To visit the forums, please click this link.
By Michael Lowell
April 20, 2011
So, You’ve Decided to Start a Forum
Back in Februrary, I created this page. That’s the web site comment discussion thread. There was demand for discussion outside of the topics being discussed on the site. However, I used it to gauge demand for a message board. There’s enough demand for a message board. It’s time for go time.
The addition of a message board is going to take some time. Logistics and specifics need to be addressed. The most important issue is my budget for the message board. It stands at zero dollars. The chief goal of the forum will be to accomodate demand for topics that have not been discussed in articles. That will include general news, books, and games related to the medium. To do this without creating a divide between the articles and the message board, I plan to integrate the comment feeds. That is, comments posted in the article will be mirrored in a discussion thread on the forum and vice versa. I need to see how to do that. Both WordPress and the various open-source bulletin board programs have a number of options, so I hope it is easier than it looks. I’m doing this to help foster ancillary discussion while making sure one-time visitors (i.e. “lol I read the first paragraph this site sucks bye”) can leave their feedback. I don’t want feedback on this web site to favor a particular point of view. Sure, I have a strong opinion and that opinion generates a specific audience. But I want guests to feel comfortable posting. I don’t want to burden them with the creation of a new account. I don’t want to put them in a position where they fear the ban hammer. I don’t want the web site to gravitate towards an unquestioned groupthink atmosphere. I want this web site to be easy to learn and difficult to master. Like Angry Birds, y’all. That game was whack.
What else is there to say? Let’s go ahead and lay out the ground rules right now. I’ll allow you to be shocked or saddened with any point of contention in advance. If you have any issues with the ground rules, feel free to front them in this thread. I’ll add more ground rules as I can think of them and as they are suggested. Feedback is always wonderful.
Potential Forum Rules™
Behavior and Moderation: I don’t care if somebody wishes death on me. I’m used to it. I’d rather you didn’t subject your peers to nasty comments. With that in mind, it’s the internet. I’m not going to play politics and get involved in games where posters are upset that somebody said something mean about them. Unless somebody said or posted something that’s demonstrably harmful, I’m going to do my best to stay out of it. I really don’t care for drama on the internet. Most of the message boards I have posted on for the last eight years are very lax about moderation. I plan to emulate that. Banning people breeds groupthink. Particularly since my point of view dictates the supremacy of the computer gaming master race, I would rather not breed a reputation as insular. I would like to be as far from that as possible. However, the lack of moderation is not a license to make shitty posts. If something strikes me as a shitty post, I’m going to call it a shitty post. Off-Topic forums will be created as necessary. Unless it’s a series of extreme incidents, I only plan to ban people for spam. That’s it. Banning people from internet message boards is a rather pointless endeavor. I would know this from my experience of posting on the Battle.net forums. If moderators are necessary, I will create positions in the face of demand. For the time being, I will be king. Although, I’ll certainly be fair about it. You can have your cake. Don’t worry.
Content: Let’s go ahead and put it this way: If it’s an image or text that’s not considered suitable for work, it’s probably going to get wiped. I’m doing that to keep this forum a family-friendly place to wish death upon the makers of a video game console. If it’s a link with questionable content, label it as such. That’s all. If it’s a spoiler, you can label it as a spoiler. (That said, if a game is out for two-plus weeks, I’m not going to honor an audience from any upset posters that claim the game was ruined for him or her.) The internet is a dangerous place, so let’s band together to make it wonderful!
Video Game Software Piracy: The point of view shared by numerous people on this site (myself included) is that the video game industry needs to grow the fuck up and stop blaming their woes on eleven-year-old Eastern Europeans who do not have the disposable income to buy video games. So obviously, there’s going to be a discussion of video game software piracy. I’ll go ahead and make this simple: What, When, and Why are acceptable discussion topics. That’s okay with me. Where and some variations of How are not. (I haven’t decided on what those variations are.) Somebody will probably say something like “But you allow YouTube videos, and I’m sure there’s copyrighted material in those!” That’s YouTube’s call to determine what is acceptable and what is not. They’re the intermediary. With illegitimite video game downloads, I become the intermediary. I have no interest in that. If you found this web site, a web site tucked all the way in the corner of the internet, you can probably navigate your way to successfully downloading “backups”. Keep the details to yourself. However, I will make an exception for any link that is news-worthy and necessary as part of discussion on the topic. I.e. a console gets cracked and the internet is making a big deal out of the web site where the announcement was made. I’ll elaborate on this as I get some feedback.
Web Site Organization: I’m planning to go with the SomethingAwful model: Discussion of topics will be organized by either the game or the franchise. There will also be discussion boards for general industry news, video-game-related books, and other reading material. I will try to create a list of recommended reading material (featuring their own discussion threads) while I am at it. People can create a post for any game they would like. I’ll set up a template for naming conventions to help assist posters. That way, four threads about Starcraft II don’t make it onto the first page, with each poster claiming “I didn’t know there was already a discussion thread!” In a way, these posts will act as a hub for content on the web site. If somebody creates a thread about a game, I’ll go ahead and add links to various related web site content to the original post. If somebody makes a post about Uncharted 3, I will add a link to and synopsis of my review when it is complete. In a way, I’m looking to create a bit of a collaborative project. I feel that you’re capable of it. <3 I’m not going to be the slave driver here and I’m not going to ban people for misusing semicolons. I’d simply like to create some structure for the message board. Treating each thread with some respect will make that easier.
If you have feedback, throw it my way. Let’s draw a blueprint and get this show on the road.
