Shooter video games or shooters are a subgenre of
action video games where the focus is almost entirely on the defeat of the character's enemies using the weapons given to the player. Usually these weapons are
firearm
A firearm is any type of gun designed to be readily carried and used by an individual. The term is legally defined further in different countries (see Legal definitions).
The first firearms originated in 10th-century China, when bamboo tubes ...
s or some other
long-range weapons, and can be used in combination with other tools such as
grenades for indirect offense,
armor for additional defense, or accessories such as
telescopic sights to modify the behavior of the weapons. A common resource found in many shooter games is
ammunition
Ammunition (informally ammo) is the material fired, scattered, dropped, or detonated from any weapon or weapon system. Ammunition is both expendable weapons (e.g., bombs, missiles, grenades, land mines) and the component parts of other we ...
, armor or health, or upgrades which augment the player character's weapons.
Shooter games test the player's spatial awareness, reflexes, and speed in both isolated single player or networked
multiplayer
A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, either locally on the same computing system ( couch co-op), on different computing systems via a local area network, or ...
environments. Shooter games encompass many subgenres that have the commonality of focusing on the actions of the
avatar
Avatar (, ; ), is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means "descent". It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, goddess or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appear ...
engaging in combat with a weapon against both code-driven NPC enemies or other avatars controlled by other players.
Subgenres
Shoot 'em up
Shoot 'em ups (also known as shmups) are a subgenre of shooters wherein the player may move, up, down, left or right around the screen, typically firing straight forward.
Shoot 'em ups share common gameplay, but are often categorized by viewpoint. This includes fixed shooters on fixed screens, such as ''
Space Invaders'' and ''
Galaxian''; scrolling shooters that mainly
scroll in a single direction, such as ''
Xevious'' and ''
Darius''; top-down shooters (sometimes referred to as twin-stick shooters) where the levels are controlled from an
overhead viewpoint, such as ''
Bosconian
is a multidirectional scrolling shooter arcade game which was developed and released by Namco in Japan in 1981. In North America, it was manufactured and distributed by Midway Games. The goal of the game is to earn as many points as possible b ...
'' and ''
Time Pilot
is a multidirectional shooter arcade game designed by Yoshiki Okamoto and released by Konami in 1982. It was distributed in the United States by Centuri, and by Atari Ireland in Europe and the Middle East. While engaging in aerial combat, the ...
''; rail shooters where player movement is automatically guided down a fixed
forward-scrolling "rail", such as ''
Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom'' and ''
Space Harrier''; and isometric shooters which use an
isometric perspective, such as ''
Zaxxon
is an isometric shooter arcade game, developed and released by Sega in 1982, in which the player pilots a ship through heavily defended space fortresses. Japanese electronics company Ikegami Tsushinki is also credited for having worked on the de ...
'' and ''
Viewpoint
Viewpoint may refer to:
* Scenic viewpoint, a high place where people can gather to view scenery
In computing
* Viewpoint model, a computer science technique for making complex systems more comprehensible to human engineers
* Viewpoint Corporat ...
''.
Run-and-gun shooter
Run-and-gun shooters are 2D
scrolling action games in which the protagonists fight on foot, often
with the ability to jump. Run-and-gun games may use
side-scrolling,
vertical scrolling or
isometric viewpoints and may feature multidirectional movement.
[Provo, Frank]
Bloody Wolf
, GameSpot, July 7, 2007. Accessed June 17, 2008[Dunham, Jeremy]
, ''IGN'', July 27, 2004. Accessed June 17, 2008[Bielby, Matt]
"The YS Complete Guide To Shoot-'em-ups Part II"
''Your Sinclair,'' August 1990 (issue 56), p. 19
Top-down run-and-gun games are characterized by an on-screen overhead in a camera angle that shows players and the areas around them from above. Notable games in this category include ''
Commando'', ''
Ikari Warriors'', ''
Shock Troopers
is a run and gun (video game), run and gun arcade game developed by Saurus and published by SNK in 1997 for the Neo Geo, Neo-Geo arcade and home platform. Gameplay involves taking command of one or three soldiers in an eight-way shooter. A secon ...
'' and ''
Shock Troopers: 2nd Squad''.
Side-scrolling run-and-gun games combine elements of both shoot 'em up and
platform games, while the
player characters move and jump around shooting with various guns and other long-range weapons. These games emphasize greater maneuvering or even
jumping, such as ''
Green Beret'', ''
Thexder
is a run-and-gun platform game from Game Arts, originally released for the NEC PC-8801 in 1985. It was subsequently ported to many other systems, including the Famicom.
