Important note: This is Part 1 of what will be at least a 4-Part series, The Birth of First-Person Shooters. I got the idea for this series after publishing ‘The Return of Combat Chess and Push-Forward Combat’ (link here) in December 2018. So join me as I take a look at technology, game design and the birth of the first-person shooter genre.
Quick warning: this article is a bit of a long one; nearly 2400 words… you may want to sit down for this.
Game: Wolfenstein 3D
Developer: id Software
Publisher: Apogee Software
Director: Tom Hall
Producers: John Carmack, John Romero
Platforms: MS-DOS, Atari Jaguar, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Classic Mac OS, Acorn Archimedes, 3DO, Apple IIGS, Game Boy Advance, Xbox, Linux, iOS, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Android.
Release date: May 5, 1992
There is some contention over the holder of the title ‘first first-person shooter’.
There are those in the lower levels (younger generations) who believe 1993’s Doom was the first.
Some believe it to be Wolfenstein 3D, from 1992.
Then there are those who remember that games existed before the roaring 90s… and they believe the title belongs to one of two games; either Spasim from 1974 or Maze War from 1973.
Given the years I just attached to each, it may seem that Maze War should obviously hold the title, but no one is really sure when the game came out, some sources say it came out sometime in ’73, while others believe it came out towards the end of ’74, some even think it released in 1975.
Why are these games important to this article?
Well, Spasim is lauded as one of the first truly 3D video games out there, it was a flight simulator and was strictly multiplayer only, supporting up to 32 players in a single game.
The only reason Spasim ran on anything was because of how extremely simple the game was.
A player’s position was recorded on a Cartesian plane and refreshed for other players once a second, along with the simple geometry, this meant the game could run on relatively weak systems (weak by our standards).
Maze War, on the other hand, just looked 3D, a difference which will become important moving forward in this series.
For the longest time, the home computer was designed to do a job, and that job had nothing to do with video games. This meant that most games ran on systems specifically designed to run them – yes, there was once a time when consoles were better than computers.
Home computers were also expensive, considering what you got, but they were far cheaper than any ‘room-filling’ computer
In the 1970s, Atari, Apple, and even Tandy Corporation (a family-owned leather company, of all things) had managed to worm their way into the newly created personal computer market, with their computers in universities, schools and the average household; but these personal computers, for all their mass-production and lower prices, weren’t very powerful, they could run simpler games, but the most advanced thing they could handle was probably along the lines of Spasim.
IBM, an information technology company, was one of the leaders in computer hardware, they were renowned for their powerful machines – granted, the average smartphone of today is several orders of magnitude faster and more powerful.
The room-filling IBM System/360 was one of the most powerful computers on the market, it was also among the more expensive. In 1979, the personal computer market was worth about $150 million in the US alone, and it was projected to go up by roughly 40% in 1980.
So, IBM, in their now-famous rush, scrambled to put a low-cost option on the market.
August 1981 (excuse the time-jump for the moment, it’s relevant, I promise) saw the launch of the IBM PC Model 5150; which managed to become one of the more powerful, and more affordable, personal computers on the market – during it’s development, they actually chose a less powerful processor than what they had readily available to them, not only was this done to cut the budget (and end-user prices), but this also meant that the 5150 wouldn’t be able to compete with their lower-end room-sized computers.
And it was through the Model 5150 that IBM came to dominate the market; the 5150 was even somewhat future-proof, the computer was designed with an open-architecture, which encouraged developers to make their own changes to the operating system and upgrade the hardware themselves.
The only problem with this was the way in which IBM wanted developers to interact with their system. Third-party software couldn’t directly interface with the hardware, or at least, IBM didn’t want developers to do that, third-party software had to instead interact with the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), which would then, in turn, interface with the hardware.
The reason this was a problem was because it was faster to simply have software interface directly with the hardware – and this was important for gaming.
Fortunately for developers, Microsoft had created a second option.
The 5150, in a strange decision from IBM, used an operating system not of their own invention, turning instead to Microsoft. Part of the deal, however, was that Microsoft would be able to release their own version of this same operating system; IBM’s would be called PC-DOS, while the IBM compatible version Microsoft sold would be known as MS-DOS. The IBM PC 5150 became so popular that it became the industry standard.
Thus was born the IBM Compatible.
No, it wasn’t an actual computer, but a name for anything that was compatible with IBM software or hardware; such computers were often referred to as ‘PC Clones’.
Okay, back to computer games. That whole tirade was very important to this series, I promise.
The IBM 5150, and thusly the IBM Compatible, laid the groundwork for almost all modern computers; in the same way the 5150 had an open architecture, allowing people to slot in upgrades themselves, most modern PCs can also be upgraded by simply purchasing and installing new parts (that’s an oversimplification, I know, but it still applies).
For a time, the IBM Compatible was seen as just a printing machine, while it was compatible with most hardware and software on the market, most Compatibles weren’t excessively powerful for the time, you couldn’t get the same out of them that you could out of a console or arcade machine.
But when IBM put a powerful yet comparatively cheap personal computer on the market, they changed things… suddenly the cost of higher-end parts started to go down.
Que the rising popularity of 3D games on PC… along with PC gaming as a whole.
Most 3D games of the time were incredibly basic, models had very simple geometry and extremely low polygon* counts, even then, most had either flatly coloured surfaces or were simply see-through wireframes.
Polygon: 3D games use polygons (multi-sided shapes) for their models. Remember in older games when characters had blocky arms and heads? Those characters had relatively low polygon counts; the more polygons, the more detailed, smoother and realistic a model looks.
