracs probably got junked for parts when Nova shut down.)
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Hey Rob, I don’t know if it’s just me, but blog view is not updating (the last post there is from yesterday). I think of blog view as “yours”, could you wake the hamsters up in the blogview server please? (This video was good and made me think the jump in quality between Doom and Quake was the most exciting, maybe not coincidentally because it coincided with my most intense interest in the genre.)
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Thanks for posting a link to the Aztarac article, it was amazing. There’s a follow-up linked to at the bottom of the original article that brought tears to my eyes: https://arcadeblogger.com/2017/12/08/tim-strykers-aztarac-the-final-chapter/
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This is great, but why did he end his revue almost a decade in the past?
Also: the genre has evolved beyond the medium he’s using to summarize it. Half-Life:Alyx is the cutting edge of FPS, and you can’t play it on a monitor.
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So Doom has always been the default? If it can’t play Doom it’s not a computer.
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Came here to see Marathon: Durandal. I was disappointed.
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I was the same. LOL
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Ot: I’m getting to old for this.
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At least 4 games in this video are first person, but aren’t shooters. 5 if you want to argue that you’re not really “shooting” in Portal 2. I wish there were a lot more of those.
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Wolfenstein and Doom are the only two FPS games that gave me motion sickness issues. Funny how I turned a little green around the gills just watching a few seconds of video from those games. Must be getting old.
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Nice editing but surely there have been iconic shooters in the years since.
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The Marathon Trilogy was fantastic, had a great story, and had some of the best network play. One of my favorite first person shooters. Sad that many Bungie fans don’t know it was Halo’s predecessor.
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That first game looked a lot like something we were dreaming up in high school on the Apple //e. 
Granted, we were a full decade later… I had no idea FPS came that early.
For some reason, youtube defaulted to 480p. I didn’t realize for a while. 
Those transitions, though… wow. Some serious tracking and matting going on, especially when rounding corners.
What struck me most was the sound design (spent 5 years in audio in the games industry, so I’m biased). But… you could tell instantly what game you were transitioning to, especially throughout the id games.
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For me it was that chirrup that immediately signalled we were back in HL2’s City 17
At least it wasn’t Ravenholm…
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Duke Nukem 3D. Wasted many, many hours on that one. Glad to see it made the list
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It’s not just you. I get the “Painting from 1860” post at the top unless I do a hard refresh on the page on every visit.
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The non-blog view doesn’t seem to be updating posts, either. I only found this via the Twitter account links…
Ah, so at least there is a solution. I thought I was going to have to have to read Boingboing via the Twitter feed only. (Under normal circumstances I have to refresh BB by going to the bookmark; just reloading it screws up all the video links, but even that wasn’t working now.)