Gameplay
In ''Thexder'', the player controls a fighter robot that is ab ...
'', ''
Contra'' and ''
Metal Slug''.
Shooting gallery
Shooting gallery games (also known as "target shooting" games) are a sub-genre of shooters where the player aims at moving targets on a stationary screen. They are distinguished from rail shooters, which move the player through levels on a fixed path, and first-person shooters, which allow player-guided navigation through a three-dimensional space.
Shooting gallery games can be
light gun games and rail-shooters, although many can also be played using a regular
joypad and an on-screen cursor to signify where the bullets are being aimed. When these debuted, they were typically played from a
first-person perspective, with enemy fire that occurred anywhere on the screen damaging or killing the player. As they evolved away from the use of light guns, the player came to be represented by an on-screen avatar, usually someone on the bottom of the screen, who could move and avoid enemy attacks while returning fire. These sorts of shooters almost always utilize horizontal scrolling to the right to indicate level progression, with enemies appearing in waves from predestined locations in the background or from the sides. One of the earliest examples is the 1985 arcade game ''
Shootout'' produced by Data East.
As light gun games and rail shooters became more prevalent and started to make use of scrolling backgrounds, such as ''
Operation Wolf
is a light gun shooter arcade game developed by Taito and released in 1987. It was ported to many home systems.
The game was critically and commercially successful, becoming one of the highest-grossing arcade games of 1988 and winning the G ...
'', or fully 3D backgrounds, such as the ''
Time Crisis
''Time Crisis'' is a first-person on-rails light gun shooter series of arcade video games by Namco, introduced in 1995. It is focused on the exploits of a fictional international intelligence agency who assigns its best agents to deal with a ...
'' or ''
House of the Dead'' series, these sorts of games fell out of popular production, but many like ''Blood Bros.'' still have their fanbase today. Other notable games of this category include ''
Cabal'' and ''
Wild Guns''.
Light gun shooter
Light gun shooters are shooters designed for use with a gun-shaped controller, typically a
light gun in
arcade games; similar control methods include a positional gun,
motion controller,
pointing device
A pointing device is a human interface device that allows a user to input spatial (i.e., continuous and multi-dimensional) data to a computer. CAD systems and graphical user interfaces (GUI) allow the user to control and provide data to ...
or
analog stick. The first light guns appeared in the 1930s, following the development of light-sensing
vacuum tube
A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric potential difference has been applied.
The type known as ...
s. It was not long before the technology began appearing in mechanical shooting
arcade games, dating back to the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite in 1936. These early mechanical gun games evolved into shooting
electro-mechanical games around the mid-20th century, and in turn evolved into light gun shooter video games in the 1970s.
Early mechanical light gun games used small targets (usually moving) onto which a light-sensing tube was mounted; the player used a gun (usually a rifle) that emitted a beam of light when the trigger was pulled. If the beam struck the target, a "hit" was scored. Modern screen-based video game light guns work on the opposite principle—the sensor is built into the gun itself, and the on-screen target(s) emit light rather than the gun. The first light gun of this type was used on the
MIT Whirlwind computer, which used a similar
light pen. Like rail shooters, movement is typically limited in light-gun games.
Notable games of this category include the 1974 and 1984 versions of ''
Wild Gunman'', ''
Duck Hunt'' for the
NES, ''
Operation Wolf
is a light gun shooter arcade game developed by Taito and released in 1987. It was ported to many home systems.
The game was critically and commercially successful, becoming one of the highest-grossing arcade games of 1988 and winning the G ...
'', ''
Lethal Enforcers
is a 1992 light gun shooter released as an arcade video game by Konami. The graphics consist entirely of digitized photographs and digitized sprites. Home versions were released for the Super NES, Genesis and Sega CD during the following year an ...
'', the ''
Virtua Cop'' series, ''
Time Crisis
''Time Crisis'' is a first-person on-rails light gun shooter series of arcade video games by Namco, introduced in 1995. It is focused on the exploits of a fictional international intelligence agency who assigns its best agents to deal with a ...
'' series, ''
The House of the Dead'' series, and ''
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles'' & ''
Darkside Chronicles''.
First-person shooter (FPS)
First-person shooters are characterized by an on-screen representation of the
player character's perspective within a
three-dimensional space
Three-dimensional space (also: 3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a geometric setting in which three values (called ''parameters'') are required to determine the position of an element (i.e., point). This is the informa ...
, with the player having control and agency over the character's movement and action within that space. While many rail shooters and light-gun shooters also use a
first-person perspective, they are generally not included in this category, as the player generally lacks agency to move their character within the game world.
