First Person Shooter: The Definitive FPS Documentary

It all started back when I was in high school.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.

I really enjoyed electronics and I was lucky enough

To get involved in a program at NASA Ames Research Centre

in Mountain View

Three of us from local high schools got involved.

What was coming out at the time were

early vector drawing computer graphic systems called IMLACs.

Well, it’s a really clunky looking thing, but it really does look a lot like a PC

It’s got a keyboard, it’s got a mouse

Steve Colley, Howard Palmer, and myself were given free rein of

all of this fancy computer graphics

We were given the challenge to figure out what you could do with an IMLAC

Could an IMLAC really visualize a 3D world?

So, Steve Colley started by

creating a program that could do

hidden line removal dynamically and visualize a cube rotating.

It was one of those things where you, you look at it, and you’re just sort of

bowled over at how cool it was.

So, the next thing was, what if you had multiple cubes and instead

Generated a perspective of being inside this rays of blocks or cubes

That essentially becomes a maze

The first thing that I remember seeing was an environment that you were in

and I, you know, was like, ‘Woah!’

So, we were able to create a visualization from first person

looking down a maze and it was kind of a maze game as far as

‘Well, can you find the exit?’

That then continued on as to,

‘What if we had two IMLACs and we had them talk to each other?’

When Greg Thompson came to MIT from Ames, he brought

a whole bunch of usable programs, but the one that he brought that was really the coolest

Was this thing that they called, ‘Maze, ’ and sometimes ‘Maze War.’

Dave wrote the program that, when you type to start up Maze,

it would download into your IMLAC the Maze game

and then acted as the communication hub

to exchange messages between all of the IMLACs at Project MAC that were playing the game.

When you moved, a little message went out to everybody,

and the updating part was handled in the mainframe program

because it had a vision of where each player was.

If he could see you, if you were in his view

it would draw a representation of yourself.

All we had there, really, was we could draw the person’s name.

That was good. Well what if we could turn it more into a game and shoot each other?

Now, you didn’t actually…You couldn’t really draw a gun but, from the first person perspective,

we would draw a representation of a bullet going down the hallway.

and so, if he is in the square that the bullet reached at that point in time,

it would declare that other player’s dead,

and the other player would get a message that you’re dead, and it would create a visualization

of explosions, essentially, on the screen

along with your name. Up to eight players, we would have

two numbers of hits and shots, so you could kind of track the score.

We had enough IMLACs, we could get some pretty good games going.

The researches are spending late nights inviting their friends to

get into Project MAC to play this game at late hours as opposed to doing the problem set

they were probably supposed to be doing in their dorm rooms.

People would come in from all over the lab which was, you know,

this large building with about five floors of it.

J.C.R Licklider himself, we’re seeing playing the game sometimes

and people would sit around and cheer

cheer their favorite players on.

It was kind of like eSports. I guess it’s kind of like eSports.

Very primitive eSports.

It would download into your IMLAC, the Maze Game,

and then acted as the communication hub.

That basically enabled it to be played over the Internet.

You could just come in, start up an instance of being a player in the game, and off you went

You could shoot, you could chase each other around,

you could have a lot of fun.

We pioneered online gaming.

It was shocking. It’s totally shocking.

The concept, first person shooter, didn’t exist.

It was one of those many things that was kind of retrofitted.

Maze itself appeared in late 1973.

Years went by, and the hardware for playing games

improved more and more and more, and

one of the first things that people wanted to write for anything that had graphics

was a version of Maze.

Once the PCs came out, billions and billions of knock offs

And, you know, you can trace the lineage to things like Doom.

I could see that it would catch on,

and I was happy to have happened in to be

one of the contributors in getting it started.

These days, people see, like, Fortnite, and they assume harbor rendering has always been.

No, we came from very, very humble beginnings,

beginnings of games like Battlezone in which it was just vector lines.

Battlezone was a brilliant application

It was so compelling to me, and

I just got totally hooked.

The first time you saw that, everything you needed to know about a first person shooter was already defined.

The first person shooter is the closest thing you can be to

being in an environment in reality

because first person means, by definition

That it’s from your sight, and that was Battlezone.

I remember, as a kid, you put your face through the gunner mechanism, and then you could turn

and then I felt like I was there. I felt like I was in, like, that tank.

It was so immersive. You’re brought into that world,

and it was so powerful, and I was thinking,

‘This is the way everything’s going to work in the future.’

Battlezone is a masterful game and, if you haven’t played it

On a vector arcade stand up arcade version, you’d need to.

