The Genealogy of the First Person Shooter

 For my very first official post on this blog, I'd like to start by introducing more concepts and not talking about a videogame.

...wait..

Doomed from the start

A few years ago, a close friend of mine got me a copy of Doom Eternal for the PC. I'd really liked the 2016 reboot. But I made a spontaneous decision that I've since stuck to rather firmly for several years now - I would delay my enjoyment of Doom Eternal until I fully understood the genealogy of the First Person Shooter genre as a whole leading up to this point.

There were some games I had played before that I intended to replay with my adult hindsight, and other games I had on my backlog for years that I would finally resolve to play, and other games I'd never heard of or had any interest in that I'd insert into my timeline.

I started with Wolfenstein 3D, with the intention of playing major Id releases leading to Doom Eternal. I played and finished Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom II, Doom 64, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Doom 3, and Quake 4.

However, before playing Quake I opted to insert non-Id games. What felt appropriate at first were ID's direct competitors - Lucas Arts' Star Wars: Dark Forces, 3D Realms' Build Engine games (Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood) and why not add Return to Castle Wolfenstein?

And every time I played a new game, at least 3 more were added to my list. I've been working on this for years now at this point, and only just earlier last week reached Doom 2016. 

In addition to the games above, some of the games I have added since then were Catacomb 3D, Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 1 and 2, the rest of the Catacomb series, Super 3D Noah's Ark, Rise of the Triad, The Spear of Destiny, Marathon, Jedi Knight, FEAR, Condemned, BioShock, SiN, American McGee's Alice, Rainbow Six, the Half-Life series, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, Portal, L4D, and I'm sure several others I hadn't thought of.

Some of these games I picked up briefly but put down - USUALLY with the intention of returning later. Most of the time I at least manage to finish the base game, if not all the DLC or expansion packs associated with it.

My journey has been a chaotic one - my biggest obstacle recently was obtaining my very first VR headset, and going back to replay older games. Again.

In my time playing all of these games, I have learned an exceptional amount of information. I have felt myself, who was casual at best in the FPS genre, improving substantially during my marathon, I would often opts to revisit games that I had played prior, even just a year before, to find that the game plays much easier now compared to how I felt about it before. 

One example would be Doom 2016 - I first played it about a year before Doom Eternal head come out, and when I revisited it just a week ago, I felt much more able to start a brand new save on ultraviolence difficulty. 

I say all this to explain my current library consists largely of FPS games. I will talk about other games - in fact I guarantee it - but a very significant amount of my thoughts will be in relation to this genealogy. I will mark the articles with the appropriate tag if you are interested in this series.