First-person (video games)

• 1. Introduction

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  First-person perspective in video games places the camera exactly where the player's avatar's eyes would be. Not behind the character, not above them. Inside them. The world fills the screen as though you are the one standing in it, weapon in hand or hands on the wheel, looking out.

  This viewpoint is so common today that it can feel inevitable. It shapes entire genres, from flight simulators to walking sims to the massively popular first-person shooter. But the format was not planned. It grew, fitfully, out of carnival shooting galleries and university computer labs and the garages of high school students. It survived motion sickness complaints and the awkwardness of navigating a world you can barely see your own feet in.

  How did a graphical choice become the defining feature of some of gaming's most played genres? The answers reach back to the late nineteenth century, to a game network built for university researchers, and to a single summer in 1973 when two teams, working independently, may have created the same idea at roughly the same time.

• 2. What the Avatar Sees

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  Players in a first-person game typically cannot see their avatar's body. They may catch a glimpse of hands or a weapon held out in front of them, but the torso, legs, and feet are absent. What they gain is an unobstructed line of sight to the game world, which makes aiming considerably easier than in third-person games, where the avatar's own body can intrude on the view.

  Positional audio is a common companion to this viewpoint. The volume of ambient sounds rises or falls depending on their position relative to the player's avatar, reinforcing the sense of physical presence in the game world. When a vehicle roars past on the left, the sound comes from the left.

  The perspective carries a meaningful trade-off. Without a visible avatar body, players find it genuinely difficult to judge the timing and distance needed to jump between platforms. The absence of a reference body removes cues that third-person games take for granted. Some players also experience motion sickness, a physiological response to the disconnect between the visual motion on screen and the stillness of their actual body. Key objects such as dropped items or levers are sometimes deliberately scaled larger than realism would suggest, improving their visibility in a view that otherwise has no avatar to help orient the player in the environment.

• 3. Carnival Roots and Racing Machines

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  Shooting gallery games stretch back to the late nineteenth century, to carnival stalls where patrons aimed at moving targets. By the mid-twentieth century, these had migrated into arcade electro-mechanical games. When those games moved to video screens, they kept the first-person viewpoint almost automatically: you are the shooter, the screen is your sight line, and the targets move across it.

  Rail shooters descended from shooting galleries. They added the illusion of forward movement, pulling the player through a level on a fixed path while maintaining the same frontal view. Both types, when played with a light gun peripheral, belong to the sub-genre called light gun shooters.

  First-person perspectives appeared in electro-mechanical racing games as early as the late 1960s. Kasco's Indy 500, released in 1968, placed the driver's viewpoint inside the cockpit. Chicago Coin's version, titled Speedway, followed in 1969. The transition to video-based driving games came in 1976, with both Nürburgring 1 and Atari's Night Driver adopting the same driver's-eye approach. Atari Games returned to the format in 1989 with Hard Drivin', which went further than any predecessor: fast filled-polygon graphics, a mathematical model of how vehicle components interact with each other, force feedback in the controls, and instant replay triggered after each crash. Two MS-DOS games that appeared in the years following, Stunt Driver from Spectrum Holobyte in 1990 and Stunts from Broderbund in 1991, both included track editors and carried Hard Drivin's template onto home computers.

• 4. Maze War, Spasim, and the First Shooters

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  No one knows exactly which game was the first first-person shooter. The two leading candidates are Maze War and Spasim, and the uncertainty exists because Maze War's own developer cannot remember the precise dates of its creation.

  What the source material does confirm is that the initial development of Maze War probably occurred in the summer of 1973. The game placed a single player inside a maze of corridors rendered from a fixed perspective. Multiplayer capabilities came later, probably in late 1973 by linking two machines via a serial connection, and then again in the summer of 1974 when the game became fully networked. Spasim's timeline is more precise: it was developed in the spring of 1974 and made its documented debut at the University of Illinois that same year. It was a rudimentary space flight simulation with a first-person wireframe view, and it ran on the PLATO network, a worldwide university-based system that allowed online multiplayer.