Updated on April 22, 2010: The plans for comment integration are proving to be much, much more difficult than I originally intended. It severely limits my options for forum functionality and puts me at the risk of having somebody decide “I’m done supporting this plugin” and destroying the entire fabric of the website. I decided this when I spent thirty minutes with SimplePress and discovered my ability to delete posts was bugged. So much for that.
To comment on this article as a guest or registered member, please visit the forums.
By Michael Lowell
April 15, 2011
The History of Why I’m Tired of Your Tactical Shooters
Introduction and Part One: Advent and Imitation
Part Two: Serious Realism
Part Three: Xboxification
Part Four: Corporate Warfare and Conclusion
Epilogue: Controller of the Future
Part Two: Serious Realism
So, we’re stuck in the late nineties. We’re hearing all of this chatter about “evolution” and “breaking out” and “innovation”. It’s not surprising that when we firmly plant our feet in 1998, we find what is perhaps the greatest year in the history of the video game business. I bid you luck in trying to comprehend how consumers toyed with their money on November 30th, when StarCraft: Brood War, Starsiege: Tribes, Thief: The Dark Project, and Baldur’s Gate were all released on the same day. Of course, that assumes consumers weren’t fully absorbed in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which was released nine days prior. But if you didn’t own a Nintendo 64, you were likely too busy with another game that went to market on November 19th. At the time, nobody thought much of it. Then people played it. Video games changed forever. The game was Half-Life.
Describing the achievements of Half-Life to newer audiences is kind of like explaining to Family Guy fans how The Simpsons revolutionized cartoons by airing a dysfunctional family, pop-culture name-drops, and nonsensical sight gags in a prime time network slot. On first glance, Half-Life looks quite ordinary. It features ordinary shooting with ordinary gunplay and ordinary weapons. Don’t get me wrong, the enemy design was fantastic. The artificial intelligence was also fantastic for its time. However, Half-Life was never a difficult game and never bothered to try and be one. It was rather contrary to the shooters of the time. So why do we discuss this landmark title in awestruck tones? All goes back to what we discussed earlier: When you remove a game mechanic or de-emphasize a skill required to master a game or genre, you add something back. Half-Life forfeitted a punishing difficulty level and eliminated superhuman feats of strength, limiting its platforming elements to what an ordinary scientist like Gordon Freeman could accomplish. In its place, Half-Life told a story. Yeah, shooters have been telling stories since their inception. Wolfenstein 3-D had a pretty good one: Hitler is an asshole, shoot him. It was the way that Half-Life told its story.
Half-Life did things that had never been done before. The game used clever level design tricks (dressing the end of one level with the same architecture as the beginning of another and then conjoining them) to present the illusion of a gigantic government science facility that was only separated by short loading times. Yeah, the levels in 1996′s Strife were connected through an overworld and Doom level creators were managing very similar concepts. Half-Life did it on a scope that nobody had ever matched before, a scope firmly established by Half-Life’s now-famous opening introduction.* It’s pretty simple: Valve did “gigantic hub world” better. Up next, the company took a genre that was obsessed with the power of the individual and instead focused on his or her vulnerability. Previous shooters put you by your lonesome and told you to kick some ass; Half-Life told you to go out and simply survive. Everything was out to kill you: Aliens from another dimension, military special ops forces, radioactive waste, shoddy building engineering. To make it out alive, the player had to maneuver through narrow ventilation shafts (a practice that spawned nightmares for millions of players who didn’t see that Headcrab in the dark) and perform tight-rope platforming acts across decaying structures.
Games like Doom and Quake moved ridiculously fast, making their game worlds feel rather small. Half-Life encouraged you to think about every step, making the Black Mesa Research Facility seem outright gigantic. In the genre that had always emphasized the untouchable power of the individual, Half-Life was at least as much survival-horror as Resident Evil 5. (You can make your own opinion of what the Resident Evil 5 comparison is worth.) Half-Life then bridged these elements with a storyline driven by the rumors and hearsay of fellow terrified survivors, a series of plot devices and storytelling mechanics presented in real-time and without interruption from cutscenes. And by presenting weapons and items to players at logical points in the game (where you get access to machine guns by killing military personnel, secure additional ammunition by destroying supply crates, and regain your health with conveniently-located wall units scattered throughout the facility), there was no chance of “weird item placement” reminding the player that, you know, he was playing a video game. Half-Life did it all, and it all worked.
How does that sell shooters to console gamers, anyway? Well, are we forgetting what the biggest game of 1997 was? It was Final Fantasy VII, a three-disc epic that was built, presented, and sold to consumers as though it was a major motion picture. Years after the Japanese Role-Playing Game established itself on sixteen-bit consoles as a preferred means for video game storytelling, the genre broke out in the West with assistance from “production values”. Little did the industry know that even as Final Fantasy was firmly establishing itself as the most popular ticket on the Sony PlayStation, Half-Life was the beginning of the end for the JRPG in the West. It would convince Western gamers that the “body count” genres (and their superior combat systems) were every bit as capable of compelling narrative. Western developers would quickly realize this and respond with mainstay franchises like Grand Theft Auto, God of War, and Assassin’s Creed
But Half-Life came at a significant cost to the first-person shooter genre. When the iD Software team was working on Doom, Romero and Carmack noted that the level design of co-worker Sandy Petersen was hideous. But the boys didn’t give a crap. It played well. On contrast, Tom Hall’s realistic military design was outright rejected by Carmack and Romero. (Hall was torn by the event and it would go a long way towards his departure from iD Software.)* Carmack and Romero understood that “Does the level play well?” was the first question to ask. Half-Life marked the beginning of a shooter market where narrative drove mission structure. In order for this to happen, warehouses needed to look like warehouses and urban environments needed to look like urban environments. In creating that compelling narrative, abstract level design began to fade out of existence. And thus, developers lost a valuable tool in the creation of good level design.
