It started as an experiment. Steve Colley had just figured out how to rotate a cube on the screen when Howard Palmer suggested they could make a three-dimensional maze.
The year was 1973. They were high school seniors in a work-study program with NASA, tasked with testing the limits of the Imlac PDS-1 and PDS-4 minicomputers. Their maze program flickered into life with simple wireframe graphics and few of the trappings of modern games. You could walk around in first person, looking for a way out of the maze, and that's about it. There were no objects or virtual people. Just a maze.
But Maze would evolve over the summer and the years that followed. Soon two people could occupy the maze together, connected over separate computers. Then they could shoot each other and even peek around corners. Before long, up to eight people could play in the same maze, blasting their friends across the ARPANET — a forebear to the internet. Two decades before id Software changed the game industry with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, Colley, Palmer and MIT students Greg Thompson and Dave Lebling invented the first-person shooter.
This is the story of Maze, the video game that lays claim to perhaps more "firsts" than any other — the first first-person shooter, the first multiplayer networked game, the first game with both overhead and first-person view modes, the first game with modding tools and more.
http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/21/8627231/the-first-first-person-shooter
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Saturday May 23 2015, @03:57AM
and send it to Byte, in around '80/82. I'd written a lot of assembly code for my TRS-80 that would display stuff onscreen and move it around. For better resolution it also supported my Epson Mx-80 with the graphics option. Had a language that, it turned out, was a lot like Megatek's Phig. Was just getting started on my article when BOOM! Byte magazine came out with the article I was planning to write. It was a good 3-5 years later I learned of Phig, I was at a graphics show and picked up a book, when I got home and read it I thought"hey! I had 75% of that in my old computer!".
Closest I ever came to trying to write an article for anything, and shows how, in the early days, a guy with no formal education nor google could figure stuff out and almost get famous.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Saturday May 23 2015, @06:41AM
Last year I read "The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers" which had a lot of interviews with game developers who had gotten into the business in the '80s. In one particular story that stood out, a man graduated from business school and went to work at a company that sold car accessories. The closest thing he had to experience with computers was having used a typewriter. One day he suggested to his boss "hey, what if we sold software too?" His boss basically says "OK, why don't YOU give it a shot?" So the guy spends a bunch of money on an 8-bit NEC microcomputer, disassembles an entire game by hand to see how it works, and then writes his own game in Z80 assembly language, all in a few months time. (The game was published but didn't sell many copies. He went on to write a series of books on programming.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by K_benzoate on Saturday May 23 2015, @04:05AM
I'm amazed to see Polygon [deepfreeze.it]--an outlet known for railing against the FPS genre as a hive of scum, villainy, and of course toxic masculinity--doing such a positive long-form piece about the origins of the first person shooter.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 2) by ticho on Saturday May 23 2015, @09:06AM
Perhaps they're more above the whole silly tempest in a teapot about "ethics in gaming journalism" than you are, and can appreciate a good piece about computer history for what it is.
I am kind of disappointed with comments here, though, most of them are off-topic, about controversial stuff. Looks like SN is sinking into the internet muck faster and faster.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday May 23 2015, @05:17PM
I totally agree. It's a sign of the upcoming Apocalypse, where Lennart Poettering and Obama will lead the forces of darkness in the final battle against Rand Paul and the Veteran Unix Administrators collective. This will happen very soon now. But afterwards, after the forces of light slay SystemD in battle, Init will descend from heaven to rule Earth for 1000 years in a glorious reign of Linux and ponies.
So SoylentNews should get better if you just wait a while.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @04:07AM
The first person-shooter is a terrorist trainer! Round up all the players and throw their asses in jail!
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by rts008 on Saturday May 23 2015, @05:39AM
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Pro tip: there were terrorists long before there were hippies.(and I wonder what your definition of 'hippies' is...if they are not at least 60 years old, you have not met a real hippie)
In the USA, the 'Founding Fathers' were the original terrorists, unless you want to ask the Native Americans.
As usual for your type, your bigotry is exceeded only by your ignorance.
Ideology(with religion in the majority of causes) coupled with limited resources, can be more accurately blamed for terrorism.
Hippies! I'll bet that you wouldn't know a hippy if the original cast of 'Hair' walked up and offered you a 'Peace, man", a flower necklace, a few hits of Orange Sunshine, a joint or two,warm wine in a bota-bag, and some free love.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @06:06AM
Future generations became prudish, cranky, and belligerent due to lack of sex. War, man, is good for something. It's good for getting revenge on the world for incurable STDs! Can't fuck 'em? Kill 'em all! Who "they" are doesn't even matter. You can call them terrorists, you can call them freedom fighters, you can call them radical extremists, you can call them unpatriotic pacifists. It doesn't matter, as long as "we" believe "they" are getting laid more than "we" are, "they" gotta die.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Saturday May 23 2015, @07:59AM
The problem with hitching the cart before the horse(or three-legged mule in your case), is it has been historically, scientifically, and common-sensically far more inefficient to reach your goal. You are going about it completely backwards.
Prudish, cranky, and belligerent caused their lack of sex. Chill out, open up your minds, drop the angst, and war-glory ideals, and you will find yourselves engaged with more sex than you can handle. Your heirs will not be able to pay the undertaker enough to wipe that smile from your corpse when you die of sexual intercourse overdose.
Silly AC, looking to fight a war, thriving on hate and conflict, drowning in FUD...well, as we used to say, 'Keep on Truckin', and I'll keep on fuckin'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @09:13AM
Dude! You're totally missing the point because you're on too many drugs. Fear of death by sexually-transmitted-incurable-disease caused their lack of sex. STIDs are much worse than STDs, man! Back the days of Free Love you got a shot of penicillin and kept on fuckin'. Penicillin doesn't do jack against AIDS, man.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday May 23 2015, @06:33AM
Children of Hippies? I think you are missing an entire generation. Children of Reagan were the first terrorists!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Saturday May 23 2015, @01:56PM
The Imlac PDS-1 [wikipedia.org] is a 16-bit computer with 8-16 kB of "memory" and the instruction execution rate seems to be at something like 500 000 instructions/second. So the code to run this would likely be compact. But can it be found anywhere?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @04:36PM
Archive link for those of us boycotting corrupt game sites:
https://archive.is/yVvEO [archive.is]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @09:54AM
Need I remind you that both Exorex and Dactly Nightmare were 3D first person shooting VR Games that existed before Doom?
Yes, I think I do.
And for that matter, Starglider and Starglider 2 were both First Person Shooters, the former wire-frame and the latter fully 3D (flat shaded) created years before ID Software's faux 3D (2.5D) Hovertank, Catacombs 3D, Wolf3D, and Doom.
ID didn't popularize the FPS. It was just in the right place at the right time.