  A further PLATO game, Panther, introduced in 1975 as a tank game, is generally acknowledged as a precursor to Battlezone. The following year, high school students Erik K. Witz and Nick Boland created Futurewar, also on PLATO, which included a bitmap image of a gun and armaments pointing at monsters and other players, with walls rendered as vector lines. Set in A.D. 2020, Futurewar is sometimes claimed as the first true FPS. Its futuristic setting anticipated Doom, though the source notes that the shared PLATO origin with Castle Wolfenstein's later transition to a futuristic theme is coincidental.

  In 1979, two first-person space combat games arrived: the Exidy arcade game Star Fire and Doug Neubauer's Star Raiders for Atari 8-bit computers. Star Raiders proved influential enough to spawn similarly styled games for other systems, including Starmaster for the Atari 2600, Space Spartans for the Intellivision, and Shadow Hawk One for the Apple II. It later shaped two major 1990s titles: Wing Commander and X-Wing.

• 5. The 1980s Laboratory

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  Flight simulators became a first-person staple for home computers from 1979 onward, beginning with FS1 Flight Simulator from Sublogic. Flight Simulator II followed in 1983. MicroProse found a distinct niche in first-person aerial combat games: Hellcat Ace and Spitfire Ace, both in 1982, and F-15 Strike Eagle in 1985.

  Among the maze games of the early 1980s, a 1982 release called Wayout stood apart. Written by Paul Edelstein and published by Sirius Software, it was not a shooter. It offered smooth, arbitrary movement through its maze using what would later be identified as a raycasting engine. That visual fluidity was unusual for its moment; later games including MIDI Maze and Wolfenstein 3D would display the same quality. A split-screen follow-up, Capture the Flag, appeared in 1983 and let two players navigate the maze simultaneously, anticipating multiplayer modes that would become standard in 3D games of the following decade.

  The arrival of the Atari ST and Amiga in 1985, and the Apple IIGS in 1986, raised the ceiling on what consumer hardware could render. In 1987, Taito's Operation Wolf introduced realistic military-themed action shooting with side-scrolling environments to arcades. Its 1988 sequel, Operation Thunderbolt, added a pseudo-3D perspective and the illusion of depth. Sega responded in 1989 with Line of Fire, which implemented a rotating point of view that created the effect of turning corners rather than only walking forward.

  Also in 1987, MIDI Maze used raycasting to draw square corridors with notable speed and offered networked multiplayer deathmatch via the computer's MIDI ports, making it an important transitional game for the genre. In 1988, Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode introduced first-person shooter levels with a sniper rifle designed for long-range assassinations through an unsteady sniper scope, a mechanic that pointed toward the genre's future.

• 6. id Software and the Genre's Shape

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  In late 1991, the then-new id Software released Catacomb 3D. That game introduced the practice of showing the player's hand on-screen, a deliberate design choice to strengthen the sense that the player was literally looking through the character's eyes rather than merely following them.

  Less than a year later, id added VGA graphics support to refine that engine into Wolfenstein 3D. The game was widely imitated and established conventions the genre would carry forward for years: multiple collectable weapons switchable by pressing number keys on the keyboard, and the management of limited ammunition. In 1992, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss introduced texture-mapped environments, polygonal objects, and basic lighting, and its engine was later adapted for Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds and System Shock.

  Doom arrived in 1993 and extended Wolfenstein 3D's framework in every direction. It supported higher resolution and improved textures. Its levels allowed walls at any angle, where Wolfenstein 3D had required all walls to sit on a strict grid. Doom added variations in floor height, flickering lights, and areas of darkness, producing a far more convincing three-dimensional environment. It also popularized the word "deathmatch" to describe competitive multiplayer, a term that passed into general video game vocabulary from that release. The source describes Doom as the most important first-person shooter ever made.

  The 1995 game Descent moved further still, using a fully polygonal engine and granting the player six degrees of freedom of movement: up, down, left, right, forward, backward, pitch, roll, and yaw. The Quake series, beginning in 1996, brought a fully three-dimensional engine, and the 1998 title Half-Life, derived from Quake's technology, helped establish the mouse and WASD key combination as the standard control method on personal computers. On consoles, Halo in 2001 helped set the dual analog stick controls that became the norm for the format on that hardware.