That’s not to say that “realistic level design” is a hopeless endeavor. Even as Half-Life rewrote the rules, its level design was fantastic, presenting the player with not-so-obvious progression points and teasing the player at every turn. You know, those “Dammit, the exit is behind that cage. How do I get back there?” moments. For the rest of the video game industry, “narrative-driven single player” became a mixed bag. Back in 1996, Descent II was the embodiment of the arcade-style first-person shooter, emphasizing high scores and bizarrely-designed levels with even more conviction than its predecessor. It didn’t try to focus on its paper-thin plot. Come 1999, Descent 3 attempted to make sense of that plot, exchanging colored key cards for a ridiculous storyline and a plot twist that even a six-year-old could have seen coming. That game still played well because Descent enemy and weapon design was still quite varied and plenty capable of making up for sloppy level design. But “WE NEEDS STORYLINEZ!!1″ even caught up with the guys at iD Software, as 2004′s Doom 3 was envisioned itself as a slower, narrative-driven retelling of the events in the 1993 original. And even as Doom 3 sold millions, its boring level design (most memorable for its jump scares, a practice that even Resident Evil had begun to abandon) and de-emphasis on large-scale carnage yielded perhaps the most disappointing computer game of the last decade. As time passed, “good level design” would almost exclusively become the domain of multiplayer shooters, where arenas still needed to entertain the most talented players. Today, single-player level design has become so fruitless that even when 2011′s Bulletstorm advertised itself as a departure from military-themed shooters, the game’s level design turned out to be no more advanced than 1984′s gallery shooter Hogan’s Alley. (That’s not to say Bulletstorm was bad. I enjoyed it. But the level design was crap. True story.)
So console developers got their blueprint for narrative. All they had to do was find that special shooter subgenre that could work well with a controller. Let’s head back in time five months before the release of Half-Life. A company by the name of Red Storm Entertainment was cutting checks as the developer of video games based on the Tom Clancy series of novels, a tale of sabotage and espionage that will never end because Tom Clancy is a dimensional vortex where the free market prevails. Red Storm decided to try their hand at the first-person shooter with a game based on the upcoming Tom Clancy book Rainbow Six. And, for lack of a better name, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six was born. What Half-Life would do for narrative, Rainbow Six would accomplish for shooting mechanics.
Rainbow Six belied a cardinal rule of game design: It’s always more important to create a game that’s fun than it is to create a game that’s realistic. But it turned out that realistic games could be fun, too! Realism, bitches! Rainbow Six would be all ’bout realism. The game was built around a number of special ops scenarios. The player’s goal? Direct and manage numerous squads (i.e. more than one squad) of good guys. This made the planning phase just as important as the execution. The hallmarks of the modern tactical shooter were in full force: Players would have to line up their shot (or suffer a loss of accuracy) while carefully navigating rooms and covering every angle with a level of patience. They would have to choose their weapons before the fight began. But most importantly, Red Storm Entertainment made a subtle design decision: They acknowledged that bullets hurt like hell. One good shot from a pistol (a weapon long portrayed in the genre as a popsicle stick in a sword fight) was all you needed to take down a target. Goodbye, rocket launcher. Goodbye, railgun. Goodbye, one-man armies. Rainbow Six forced players to cooperate and employ semi-realistic urban warfare tactics to get the one-up on opposing forces. Teamwork, bitches. All ’bout teamwork. Along with 1998′s Delta Force, the tactical shooting genre would pretty much inspire the state of modern shooters as we know them. Keyword: Inspire. Rainbow Six was too slow and too patient for a wide audience. The “simulation style” of tactical shooter has become a niche product, the torch best carried by the United States Military’s own tactical shooter America’s Army. Rainbow Six fans haven’t even been able to coax Ubisoft into developing a spiritual successor to the 1998 classic. The company is apparently more interested in using Tom Clancy video games to recreate the “Exciting Arcade Action!™” present in Halo and Call of Duty. So Rainbow Six, “some game”, modern tactical shooter. What game was the intermediary that would inspire the combat in console shooters?
Well, there’s a much greater range of options than I’ve been letting on to. Doom didn’t simply take the first-person shooter concept into the mainstream. It didn’t merely popularize the concept of multiplayer deathmatches. It also legitimized the concept of custom content creation. Doom level creation wasn’t simply limited to different shades of map design. Entire overhauls of the graphics, monsters, and weapons became stunningly commonplace. Wanted to play Aliens? Somebody had you set. Wanted to shoot Barney the Dinosaur in the face? You were covered. That’s not to say every mod was a ripoff of somebody else’s intellectual property; totally original and spectacular campaigns such as Memento Mori and Osiris got in on the “custom graphics” fun as well. Come 2000, content creation had become such an important part of the purchasing process that consumers developed the expectation of easy-to-manipulate game files. In the eyes of many people, they weren’t buying a video game, they were buying a game engine. Thanks to the client-server online gaming model, players could host their custom multiplayer content independently of a company-run centralized server. All the playing audience required was a legitimate product key. Valve would profit in droves from the philosophy. They embraced “This map is fun. Let’s give him a job!” better than any other company on the market. Amongst others, the amateur creators of 1996′s Quake mod Team Fortress found employment with Valve. The Team Fortress creators would whip up a commercial version of the game in 1999, and its success would ultimately yield a million-selling sequel in 2007. It was a wonderful work environment for talented amateur developers. It’s not much of a surprise that another Half-Life mod would light computer video games on fire.