Use the joysticks, play it like it was meant to be played,

because that experience is extraordinary.

I just played and played, and I got so good that I got to the point where

I would not lose.

There are things in Battlezone that Carmack and Romero had to learn

like being shot at from behind, being able to see the enemy

and the importance of a radar and auto radar.

Ed Rotberg figured them out for the very first time and mastered them, right?

I tried playing it recently, and I’m still pretty good.

I still have that feel for the game which is so weird

It’s been 30-something years.

It’s beautiful. It’s like a poem. It’s fantastic.

I can’t overstate its importance enough.

There’s games out there that basically prove something

That would otherwise be thought to be impossible.

It sort of set a bar in a number of different dimensions

that really forced me to rethink about what these immersive experiences would really mean.

You don’t think, ‘Oh, I could do that, ’ until you see somebody else do it.

So, I wanted to build a game, and I started out working on Apple II’s.

I was really obsessed. The Apple II had some games that were images,

and you can, like, click on something, you go to another image and, you get about 10-20 images,

you fill up a floppy. I thought,

‘There must be a way to create a world that’s more alive.’

I came to 3D as a compression technology

to generate the world and have a very, very, very tiny file that does it,

and I heard that Apple was going to be putting out a new computer.

On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.

I put money down on it. Soon after, the store gives me a call and says, ‘Your Mac is here.’

Every store only got one Mac.

So, they were giving me their demonstration computer

before they even opened it up. I thought that was really classy of them.

It was, to me, the future of computing,

and I saw what the game I was building as the future of gaming.

I invented at least half of mouselook, if you will.

You take the mouse, and you move left and right, you’d turn left and right.

Since I couldn’t look up and down, what I did is, move the mouse up, you’d go forward

and move the mouse down, you’d go backwards, and that proved to be a very, very smooth interface.

I learned something very interesting. As soon as I added

sound to the game, like running into a wall,

the perception of the speed of the game doubled.

There’s sort of a real close link between your auditory system and your visual system

And, when they match up, there’s certainly a heightened sense of realism

The Colony shipped on two discs: one was the game, and the full game.

The other was just the sounds.

Basically, I did all the sounds.

recording whatever, whatever I get my hands on. That was a lot of fun.

I had built the very, very first corridor.

I could see down, at the end of it, was this turn.

I was very, very surprised at how compelling it was.

You’re pulled into the world, and you can’t stop.

You can’t look away. It was quite something.

Colony had a number of different pieces. You start on the ship.

The ship was a safe place where you could actually learn the interfaces.

and, actually, it turned out the hardest puzzle in the game was figuring out how to get off the ship.

I put an airlock there, and I figured,

‘Everybody knows how an airlock works.’

Now, everybody goes in the airlock, opens the door,

they go on in, they open the second door, die.

So, what happens when you finally do get outside,

you’re in a Battlezone-like world.

It was Battlezone. I replaced the tanks with these creatures,

but it felt good.

This is a family colony that had been set up,

all the adults were killed, you’re in a world that’s very, very dangerous.

You go through the colony, and you build up the story.

‘What happened here?’ One room had a slideshow, even talks about all the different creatures.

The world had it feel continuous,

but every environment, every piece of it had to have a little bit of a difference to it.

You know, the top three levels were living quarters.

As you get deeper into the colony, these creatures that have taken over would attack.

There was like an infinite corridor, because it looped back to where you started.

And you could actually figure that out by dropping some things.

I’m sure people probably spent hours hoping to get to the other end.

I had no idea what a game like that

should be, no, nor did anyone else

There were a few things in there that were pure sadism.

One of the first things you see on the ship is a cigarette

but, if you pick up the cigarette, which you could do,

it says, ‘Cigarettes are hazardous to your health. You’ve died’

and you’re dead.

I was told by a number of people I had caused their divorce

because they kind of got a little too immersed in the game.

But, yeah, it was hard. But, on the other side,

there was a lot of…People had a lot of fun.

A favorite id game?

gosh

Uh

Um

This is gonna sound absurd.

The original games that I played of theirs were the side-scrollers

I went to Softdisk in March of 1989

and I immediately met Tom Hall.

I interviewed with IBM and Gould and lots of other companies

and I kind of thought about it and go,

‘No, this is boring. I want to make games.’

I wanted to start a gaming disk, Gamer’s Edge,

and I needed to have a team of people to help me with it.

So, I hired John Carmack.

When I was growing up, I really was the only one that was

into computers at the level that I was.