What the First FPS Game REALLY Was (Not DOOM or Wolfenstein)

From to to, the FPS genre has defined a wide array of video games. id Software, the developer behind,, and is regularly credited with creating the first-person shooter, as those games are seen as the granddaddies of the genre. The history of FPS games doesn't begin with id Software's most successful titles, however, and diving into the games that actually created the genre reveals a much longer path to market domination.

is often considered to be father of the FPS. After all, throughout the 1990s, first-person shooters were known as " Clones" rather than entries within a larger genre, and the id Tech 1 engine that powered served as the backbone for many other titles. However, while may have popularized the genre, it was not the original first-person shooter. The seminal predated the 1993 release of by a year, but even that was far from the first title to fit into the genre.

Technically, the very first FPS was a student project called , created in the early 1970s. According to, was developed by high school students during a NASA work-study program and later expanded upon when they went to college, and it pioneered many of the features that have become synonymous with first-person shooters. In, players navigate through a series of mazes and fire away at other players or bots if they encounter any, represented initially by usernames and later by eyeballs.

It's difficult to pinpoint the exact timeline of combat being added to, which started purely as a maze navigation experience.

Another early pioneer was , which featured first-person spaceship combat and came out during the period of 's ongoing development. was built to take advantage of the early PLATO computer network that started at University of Illinois, which developer Jim Bowery attended. Inspired by the PLATO game, was in turn an influence on the development of other games on the system, including a tank combat game called

Although these early experiments were foundational for the genre, it took some time