Let’s go ahead and put it this way: If Rainbow Six was John Madden Football, with its intricate plays, strategic element, and incredible detail for the game of football, then 2000′s Counter-Strike was NFL Blitz, with first down and ten headshots to go. Team deathmatches had been around for years. Team Fortress and Starsiege: Tribes built an entire legacy around the idea, but nobody did team deathmatch quite like Counter-Strike. The Half-Life mod had a different way of going about winning and losing. It was a simple concept: Democrats vs. Republicans. That is, terrorists vs. counter-terrorists. The goal? Depends on the mission. The most popular game type is known as “Bomb Defusal”, so popular with its player base (and the competitive scene) that we might as well discuss the game type as though it’s the only game mode. In that mode, the objective is to win as many rounds as possible. There’s three ways to win a round: Wipe the other team out, successfully plant a bomb as part of the terrorist team, or successfully defuse that bomb as a member of the counter-terrorists. Unlike most games in the genre, death acted as a penalty box. When the round ended, you went back into the field of play. But like Rainbow Six, it was atypical of most shooters in that you would purchase your armaments on a round-by-round basis. In a multiplayer shooter, this added a particularly interesting element of strategy, allowing the player to customize his playstyle in order to better suit the situation.
When 1991′s Street Fighter revolutionized competitive video games, it attracted an audience dissimilar to video gaming’s nerd stereotype. Nerds still got their kicks, sure. But it was definitely a game that the jocks could channel their roid rage into. What Street Fighter did for competitive versus play, Counter-Strike would do for competitive team-based multiplayer. At the time of its public release, Counter-Strike was merely hugely anticipated and hugely popular. It’s not hard to see why. Sure, previous shooters had all kinds of “party game” appeal to them, but they typically involved friends getting together and beating the crap out of each other. Counter-Strike was different. In this game, that social aspect was critical for accomplishing victory. Players would have to run plays and alert their teammates to incoming danger. You had offense, you had defense, you had short-and-long-term strategy, and players had to work as a team in order to execute. And if you got to experience the thrill of victory, you got to experience that thrill with your teammates; your friends. Guess what? Counter-Strike was virtual sports. The game allowed the people who grew up playing team sports to continue getting the rush. That had a demographic appeal that previous shooters didn’t have. Sure, Counter-Strike players get mad at each other and stab and beat their adversaries, but at least they aren’t nerds, right?***
Most elite-caliber Counter-Strike players are the kinds of guys who once excelled in youth sports but washed out at higher levels of competition. Counter-Strike is for athletes too old for the JV team and not good enough to make varsity. So they get their competitive fix where they can, in e-sports.
Tr1p was too small for hockey, Warden too stocky for soccer. Punkville had a knee injury in football. Moto and Rambo both excelled in roller hockey, and ShaGuar was a skilled Little League pitcher who ruined his elbow throwing curveballs at too young an age. Now Counter-Strike is their substitute.
Michael Kane’s Game Boys, Pages 45-46*
Shortly after the public release of Counter-Strike, then-thirty-year-old pizza parlor owner Frank Nuccio got his buddies together for a night of Counter-Strike. Unlike most of the people associated with the practice of all-night video gaming, Nuccio had played sports when he was a child. He immediately realized it: Counter-Strike was the digital equivalent of sports. He figured that this game could be a hell of a lot of fun. All somebody would have to do is codify a set of established rules for the new sport. Nuccio did exactly that. He took his knowledge of professional sports and developed the ground rules for Counter-Strike. Hockey has five offensive players on the ice at any given time. Therefore, Counter-Strike will take place between teams of five. An originally-popular seven-versus-seven format for competitive Counter-Strike ultimately proved too crowded and faded. Five was enough players to emphasize teamwork while giving star players room to shine. Nuccio attached his model to a league called Domain of Games and divided his sixteen-team league into two conferences, using the “two points for wins, one point for tie” system used by the National Hockey League at the time. It worked. Nuccio was lauded as a genius by gamers, most of whom didn’t understand that he had simply copied professional hockey. By the next year, Domain of Games was absorbed by the Cyberathlete Professional League and renamed the Cyberathlete Amateur League. By 2004, the CAL had 200,000 Counter-Strike players under registration. Yes, 200,000 people signed up to play in a league format. To this day, Counter-Strike is the most internationally-popular competitive video game in the history of the medium, finding a level of worldwide success not even professional StarCraft could match.*
To make all of that happen, Counter-Strike did a couple of things that team shooters hadn’t bothered to do. For years and years, deathmatch had become increasingly complicated. Counter-Strike simplified offense. The game isolated its weapons into classes, forcing the player to select a primary weapon (a shotgun, rifle, or machine gun) and a pistol to go with grenades and a knife. Proper use of those weapons in the correct situations was a must, but Counter-Strike was a stern rebuttal of the days of juggling four and five weapons, a skill critical to mastering Quake or Unreal Tournament. In conjunction with a paper-thin health tally, the player was forced to use both cover and his teammates to get good shots at the opponent. Counter-Strike derived its depth from two simple concepts: Offense would become “shoot the guy in the head”; defense to “don’t stick your head out from behind that wall”. The dodges and double-jumps that had come to define the genre were predictably absent. In the deathmatch shooter days, making opponents miss was just as critical a skill as proper aim. What did this mean for Counter-Strike? It meant that one man couldn’t dominate a match at its highest levels of play. Counter-Strike simply wasn’t designed for it. If one player walked into a gunfight with two opponents, it usually meant picking off one man before the other tagged him. In order to win the game, players would have to rely on their teammates and coordinate their actions efficiently. In order to establish a different skill set, Counter-Strike was ultimately a simpler game (i.e. containing fewer game rules) than the shooters that had preceded it.
In other words, console gaming devtopia found their model.
