[dieKatze88]

Maze War by NASA was the first FPS game, it also had multiplayer. You could shoot other players and gain and lose points. A similar game called MIDI Maze for the Atari ST was released in 1987. I'm not sure if either of these games had killing. I've never seen Maze War run. I have seen MIDI Maze run in an emulator, However, I never saw the game remain stable enough to actually play.

The next big thing in FPS games would be id software's Hovertank. It used the Raycasting technology of id Tech -2 (Hovertank/Catacomb 3d/Wolf3d engine) to greatly increase the rendering speed of a 3d game on commodity hardware available at the time. Hovertank was the first game produced on this engine and Catacomb 3d came next. Both used EGA graphics. Wolf3d was the first FPS games to be displayed on VGA cards, and the first in 8 bit color.

It would not be until Doom and its earth shattering use of Binary Space Partitioning that would allow 386 class machines to display full 3d graphics with dynamic lighting and variable heights on floors and ceilings. Bear in mind that the birth of deathmatch would not allow for room over room due to limitations of the BSP processor used in Doom. Eventually hackers found a way to create fake room over room using some cleverly defined linedefs, however, you can see and shoot through them.

Doom allowed 4 player deathmatch over an IPX enabled LAN, or 2 player deathmatch via Null Modem Serial (7 pin required) or via dialup modem (minimum 9600 baud required) However, because Doom required an external program to handle the execution of network functions, hackers eventually developed a few programs, one allowed for 4 players over a mix of connections using some clever connections, however, this was unreliable (I had a 3 player setup between 3 nearly identical 486/33mhz machines in my Grandmother's basement. We downloaded WADs via a 28.8kb/s modem I lifted out of a junked 286/16) and another allowed for ip setup that would allow for multiplayer over the now common TCP/IP protocols, but by the time that came around Quake was pretty big and Quakeworld was in full swing.

Neat little trick to try. If you can put together 3 machines of the right age (Pentium class machines are perfect for this) you can actually play Doom v1.1 in a VR mode. Learn how to run IPX Setup manually on the command line and start Doom with 3 extra commands -left on the left monitor, -center on the main monitor, and -right on the right monitor. This worked with the clusterfuck setup program however it was not very cooperative with this and would often cause crashes.

Doom remains one of the bigger classic shooters of these times, because id software released the code to the Linux port and allowed hackers to reengineer the software. I played a lot of many many versions of the Doom Engine. CS Doom was the first that had a master server and allowed for modern browsing of game servers as quake and such have pioneered. Zdaemon and Skulltag are still quite popular. Skulltag is best described as Quake 3 features inside Doom, which thanks to a talented dev team works quite well. Zdaemon is mostly about the rankings and straight deathmatch. They run mapping contests from time to time and I nearly won the first one. I'll see if I can find a copy of the WAD for you guys.

Send me a PM if you guys ever want to play. I freaking love Doom.


Now for the actual reply to this thread:

When you say appreciate the ones before it. You do mean Doom. Sure, two games came out before, but they hardly qualify. Neither of them started an online sensation. and I didn't even go into DWANGO, which allowed for 4 player action via dialup modem. Doom was a pretty significant part of my life before and during my early DDR days. If it wasn't for the initial shutdown of the Doom Connector back in the day, I would probably still be playing it every day.