We disassembled the evolution of racing games, and it’s time for shooters. When was the first time the camera began to sway while moving, adding realism? When did the gun appear on the screen? What did the first shooters look like? And why does the majority use WASD as the main combination on the keyboard?
The history of modern shooters that assume first-person control begins in the 1970s. One of the first games in the genre was Maze War, released in 1973 for the Imlac PDS-1 computer. The player moved through the labyrinth through invisible squares, turning left and right 90 degrees.
To shoot at the enemy, it was enough to look at him, and not aim at a specific point. There was already both single and multi-player modes: the other players saw the player as eyeballs.
Steve Collie was working on the game at NASA’s Ames Research Center. He used tile graphics. The tile image consists of a set of tiles and a matrix of cells. Tiles – “tiles” – images of the same size, from which the full picture is built. This approach allows you to build spaces, spending a little memory.