Continue to Part Three: Xboxification
To comment on this article as a guest or registered member, please visit the forums. Otherwise, return to the main page.
To comment on this article as a guest or registered member, please visit the forums.
By Michael Lowell
April 10, 2011
The History of Why I’m Tired of Your Tactical Shooters
Introduction and Part One: Advent and Imitation
Part Two: Serious Realism
Part Three: Xboxification
Part Four: Corporate Warfare and Conclusion
Epilogue: Controller of the Future
Note A: Due to the nature of old programming code and its compatibility with modern computers, some of the pictures in this article have been pulled from emulated sources. Don’t get your panties knotted if things aren’t pixel-perfect.
Note B: For the purposes of this article, the tactical shooter refers to any game that requires or emphasizes tactics and teamwork as the primary means of achieving victory. So yes, that puts Halo and simulation tactical shooters in the same bucket. That’s how these games play at their highest level. That YouTube video where some guy runs off twenty-five kills in a row with a knife does not change that. If you have a better suggestion for a name, I’m open to hearing it.
Note C: Was mistaken on the lack of a true “mouselook” function for GoldenEye 007. Jesus, that option is dug all the way down there somewhere. Thanks goes to Tupseh for proving me wrong.
Note D: Paragraph formatting in this article has been improved for readability.
—
Introduction
So, you may like Call of Duty. You may like Halo. You may like Gears of War. I’m bored, brother. I’m bored of those games. You hear me, Video Game Overlords™? I’m sick and tired of your tactical shooters. They need to go the fuck away.
Coming this November, it will be the tenth anniversary of Halo: Combat Evolved. And if you’re speaking to a gamer under the age of nineteen, you’re better off pretending that Bungie invented the first-person shooter. Trust me, it’s not worth the shouting match. I’ve been there. The people who grew up playing Doom and Quake and Descent and Unreal Tournament still don’t know what the fuck to do. They’re close to sharing beds with the same men and women who grew up on the Golden Age of Arcade Games, shouting into a desolate echo chamber that “The games were pretty good back in the day! We swear!” The video game industry is no longer interested in developing shooters for the mouse and keyboard, because of “software piracy” and “entitled gamers” and a whole carnival of bullshit talking points. Computer gamers haven’t accepted that. They haven’t accepted that Infinity Ward and Epic Games dumped them for a mature community of twelve-year-old racists and their parents’ credit cards. To comfort themselves, computer gamers have taken up the discipline of defiance. They accept that development has successfully assimilated to consoles, but if they hear “competitive” and “Halo” in the same paragraph, somebody dun gonna get flamed. It sounds like this: “I don’t care about your crappy console shooters. Quit telling me they’re any good. They’re not. And if you disagree, get your controller and prove me wrong. I’ll be playing with my mouse and keyboard. Then we’ll see whose opinion is more skilled at video games!”
It’s not healthy stuff, gentlemen. Computer gamers are too angry and too busy bitching about the games to explain their beef; to explain their feelings; to explain what they really mean by “FUCK CALL OF DUTY!!1″ To my knowledge, nobody has attempted to articulate how the first-person shooter underwent a simultaneous explosion in popularity as it collapsed upon itself creatively. Nobody has explained what makes Doom more progressive than ninety percent of the shooters in today’s market. Nobody has explained how GoldenEye 007 side-stepped its roots in order to win console gamers. Nobody has explained why computer gamers have an issue with the controller as the popular input device for the genre. Somebody needs to discuss how we got from “Doom clones” to “Half-Life, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3: Arena, and Thief: The Dark Project all released in a span of nineteen months” to “thirty-one flavors of urban warfare”, and why it annoys the piss out of long-time gamers. This is going to be a very long story. It’s going to span nearly twenty years of video game history. So I’ll front the disclaimer: If you are a product of that glorious American system of education (that is, “LOL FIVE-HUNDRED WORD’S IM NOT READIGN THAT!!1″), I fully endorse that you close your browser, plant magnets on the top of your hard drive, and burn down your house so the internet may never grow there again. Video games are serious fucking business and I fully intend to prove it. Let’s talk shooters.
—
Part One: Advent and Imitation
Let’s kick off this war with some background music: During the very early nineties, little-known Texas game developer iD Software carved out a development niche. While working at Louisiana software developer Softdisk, game programmer John Carmack discovered a programming nuance that allowed him to create scrolling worlds without taxing the hardware in a personal computer. Yes, it’s true: Computers couldn’t do side-scrollers before Carmack discovered the magic words. Long story short, that discovery led fellow co-worker John Romero (along with co-workers Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall) to develop a pixel-perfect port of Super Mario Brothers 3. The troupe attempted to license the game to Nintendo and the company rejected the project, stunningly stating they were not interested in creating games for the personal computer “at this time”. Dismayed but determined, Romero and company transformed their side-scrolling secret into the Commander Keen franchise. The setting and motif were ridiculous, the story of an eight-year-old boy wonder building a spaceship out of junk and fighting aliens on distant planets. But that game didn’t reflect the crass behavior of Romero and company. Sure, Keen was silly stuff. But much like Super Mario Brothers 3, Keen was designed to embrace a demographic. It was designed to suck in children. iD Software’s second franchise would be much different. It would be in the business of offending the market.*
The finished product was titled Wolfenstein 3-D, and its 1992 release gave birth to the modern first-person shooter. (Yes, “first-person shooters” existed before Wolfenstein, but they didn’t offer the option of mowing down Adolf Hitler with a chaingun. As far as we’re concerned, they never happened.) The game was a blueprint for the future of consumer tastes: The shoot-first, shoot-again Wolfenstein 3-D shared its namesake with a series of slower-paced, stealth-oriented titles created by developer Muse.* Wolfenstein 3-D was what it was: Get guns, waste Nazis, find secret rooms, get a high score. There wasn’t much to it, and the technical issues were evident. Why is every room the same height? Why is every room on the same floor? Why does every room feature the same lighting? Of course, none of this stopped Wolfenstein 3-D from becoming a colossal hit. Nothing like Wolfenstein had ever been created before. And yet, it would never be heard from again. If you’re questioning iD Software’s legendary status, I’ll pose the question: Not many companies can say they “changed video games forever”. How many can claim they did it with two games in a row?
