Trigger Happy
movement—only the walls of the room moved; and the enemy soldiers were constructed by bit-mapped sprites, which means they were basically flat drawings. When the enemies got nearer, they grew perspectivally by the simple means of enlarging every pixel in the drawing, so that they looked fuzzy and “blocky.” But another innovation Wolfenstein made has been copied by every first-person shooter since: at the bottom of the screen is a representation of hands clutching a gun, drawn foreshortened so that the gun appears to be pointing “into” the screen. This was a clever effort to try to cross the barrier between onscreen action and the player’s physical situation— those are my hands, so my head must be in this world too—and the animations of recoil and reloading have become ever more impressive.
But the purpose of this gun onscreen is purely cosmetic and psychological, rather than operational. It is not used for aiming, for while Wolfenstein and Doom have the gun pointing straight into the center, other first-person shooters, such as Goldeneye, have it coming into the screen at an angle (usually from the right, which sadly compromises believability for lefties), so it is impossible to judge its precise direction and range. Of course, anyone actually using a gun
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