Category:First-Person Shooter

"The game is based mainly around shooting and is viewed from the first person perspective, and someone should really come up with a name for that." —Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw reviewing Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, Zero Punctuation

The First-Person Shooter is a popular form of Action Game. Its basic style of play is exactly what the name says: the perspective is first-person, through the eyes of the player character, and the action revolves around shooting.

This game genre was first used in Maze War, released in 1973 - this makes the genre both Older Than the NES and Older Than the Web. It was widely popularized by id Software (don't capitalize id) via Wolfenstein 3D. It actually had two potential sets of progenitors: there were Ultima Underworld and System Shock, which had sensible and consistent worlds, NPC interaction, relatively few artificial restrictions, plotlines, and puzzles, and then there were Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D which had you shooting everything and ending each level by hitting the "exit" button. Game designers went with the latter for a while, but in recent years the genre has begun to shift towards the former, if slowly, with games like F.E.A.R. and Half Life.

See Also: Standard FPS Guns and Fackler Scale of FPS Realism, Some Third-Person Shooters have similar gameplay.

Contrast Fixed Camera (in terms of perspective).