If Wolfenstein 3-D was George Mikan, the hulking prelude to the beauty of modern basketball, then 1993′s Doom was Wilt Chamberlain, a force so far ahead of its time that the competition spent half a decade struggling to catch up. Doom would only be convincingly outdone by iD Software’s own release of Quake in 1996. Unprecedented graphics, sound, and technology packaged into the incredible achievement of chugging smoothly on a 386 computer processor. Eighteen years later, Doom is derided as “old-school”. People cling to their zombie modes while slamming Doom for its primitive artificial intelligence. They defend scripted single-player campaigns and convince themselves red keys and blue keys are somehow worse. Doom is still one of the greatest video games ever made. And thanks to the passionate fans who rewrote the game engine (with an assist to iD Software’s release of the source code), it remains one of the most playable, forward-thinking shooters in the genre.
Why is that? If your brain is still tangled in the concept of colored key cards, you are missing the fucking point. “Secret areas doesn’t count as ‘non-linear’, stupid!” Nope, still wrong. It’s “level design”. All level design, baby. The variables (building layout, items, enemies, triggers) can be customized to create an incredible amount of diversity, a diversity fully reflected in the single-player modes of both Doom and the 1994 sequel. Fans wanted in on the fun. Almost immediately after the release of Doom, players began creating tools to modify the game files. Level editing went mainstream. These level editors (DEU*, DCK*, and later Doom Builder* and DeePsea*) are arguably the most powerful creation tools in the history of the genre. No, don’t confuse what I’m saying. I’m not arguing that those editors can create more robust levels than what you would see in Half-Life or Unreal Tournament. I’m arguing that it requires the least effort. (I’m sure someone wants to rebut that statement with the Forge editor in Halo: Reach. It’s closer to a sandbox than a level designer.) People make a ruckus over the concept of “easy to learn, hard to master”. That almost never applies to first-person shooter level design programs. Even for dedicated fans, these editing tools are usually nightmares. Doom level creation was as accessible as it gets.
Remember, the Doom game engine was an extension of the Wolfenstein 3-D engine. The major addition was the illusion of height. The levels weren’t actually three-dimensional. Doom’s engine was simply reading a two-dimensional level layout and rendering it into three dimensions. Remember your drafting class? Yup, that’s Doom level design. It meant that players didn’t have to master programming languages to create a Doom level. John Carmack did all the programming when he coded the game engine. Level creators got to focus their creative energies on building worlds that were fun to shoot at. The variables and triggers were robust: Players could alter monsters to ignore sounds and create rooms that drowned out noise (so monsters couldn’t hear the firefight in the adjacent room). Rooms could be edited to block monster pathing (while permitting the free passage of the player). Triggers could be used to adjust lighting, the height of floors and ceilings, create stairs, open and close doors (and manipulate the velocity of these actions), and create switches that would modify all of these variables. You could then combine these triggers with abstract (i.e. non-conforming, non-warehouse, non-urban-warfare) level design and position monsters in a manner that highlighted their strengths. The slow-moving Barons of Hell weren’t so terrifying until you were fighting the freaks in a narrow hallway and the map creator wasn’t interested in loaning you a decent weapon.
Good Doom level design was like good writing: Nobody agreed on the best means of getting the job done. Nobody gave a crap how you created a level. Just make sure it plays well and it looks good. Doom level creation was a fitting extension of John Romero’s Dungeons and Dragons passion: The mapmakers were playing dungeon master. They were creating elaborate rooms and settings and traps and rewards. The levels eventually became so complex and the designers so talented that the best began getting jobs from the game industry (most notably Iikka Keränen, who today works for Valve) and developing a God damn metagame within Doom level design; players became so familiar with the design theory that creators would have to anticipate the player’s expectation of what’s behind the next door.
The first single-player mission in Doom 2, rendered in all its two-dimensional glory.
But I’m sure you already knew that.
Not bad for one game mode. None of that even directly touches on that whole “kill your friends in multiplayer deathmatch” thing. Most people probably know the story of the Doom deathmatch phenomenon. But contrary to popular opinion, the game mode was far from perfect. As all-night bloodstorms clogged university LAN parties, Doom was suffering from a problem best compared to the arena warfare in MMO juggernaut World of Warcraft: Doom’s weapons and mechanics were clearly balanced for player-versus-environment. The Chaingun was designed for suppressive fire. The Rocket Launcher was the crowd control. The BFG9000 was the equivalent of a reset button. The accurate, fast-firing, long-range hitscan weapon (think of Unreal Tournament’s Shock Rifle or Halo’s Sniper Rifle) that would have broken the single-player campaign was nowhere to be found. I’m not quite sure I can hold that against iD Software. Good luck selling anybody on the implementation of a sniper weapon when the native resolution in your game is 320×200. But surely, the genre would have plenty of time to figure that out! The genre was in its beta phase. It was time to give it some time.
