A First Person Shooter History

My first First Person Shooter was Doom. I had a friend who had a 386, and I remember that you could shrink the screen size down to improve performance. I remember that the graphics were awesome, and that the game scared the crap out of me with monster popping out of nowhere. I didn't really have my own computer at the time, but I did get it for the SNES and later the N64. The stereo sound on the SNES was awesome hooked up to my still-living Sony Trinitron TV. I fantasized during this time about doing the single player campaign with a friend (also known as co-op), blasting the crap out of everything from two different directions suprising all the monsters.

I didn't really have my own computer until college. I missed out on the Quake craze in the dorms because I ended up dropping out. But I did play through parts of Half-Life with a friend of mine. He was the kind of guy who got very much into the games he played, and he was fun to watch. I played an enormous amount of Team Fortress Classic as a soldier. I played Quake 3 with some frequency against my friends, pwning them by turning down all the graphics settings while playing with a then state-of-the-art Voodoo2 SLI setup. I was really more into hardware at the time.

I didn't play video games for a long time until I entered the military and bought a $274 Dell server. I ordered a GeForce FX 5200 video card which looked great on paper, and I was amazed at how well it played Quake 3 and TFC (LOL). Too bad it didn't play any games contemporary at the time. Luckily today even $40 video cards can play most games, if at low settings. It took me a long time to figure out why TFC stopped working online, and it was months before I found out about Steam.

A couple of years passed, and I saw Counter-Strike being played for the first time by a friend of mine. I didn't really pay attention, and I think the only time I actually tried to play it was disasterous, and so I didn't touch it again for quite some time. Around the same time a friend of mine asked me to recommend him a video card so he could play Battlefield 1942. I saw him get on a boat on Wake, and that's about it.

I saw a good friend of mine play Battlefield 2. I bought it immediately. Like everyone else, I thought I was actually killing people at first, when in fact I was hitting nothing, not having played an anywhere near close to realistic first person shooter before. I did not get a purple heart however. I played Battlefield 2 for a very long time, and even got the people at work to play with me, to the point that we played almost everyday after work, even after 12 hour shifts. I eventually got tired of it, after reaching Lt. Colonel. I typically got 1st or 2nd highest score on maps. I played Karkand and Wake and the other city maps primarily. Infantry only servers were interesting at the end.

Mods like Point of Existence and Project Reality were interesting, but only for a time. PR was particularly brutal, but you probably couldn't find higher quality players. Battlefield 2142 was a dud and completely unnecessary.

Call of Duty 4 comes out some time later, and wow. What a nice shooting/damage model. It got old, but the controls spoiled me for future first person shooters.

My bandwidth became limited, and I started playing Counter-Strike Deathmatch against bots. I eventually understood why it's the No. 1 FPS on the planet, and why CoD4 is so successful.

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