Trigger Happy
supposed viewpoint of the player’s character wandering around an enemy-infested arena with a battery of projectile weaponry.30
Yet Battlezone, more than a decade previously, was in effect a first-person shooter, and the first-person viewpoint had even been crammed into a game released for the Sinclair ZX81 home computer, 3D Monster Maze, in which the player had to negotiate a black-and- white maze (drawn in a very low-resolution approximation of wireframe) while avoiding a marauding Tyrannosaurus rex; the entire game, a beautifully terrifying experience for any nine-year-old of the day (me, for instance), ran in a mere 16 kilobytes of code, which wouldn’t be nearly enough to run even the joystick drivers for modern games.
Yet it was Wolfenstein that first situated the player in “rooms,” connected by doors, with walls receding realistically into the distance and other humans wandering around to be killed. (In this case they were Nazi officers, so no compunction need be felt about blasting them to their doom.) Wolfenstein’s illusionism was rather crude: there was no texture to the floors or ceiling to aid the impression of forward
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30 With wry names. In the follow-up, Doom, the most potent weapon was known by the acronym BFG: “big fucking gun.”
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