In the following half-decade, the Doom model would dominate the design philosophy of the first-person shooter so thoroughly that the genre was originally labeled as “Doom clones”, in the same way gamers struggle to label Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends as something other than “DotA clones”. The competition adhered to a very similar formula: Heretic (which used the Doom engine), Marathon (developed by Bungie, a company that would never be heard from again), Duke Nukem 3D, and Alien vs. Predator were all different shades of Doom. 1994′s space-shooting Descent was perhaps the most progressive of the destructo-thons, featuring the ability to move a spacecraft in all six directions. Unfortunately, it was condemned to a niche market by the first control scheme in the history of computer video games that was too complicated for the mouse and keyboard. (Descent might as well have been packaged with the Microsoft Sidewinder Joystick that Descent would popularize.) With the exception of 1994′s System Shock (a role-playing predecessor to the beloved 1999 sequel) and 1996′s sub-par role-playing hybrid Strife, the genre trudged on-course: Kill shit, get keys, beat the level. iD Software would affirm their own design model with the 1996 release of Quake, superior to Doom mostly on technical merit.
Quake carried the torch for a gigantic issue that existed since the release of Doom: Fans were frustrated with multiplayer latency issues. The games had not been designed for the internet. The netcode was optimized for LAN play. John Carmack’s coding moxy solved the problem, a post-release multiplayer portal known as QuakeWorld. Client-server technology was included in Duke Nukem 3D, released earlier that year. QuakeWorld helped to popularize it, bringing the masses the incredible achievement of hammering home playable online Quake with your mom’s AOL subscription. By this point, it was clear “online multiplayer” was the next big thing. 1995′s Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and 1996′s Command and Conquer: Red Alert were making Kali famous. The networking emulator (best compared to Garena*) tricked a number of games into connecting over the internet with either the dial-up or LAN functions. Developers had a great reason to embrace online multiplayer: By tethering the games into the internet, you could stifle software piracy. Connecting to the “online gaming service” could require the use of a legitimate product key. Blizzard Entertainment employed this to fantastic effect with 1998′s Starcraft, featuring multiplayer support on the Battle.net peer-to-peer network. The companies that embraced online play won out big: It became so popular that numerous developers ommitted meaningful single-player modes, culminating with the 1999 releases of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament, considered by many to be the high point of the entire first-person shooter genre.
There is one gigantic, hugely important thing to remember about this evolution of the first-person shooter: Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom were only half a decade removed from the obvious decision to go “point-and-click” with the adventure game genre. The friendship between the mouse, the keyboard, and the shooter was host to significant growing pains. Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom featured a default control scheme that was optimized for the keyboard. Not the mouse and keyboard, not the mouse, just the keyboard. Yeah, you could use the mouse. Just not to “mouselook”. That was introduced in Marathon. Doom and Wolfenstein were configured for tank controls: Left and right arrow keys to turn, up and down arrow keys to move forward and backward, with the Alt key as a modifier for strafing. If you played 2002′s Metroid Prime and complained about that control scheme, you know what Doom came with out of the box. The WASD control scheme was popularized during the Quake days and retrofitted into Doom through the fan-created overhauls of the game engine. But see, Romero and Carmack didn’t give a flying crap if the game was too fast. They didn’t give a flying crap if “casuals couldn’t handle it”. Their stated goal was to create a pair of shooters that played as fast as they possibly could.*
That’s why Wolfenstein 3-D didn’t render floor and ceiling textures. That’s why Wolfenstein 3-D’s stealth elements were omitted early in development. Why bother? That’s processing power that could be spent on making the game more frenetic. So then, what do you think happened when players got their head around today’s preferred WASD control method? What do you think happened when the players got better at the games, where John Romero was stunned that players could complete Doom’s Nightmare! difficulty level, designing it with the belief that it would be impossible to complete? The developers made the games more complex and they made the games even faster, that’s what. They created rule sets to satisfy their best players and didn’t give a crap if the genre got “too complicated”. Because honestly, there’s nothing complicated about “point the gun at what you want to die”. That requires movement keys and a fire button. 1977′s Space Invaders had those. As the controls got better, the players got better. And as the players got better, the games got better. Simple stuff, kids.
Just in case you didn’t want to believe anything I just said, the Wolfenstein 3-D manual will vouch.*
The first-person shooter rode its evolution to the top. It became the most popular gaming format on the personal computer, usurping a market dominated by role-playing games and adventure games. And if history held ground, it was inevitable that Sony and Nintendo were going to look for a piece of the meat. With the exception of the side-scrolling platformer, consoles have drawn their precedent and inspiration from computers the last twenty-five years. Computer role-playing had been around as long as the microprocessor, beginning with men (and pretty much only men) trying to emulate the then-recent phenomenon of Dungeons and Dragons. As the genre stewed around and American developers figured things out, the Japanese embraced the number-crunching portion of role-playing and built some of the most beloved games for the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Sony PlayStation. It was now the first-person shooter’s turn. Now cue the obvious problem: The dungeon crawler could play well with a controller. Since Wolfenstein 3-D, the first-person shooter was built around precision and execution. How could console developers build a genre around a controller that wasn’t guaranteed to handle it?
Mouse and keyboard shooters were developed for the mouse and keyboard. When those games were ported from the personal computer to a console, they typically flopped. Nobody remembers Medal of Honor for the PlayStation. Nobody remembers the six-hundred versions of Doom for any reason other than “Doom was so popular they ported it to six-hundred consoles”. Nobody remembers Rainbow Six for the Nintendo 64 or the PlayStation or the Dreamcast. Long-time shooter fans declared the controller an unsatisfactory input method and newcomers were hampered by the pace of the game. To make the controller work, console developers would have to scale back the emphasis on twitch shooting. There’s an important rule in video games that can be best explained with the hardcore fan’s response to Starcraft II: If you remove something, you add something back. Starcraft II players were critical of Blizzard’s decision to remove interface crutches that increased the amount of mechanical skill required to play Brood War. After those crutches were removed, the player base dismissed any change (i.e. any addition) to the formula as “ruining Starcraft” or “fuck Blizzard”. This left Blizzard with “same game, less mechanical skill”. That is, “a game for noobs”. To make the transition to consoles, the industry would have to “add something back” into the first-person shooter.
