First-person (video games)

They in turn evolved into rail shooters, which also typically employ a first-person perspective, but move the player through levels on a fixed path.

[6] Electro-mechanical racing games had been using first-person perspectives since the late 1960s, dating back to Kasco's Indy 500 (1968) and Chicago Coin's version Speedway (1969).

Multiplayer capabilities, with players attempting to shoot each other, were probably added later in 1973 (two machines linked via a serial connection) and in the summer of 1974 (fully networked).

[12] The game includes a bitmap image of a gun and other armaments that point at the monsters and other players, with the walls rendered as vector lines.

The popularity of Star Raiders resulted in similarly styled games from other developers and for other systems, including Starmaster for the Atari 2600, Space Spartans for Intellivision, and Shadow Hawk One for the Apple II.

[22] Not a shooter, it has smooth, arbitrary movement using what was later labeled a raycasting engine, giving it a visual fluidity seen in future games MIDI Maze and Wolfenstein 3D.

The arrival of the Atari ST and Amiga in 1985, and the Apple IIGS a year later, increased the computing power and graphical capabilities available in consumer-level machines, leading to a new wave of innovation.

In 1987, Taito's Operation Wolf arcade game started the trend of realistic military-themed action shooters, and featured side-scrolling environments and high-quality graphics for the time.

The success and popularity of these two games led to Sega releasing Line of Fire in 1989, another military combat arcade machine that achieved a further level of realism by implementing a rotating point of view, thus creating the effect of turning corners left and right, in addition to just walking forward.

[27] In 1991, Dactyl Nightmare appeared for the Virtuality arcade VR platform, which featured first person deathmatch style games with polygon player avatars.

It features on-foot gameplay and a control scheme where the player moves using an eight-direction joystick and aims using a mounted positional light gun.

It would be widely imitated in the years to follow, and marked the beginning of many conventions in the genre, including collecting different weapons that can be switched between using the keyboard's number keys, and ammo conservation.

It also escaped the "pure vertical walls" graphical restrictions of earlier games in the genre, and allowed the player six degrees of freedom of movement (up/down, left/right, forward/backward, pitch, roll, and yaw).

The Quake series since 1996, and derived titles such as 1998's Half-Life, advanced from Doom with a fully 3D engine allowing players to look from any angle, and helped formalize the mouse and WASD keys combo that has become the standard means of control on personal computers.