Along came John Carmack, Tom Hall and John Romero, then staff at Softdisc, where they turned out isometric games on a monthly basis, including Romero’s Dangerous Dave.
In September of 1990, Carmack had developed an efficient way to side-scroll graphics on PC, something which had, until then, only really been done on consoles. Between the three of them, they developed their own version of Super Mario Bros. 3 for PC; and despite their efforts, Nintendo turned them down, apparently they had zero interest in the PC market (not much has changed) and they wanted to keep Mario games exclusively on their consoles (again, not much has changed).
The group got together and started their own business, id Software. They hired a few people, put their Super Mario Bros. 3 PC-port engine to use in Commander Keen and then began development on Wolfenstein 3D.
The Wolfenstein franchise originally started out as a stealth-based isometric game, developed by Muse Software, the first game in the franchise was titled Castle Wolfenstein, which released in 1981, and is often credited as one of the first games of the stealth genre, being that, sure, you could kill any Nazis you came across while attempting to escape the castle, but the emphasis was more on disarming or avoiding enemies altogether.
In 1982, Castle Wolfenstein got a sequel in the form of Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. This time, instead of trying to get out of the castle, you were trying to get in to kill Hitler.
Unfortunately, Muse Software peaked in 1983, with a total of roughly forty employees, over the years that followed, the team shrunk down to just six people, filing for bankruptcy protection in 1985. Apparently, their sales had taken a serious dip, due to multiple outside factors. They officially closed their doors in October of ’87.
id Software acquired the rights, somewhere along the line, to the Wolfenstein property, but before releasing it, they worked on and released two games to really test ray casting to its limit.
John Carmack believed that ray casting could be used to produce a 3D-looking game, without tanking performance on most home systems – he was right.
The team developed Hovertank 3D, just to make sure that their idea worked, and released it in April of ’91, the game was published by Softdisc.
While other 3D games of the time looked better, they ran noticeably slower – it seems that, even back then, all PC gamers could think about was the framerate.
After the release of Hovertank 3D, id knew their idea worked, and that it worked well.
So, they started work on Catacomb 3D. Catacomb was originally developed by Romero back in either 1989 or 1990 (there is some discrepancy in the dates) as a 2D, top-down, third-person shooter. The only real change made to the engine used in Hovertank 3D was that they added in texture-mapping, meaning that walls were no longer blank slates with a single colour and that they could actually have some level of texture; multiple colours were a little ways off, but simply having textures was a start.
If Hovertank 3D was the testing ground for fast, reliable ray casting and Catacomb 3D was the upgrade, Wolfenstein 3D was the finished product.
Remember I mentioned Maze Wars right at the start of this article?
All Maze Wars did was have loads of set pictures which would change depending on which ‘direction’ you wanted your character to move. There were only so many set locations your character could be in, and they could only look in one of four directions, so it was easy enough to just draw pictures which will then come up on screen in a particular order depending on how you ‘move’ around. Each picture had several versions depicting a rocket coming towards you, a rocket moving away from you and multiple versions depicting both rockets moving towards/away from you.
All this gave the illusion of movement and attacking/being attacked, when really you were basically just watching a slideshow.
Ray casting, which I’m finally going to explain after bringing it up multiple times, does something similar to this. In the case of Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3D and Wolfenstein 3D, the images aren’t pre-drawn.
The map tells the engine where everything is, and the engine figures out what its all supposed to look like depending on where you’re standing and what direction you’re looking in.
Ray casting comes in two forms, raycasting and ray tracing. Both are used to render what is in the field of view, but the difference between them is massive. Ray casting shoots rays from the current point of view and render the first things they bump into; the other side of that wall doesn’t exist because you can’t see it. Ray tracing, while it does almost exactly the same thing, is a little more complex, tracing where those same rays go when they bounce off of things; allowing for refraction, reflection and shadows.
Once upon a time, these were seen as the same thing, but there is a difference.
While ray casting is nothing new, as we’ve just established, it certainly isn’t extinct either and can be found in modern games; Spider-Man PS4 uses raytracing to decide where to place Spidey’s webbing each time you fire one while web-swinging and Horizon Zero Dawn uses raytracing to discern what is in the player’s field of view, not loading in much more than what the player can actually see. These days, it seems raytracing is used less to render entire environments and more to save on required processing power and development time – imagine if Insomniac had to place each ‘web attachment point’ individually? The game probably wouldn’t be out yet.
But Wolfenstein 3D’s engine saw more use than just Wolfenstein.
While the team at id were busy working on Spear of Destiny (a prequel to Wolfenstein 3D), Romero had heard of a small developer based in Wisconsin; Raven Software. While John Carmack was upgrading the engine, they needed a testing bed for a few ideas; Raven Software, smart enough to not let this opportunity pass by, were all to happy to provide that testing bed.
A few months later, in 1993, on an upgraded Wolfenstein 3D engine, ShadowCaster was released.
The game was set in in a fantasy world, with the player being able to shapeshift into multiple forms, each with their own capabilities (both in and out of combat). The upgrades to the engine featured sloped floors, walls with variable heights, diminished lighting and fully texture-mapped walls, floors and ceilings. There was also a basic flight mechanic, which worked on a vertical axis.
The engine ran a little slower than the version used in Wolfenstein 3D, but this fit the slower, exploratory theme of the game, as opposed to Wolfenstein’s faster, ‘run ‘n gun’ combat.
Wolfenstein 3D:
Fast-paced. Violent. Simple. Killing Nazis. And looking 3D.
What could possibly be better?
DOOM
Sidenote: The Birth of First-Person Shooters Part 2 can be found here.
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