The Nintendo 64 was a very easy answer to that question. Nintendo was probably scratching their heads and wondering why nobody built four-player functionality straight into the console. (Of course, 1976′s Bally Astrocade had four-player functionality. You do not know what the Bally Astrocade is, so it doesn’t exist. Fair?) Most previous devices required an adaptor or ignored the concept. Originally, the three-player-plus console scene was dominated by Bomberman, which became a killer app for the Super Nintendo Multi-Tap and then the franchise was built for a ten-player adaptor (!!) in a subsequent version released for the Sega Saturn. But hey, history only happens when the casual consumer brings it home from the store, am I right? The additional two controller slots became the Nintendo 64′s lone trump card against the ass-kicking it received from the Sony PlayStation. 1996′s Mario Kart 64 confirmed to a very large group of people that “four-player party action” was worth it. The following year, Nintendo developer Rare released GoldenEye 007. One of the most unlikely candidates for “gargantuan smash hit” in the history of the medium (another one of those “video game based on a movie” scenarios), the first-person shooter had found a home in the console video game market. Remove “twitch shooting”, add “I WAS DRUKN WIT MY FRIENDS AND OH MY GODS THIS IS AWSUM!” So far, so good.
Unlike iD Software and their commitment to keyboard-only control schemes, Rare had incredible foresight to use the Nintendo 64 controller’s C-buttons as a substitute for a second thumbstick (although you had to dig through the options to find a control scheme with “mouselook” and it wasn’t particularly accurate.) But no matter how hard Rare tried, GoldenEye was not going to be Quake. It never had a chance to be Quake. But yet, GoldenEye still turned out to be pretty fun. What was it doing right? What was being added to the game mechanics? The game was covering for its control scheme. The method of input limited the player’s ability to interact with the enemy during a gunfight. In the computer deathmatch games, interaction with the enemy was “gonna dodge you, and you, and I’m gonna shoot you in the head, switch to the Rocket Launcher and turn the asshole behind me into bacon”. In GoldenEye, every weapon only featured a single method of fire. Switching to another weapon wasn’t much of an option when the bullets were raining down. Under optimal circumstances, GoldenEye is “headshot or bust”.
Rare covered for this by focusing on variety. The single-player campaign was a refreshing step back into the days of difficulty levels that added monsters and scrambled the location of items, featuring additional mission objectives in each subsequent difficulty level. In multiplayer, Rare took the emphasis off of the gunfight. They provided interesting and easy ways to configure the game rules, subsequently granting players more individually-interesting ways to kill their opponent. So one game could be all about Moonraker Lasers. The next game could be a battle of Proximity Mines. Then the next game could be a war of Golden Guns. Each of these weapons introduced a different playstyle and emphasized different skills. Compare this to Quake, where each weapon was a small portion of a complete playstyle. And thus, all those thousands of childhood GoldenEye nostalgia stories were born. 2000′s Perfect Dark was an extension of the philosophy, upping the ante with more broken weapons (such as the Farsight XR-20, a sniper rifle with infrared autotracking that could shoot through walls. This actually happened), more missions, more maps, more unlockables, more stats. Remove “twitch shooting”, add “six-hundred game options”. Check and mate.
Rare used a library of easy-to-customize game variables to keep the focus off of the actual shooting element. Console developers could not do that forever. They would have to find a more appealing control scheme. Or rather, find a combat system that could emulate the computer gaming experience. They would also have to find the theme or motif that could win the public’s money. In pursuit of these lands, the first-person shooter had a gigantic plus-side going for it: The genre isn’t defined by its weapons or its settings or its game mechanics. It’s distinguished by camera placement. That’s the fundamental difference between a first-person shooter and a third-person shooter and a top-down shooter. Nothing is preventing these genres from branching out, in the way that traditional survival horror games have moved closer to becoming typical action-adventure titles. Through 1998, the genre had focused on a lack of realism. Naturally, that is not a bad thing. Gameplay always comes before realism. But sometimes, realism can make a game more fun. It can make a game more engrossing. It can force the player to master uncomfortable skill sets. But most importantly, it allowed developers to indirectly compete with iD Software and the established monsters.
Very few companies had the talent or the money to assume the risk of competing with Quake at their own game. Epic Games was one of the few companies that competed with Quake and lived to tell about it. The rest of the industry went in sprawling directions. And boy, was it glorious. The thirty-six months from 1998 to 2000 perhaps oversaw the most success and innovation of any genre in the entire history of this medium. 1998′s Thief: The Dark Project introduced computer gamers to stealth-action the same year that Metal Gear Solid was popularizing it. Later that year, Starsiege: Tribes boasted a multiplayer-oriented, objective-based shooter with incredible amounts of customization. In 1999, System Shock 2 won Game of the Year awards in two separate years when it was later stripped down and reimagined as 2007′s Bioshock. As mentioned earlier, 1999 was also the year that Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament hit the market. And in 2000, Deus Ex drew from stealth, action, and role-playing to become a damn good argument for the greatest video game ever made.
From this short three-year era of incredible shooters, console developers would find the golden box. Inside this box would be two games. Or rather, two powder kegs. All somebody would have to do is provide the lighter.
Continue to Part Two: Serious Realism