Forget Wolfenstein. Did You Know The Real First FPS Was.....

1993's Wolfenstein is usually credited as being the first first-person shooter. However, the 1973 Maze War predates not only Wolfenstein, but the personal computer. It was a maze-based two player game ran on lmlac PDS-1 computers at NASA. It had a minimap, level editor, cheats, and network multiplayer.

Yeah, there were other games before it.

But Wolfenstein 3D has Robot Hitler. I dunno, there is just something about Robot Hitler that makes people remember that game more than other games.

Just like Pong was not the first video game, but many people seem to think that it is. Probably because it had Robot Hitler.

cool...but what does this have to do with system wars?

Obviously this is an attack on PC as it didn't have the first FPS :O

@Heroldp813:

There were many games that had a first person perspective but they were usually grid based movement systems. Wolfenstein 3D and Catacomb 3D had a less restrictive movement system and that is what I would describe as the prerequisite for being a first person shooter other than just shooting with a first person perspective.

Yes PS4 had the first FPS ever created. Right Heil68?

Just like the squad tps cover game was for Gears of War, the first game that did that was Freedom Fighter(?).

The popular belief is that Catacombs 3D is the very first FPS game, not Wolfenstein 3D.

Pac Man was the first FPS Frightening Phenomenon Scarefest. Those ghosts were scary man

This^. And who cares about a game that the general public couldn't play?

Wolfenstein 3D was the one that kickstarted the genre though, it laid all the ground rules, made it popular and made everybody else start to mass produce games of this type.

It's nothing shocking though. Pretty much all of the most influential games of all time weren't really all that innovative. They just took somebody else's ideas, polished them up and achieved success.

It's Battlezone for me. I don't really care who had it first though. Heck, it even has a minimap.

Interestingly, Wolfenstein 3D isn't the first Wolfenstein game...

Bet you an HD port is already on its way for a small sum of $60

No it's not there were like 8 games before Wolfenstein.

Really didn't, it was doom. There were tons of other devs putting out games for the genre with Wolf and none of them stuck until Doom. Then we started getting competition that though competing with doom meant making an FPS game that played like a Slideshow.

None of those post-Doom games stuck either though. It wasn't untill 1996 that we got big FPS success that wasn't made by iD or based on thir engine.

Of course, Doom made the whole thing explode even bigger, but Wolf 3D had a lot of copycats. It's the same deal as Dune 2 and Command & Conquer.

Praise Godny and their live, learn, love philosophy.

Yes they did, and they sold more, pretty sure Blake Stone got like 3 games, that AVP became the best selling must buy Jaguar game, System Shock, Space hulk etc.

Wolfenstein 3D didn't really have many copycats as outside of a few features, there were already games that played similar to wolfenstein, One could say some games looked back at it in some cases and copied it but not even a 4th as much as Doom.

Thats very nice but why is this so important ?

System Shock was not a Doom copycat. It came straight out of Ultima Underworld, which even predates Wolfenstein. Space Hulk was using a grid based movements. It had nothing in common with FPSes, Wolf3D orDoom alike. And Blake Stone was running on Wolf3D engine. There many others games that were inspired by Wolf3D success, like Dracula, Shadowcaster or Terminator rampage.

Now, obviously....Doom was much more successful, especially since it had MP, and it spawned a lot more games in the genre. But the genre began for good with Wolf 3D and Wolf's success was more than enough for many devs to start making similiar games.

post-doom games=/= Doom copy cats.

Youtube has long videos of history of fps. go check them out.