Electronic Shooter Game

electronic shooter game, electronic game genre in which players control a character or unit that wields weapons to shoot enemies. While shooting games involving “light guns” and photoreceptors were experimented with as early as the 1930s, the birth of this genre of electronic games really began in 1962 with Spacewar!, a software program developed to show off the power of the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 minicomputer. The game included stellar objects that generated gravitation fields, which two players had to take into account as they maneuvered their spacecraft while shooting at each other and various asteroids. American computer programmers Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney simplified the game to one person shooting alien spaceships, and this version was published by Nutting Associates as Computer Space (1971), the first mass-produced coin-operated electronic game, or arcade game. Bushnell and Dabney later founded Atari Inc., from which they released the first commercially successful arcade game, Pong (1972), an electronic sports game based on table tennis (Ping-Pong).

Although Computer Space had too steep a learning curve to prove a commercial success, the same cannot be said of Space Invaders (1978). An arcade console produced by Taito Corporation in Japan and licensed to Bally Technologies in the United States, Space Invaders was an enormous hit—so much so that Japan experienced a temporary shortage of 100-yen coins, which were used there to play the game. In 1980 Space Invaders became the first arcade game to be licensed for a home gaming console, the Atari 2600. Atari also released Asteroids (1979) and Missile Command (1980) as arcade games before they made their way to home console machines and personal computers (PCs).

Doom

Quake

While early shooters generally had limited player mobility, typically involving nothing more than allowing the player to move a weapon horizontally or vertically along the edges of the screen, increased computer power enabled the development of games played from a first-person perspective. Although Wolfenstein 3-D (1992), produced by id Software for PCs, was not the original first-person shooter (FPS) game, it set the standard for the subgenre. id Software followed up with Doom (1993), the first FPS game with multiplayer support. Other popular FPS games released in the 1990s include Duke Nukem 3D (1996), Quake (1996), Half-Life (1998), and Unreal Tournament (1999). This subgenre in particular has driven the development of the PC market, with players often rushing to upgrade or replace their PCs in order to handle ever more realistic game engines.

In 2001 the Microsoft Corporation released its Xbox video console, which included the FPS game Halo as a launch title. Halo 2 (2004) featured multiplayer support through Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online subscription gaming network. The Halo franchise accounted for much of the success of the Xbox, Xbox 360 console (2005), and Xbox Live.

Although multiplayer combat remains as popular as ever, as evidenced by the success of such games as Valve’s Team Fortress 2 (2007) and Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010), the market for pure single-player FPS games has declined in favour of games that blend elements from other genres. Successful variations on the FPS include the electronic adventure games Half-Life, Half-Life 2 (2004), and BioShock, which incorporate horror or survival elements, as well as more complex story lines. Valve was also responsible for Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011), a pair of first-person puzzle games that feature a darkly comic plot and wildly innovative game play.