Trigger Happy
As processing power increased in the 1990s, the genre definitively broke the bounds of flat-plane representations with the emergence of the “first-person shooter,” exemplified by Doom and its multifarious clones. Doom casts the player as a marine on Mars, tramping around an invaded base from the hero’s point of view and, with the aid of a comically powerful arsenal, blasting demons back into the bloody hell from which they have erupted. This, a sub-genre that traces its roots back to Atari’s 3D tank game Battlezone (1980), ousted its two-dimensional counterparts as king of the hill, at the same time adding rudimentary quest and object-manipulation requirements which— especially as environments and programmed enemy cunning became more complex, as in the extraordinary Half-Life (1998)—edged it into the gray zone between shoot-’em-up, exploration and puzzle games.
The pure shooter, however, persists in the form of lightgun games: Virtua Cop, House of the Dead or the viscerally thrilling Time Crisis. This game has one of the simplest, most intuitive human-computer interfaces ever conceived: the player uses a molded plastic handgun (with properly aligned sights and a forcefeedback mechanism to simulate recoil) to shoot
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