History of Gaming: id & the First Person Shooter.

It is without a doubt that the first-person shooter genre might not be as big as it is today without the help of id. Through out the 1990’s the company pushed the genre multiple times, helping place the FPS in the top spot for addictiveness and competitiveness. This post will briefly look over Id’s history with the genre and how they shaped it.

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While id made the genre popular, they certainly did not invent it. Decades before, in 1973 a NASA intern named Steve Colley created a program that placed the user inside a maze, not just above it. The idea of 3D rendering at the time seemed far fetched but Colley and his co-workers figured mazes only needed 90 degrees angles, this made it much easier to create. The original game was boring, but 2 other interns, Greg Thompson and Howard Palmer saw potential in the program.

Thompson and Palmer had the idea to place more than 1 user in the maze and soon after shooting each other was introduced. At the start the game was passed around between friends but in 1974 Thompson returned to MIT and upgraded Maze Wars to run over an early version of the internet. Students battled it out across campus and the game grew in popularity, even being picked up by Xerox to port to other computers. (Olivetti, 2012) Maze Wars now appears to be mostly forgotten about, every resource I’ve read through so far seems to completely ignore it in the history of gaming, yet I believe it holds great significance in both the FPS genre and gaming in general with some of the first online multiplayer, a radar and a spectator mode.

In 1989, John Carmack met John Romero during a job interview for Softdisk. Both were very skilled programmers but Romero also had an artistic side. They also met Tom Hall and Adrian Carmack (no relation) there and began moon-lighting to create their own games, the first one being Commander Keen. Keen was a side-scrolling action game, very much like Mario but the people who played it said it was much better. The moon-lighting team began calling themselves Ideas From the Deep and eventually left Softdisk to create id Software, founded on February 1st, 1991.

J.Carmack - Front Left, Adrian Carmack - Hidden at the back, J.Romero - Middle, Tom Hall - Second from the right[2]

John Carmack, now id’s main programmer, wanted to create a fast-paced 3D game, instead of the slow 2D game, Commander Keen. After months of research Carmack and the others had come up with Hovertank. The game however was rather ugly due to the limitation of the computers at the time. Id continued work on Commander Keen to pay the bills and eventually wanted to explore the fast-paced 3D game again. The decision was made to recreate Wolfenstein by John Romero, an older stealth game that was well suited to Carmack’s engine. Romero also wanted the game to be bloody and violent, after growing up with films like Rambo and Friday the 13th, extreme violence had not been explored in video games yet. New technology such as texture mapping helped Wolfenstein 3D achieve a good visual style while also keeping the speed of the game high, the stealth elements were thrown away as they were “slowing the game down”. Wolfenstein 3D was released on May 5, 1992, with secret sliding doors, boss death cams, taunting difficulties and lots of violence and gore.

The game became an underground sensation. Internet forums and BBSs where filled with people talking about it. Eventually the media caught on and praised it too, even with all the violence. Wolfenstein 3D began to get hacked, or for a more modern term, modded. Due to the 3D nature it was more difficult to hack but this didn’t stop people replacing the enemies with Smurfs for example.

Wolfenstein 3D - No floor or roof textures yet [3]

John Carmack had again made advances with 3D rendering, creating an engine that enabled fading light and textures on walls and ceilings, he also had the idea to base their next game on demons with the title Doom. Carmack continued to push the engine, helping Romero and Adrian bring their demonic imaginations to life, while scrapping anything that would slow down the pace of the game, including the story. Tom Hall wanted to include a more cinematic story with Doom, yet Carmack said “Story in a game, is a like a story in a porn movie, it’s expected to be there but it’s not that important.”

Doom was released at the end of 1993, with faster gameplay, more violence, complex levels and multiplayer. A first person game of this speed had never included multiplayer before. Doom became an overnight hit, with any place having internet access grinding to a stop simply because people were playing. Intel and A&M had to take actions to stop their employees playing.

Doom - Roof and floor textures, with shadows! [4]

After seeing what modders had done with Wolfenstein 3D, Id made sure that Doom was much more accessible with WAD files, these allowed players to alter the game without destroying the code. Despite being so popular Doom was mostly an underground game, only available through shareware. Id worked on Doom II which would be released on CD-ROM, helping id so mainstream, while John Carmack began working on their next game engine.

Id grew, hiring more people to cope with the lengthening development time. Their next game would be Quake, they had planned this game for a while but their idea was different to the final out come. The original idea was for Quake to be a fantasy, melee combat game but as development became troubled id decided to stick with what they know - the FPS. One thing was certain though, the game would be playable over the internet from release, with 16 players. The various artists had all been in their own worlds while Carmack worked on the Quake engine, this lead to there being 3 distinct looks between the levels. Id stitched them together with a story about an invader using slipgates to assault different worlds.

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Quake was released on June 22, 1996 and despite the rough development the game was a success... a massive success, due to Carmack’s ground-breaking engine and because the game was built from the start for multiplayer. Gamers played the game across LAN and the internet battling it out and forming clans. It didn’t take long for tournaments to begin and once this happened e-sports had begun. While gamers enjoyed Quake, Id had suffered during the development and the fallout hit them hard, with the majority of the talent leaving.They later released Quake II and thanks to Carmack’s coding was a success, but Id’s win streak was over.

April 20th, 1999, the Columbine killings took place, where 2 teenagers killed 13 others. Hours before, one of them recorded a video explaining his actions and he mentioned “it’s going to be like fucking Doom!”. This lead to a media storm over violence in video games and fingers were all pointed towards the creators of these games, such as id. Quake III was in development at the time but the pitchforks were already out. Gamers had also shifted in taste, but it’s unsure if the bad media was the reason. They wanted stories now, with games like Half-Life, System Shock and Marathon leading this change. To make things worst the development of Quake III was rough due to in-fighting and no real leadership, id began to fall apart again losing some of it’s newer members. (Kusher, 2003)

Half-Life: "Do you know who ate all the donuts?" [6]

This is where, in my opinion, the FPS left id’s hands and other companies began to push the genre. Companies like Rare brought quality first-person shooters to the console with Goldeneye 007, Bungie streamlined it with Halo 2 and Infinity Ward made it extremely popular with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Id’s latest game was RAGE released in 2011, while being technologically fantastic the gameplay didn’t do anything new and multiplayer was completely absent. The fate of the FPS is now open, with companies like DICE and Infinity Ward/Treyarch making little to no advancements for the genre, here’s hoping Valve has something ground-breaking in store with Half-Life 3.


Reference & Notes
Kushner, D (2003). Masters of Doom. London: Judy Piatkus Publishers. p37-276

Olivetti, J (2012). The Game Archaeologist: Maze War. Available: http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/06/12/the-game-archaeologist-maze-war/ . Last accessed 30th Oct 2013.


[1]http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/news2001/24183/id_software.gif
[2]http://dorkshelf.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/legends.jpg
[3]http://obrazki.elektroda.pl/4690575400_1336649125.jpeg
[4]http://media.desura.com/images/articles/1/122/121099/auto/doom-imp-pc-version.png
[5]http://static.zenimax.com/bethblog/oldcontent/925702-me0000485352_2_super.jpg
[6]http://www.xblafans.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/08/halflife1.jpg