Marine Doom was never formally adopted as a training instrument, but paved the way for propaganda games such as the popular Unreal Engine shooter America’s Army. It also replaced the original’s demons with generic human aggressors. Made publicly available after Doom II ’s release, the mod sees a fireteam consisting of a leader, two riflemen and a machine-gunner tackling a range of real-life scenarios, including hostage rescue. In 1995, the US Army created its own Doom mod in a bid to cultivate such skills as ammunition discipline at a fraction of the expense of physical training, following budget cuts in the aftermath of the Cold War.

And nor should we neglect the games-before, during and after id’s breakthrough-that took many of the same concepts and techniques in different and equally valuable directions.įor better and worse, first-person shooters have long seen service as military training simulators. But we shouldn’t view that contribution too narrowly, as simply one step along the road to a game such as Call of Duty: World War II. Between them, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom brought a distinct tempo, savagery and bloodlust to first-person gaming, and programmer John Carmack’s engine technology would power many a landmark FPS in the decade following Doom’s release. The company’s later shooter, Quake, meanwhile, is often held up as the first ‘true’ 3D polygonal shooter.įounded in 1991 by former employees of software company Softdisk, id’s contributions to what we now call the FPS is undoubtedly immense. According to one popular version of the medium’s evolution, the first-person shooter was formally established in 1992 with id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D, a lean, thuggish exploration of a texture-mapped Nazi citadel, and popularised in 1993 by heavy metal odyssey Doom, which sold a then-ludicrous million copies worldwide at release. Events or people who contradict those accounts have a tendency to get written out of the tale. Writers of videogame histories often think in terms of individuals and periods-great innovators and clear-cut ‘epochs’ in design, typically bookended by technological advances.

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