Notable examples of the genre include ''
Doom
Doom is another name for damnation.
Doom may also refer to:
People
* Doom (professional wrestling), the tag team of Ron Simmons and Butch Reed
* Daniel Doom (born 1934), Belgian cyclist
* Debbie Doom (born 1963), American softball pitcher
* ...
'', ''
Quake'', ''
Half-Life
Half-life (symbol ) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value. The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable ...
'', ''
Counter-Strike'', ''
GoldenEye 007'', ''
Battlefield'',
''Medal of Honor'', ''
Unreal'', ''
Call of Duty'', ''
Killzone'', ''
TimeSplitters
''TimeSplitters'' is a series of first-person shooter video games developed by Free Radical Design. The games are often considered spiritual successors to '' GoldenEye 007'' and ''Perfect Dark'', due to overlapping elements in gameplay, design, ...
'', ''
Team Fortress 2'' and ''
Halo''.
Boomer shooter
A boomer shooter is a term used to describe newer FPS games (2010s and later) that are purposely designed to emulate the style of the original FPS games like ''Doom'' and ''Quake'', moving away from realism and story and instead emphasizing fast gameplay and over-the-top combat. The term originated following the release of ''
Dusk'' (2018), with fans of that game quickly coining the term; it has a double meaning in that it references the idea of "boomsticks" (powerful shotguns) that frequently were part of these games' arsenals, and refers to games that were popular from the
baby boomer generation. Newer triple-A games like ''
Doom
Doom is another name for damnation.
Doom may also refer to:
People
* Doom (professional wrestling), the tag team of Ron Simmons and Butch Reed
* Daniel Doom (born 1934), Belgian cyclist
* Debbie Doom (born 1963), American softball pitcher
* ...
'' (2016) and ''
Wolfenstein: The New Order'' (2016) helped to repopularize these styles of shooters in the mid-2010s, and indie developers further contributed to the field, including ''
Amid Evil'', ''
Ultrakill
''Ultrakill'' (stylized in all caps as ULTRAKILL) is a first-person shooter platformer video game developed by Arsi "Hakita" Patala and published by New Blood Interactive. It was released through Early Access on Steam for Microsoft Windows on Se ...
'' and ''
Ion Fury
''Ion Fury'' (originally titled ''Ion Maiden'') is a 2019 cyberpunk first-person shooter video game developed by Finnish studio Voidpoint and published by 3D Realms. It is a prequel to the 2016 video game '' Bombshell''. ''Ion Fury'' runs on a m ...
''.
Third-person shooter (TPS)
Third-person shooters are characterized by a
third-person camera view that fully displays the player character in his/her surroundings. Notable examples of the genre include the ''
Tomb Raider'' series, several entries in the ''
Resident Evil'' and ''
Metal Gear Solid'' franchises, ''
Syphon Filter'', ''
Max Payne
''Max Payne'' is a neo-noir third-person shooter video game series developed by Remedy Entertainment (''Max Payne'' and ''Max Payne 2'') and Rockstar Studios (''Max Payne 3''). The series is named after its protagonist, Max Payne, a New York C ...
'', ''
SOCOM'', ''
Star Wars: Battlefront'', ''
Gears of War'', and ''
Splatoon''. Third person shooter mechanics are often incorporated into open-world adventure and sandbox games, including the ''
Elder Scrolls'' series and the ''
Grand Theft Auto'' franchise.
FPS/TPS variations
Arena shooter
Arena shooters are multiplayer games that feature fast paced gameplay that emphasize quick speed and agile movement, and played out on levels or maps of limited size (the "arena"). Many of these are presented as first-person shooters, and thus "arena FPS" may also be used to describe a subset of these games. Examples of these include the ''
Quake'' and ''
Unreal'' series, more specifically ''
Quake III Arena'' and ''
Unreal Tournament'' which first pioneered the genre. Arena shooters can also be played from other perspectives, such as via a top-down view in games like ''
Robotron 2084
''Robotron: 2084'' (also referred to as ''Robotron'') is a multidirectional shooter developed by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar of Vid Kidz and released in arcades by Williams Electronics in 1982. The game is set in the year 2084 in a fictional wo ...
'' and ''
Geometry Wars''. Arena shooters frequently emphasize multiplayer modes with few or no single-player modes outside of practice matches with computer-controlled opponents. The genre hit its peak in popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Hero shooter
Hero shooters are a variation of multiplayer first- or third-person shooters, where players form into two or more teams and select from pre-designed "hero" characters, with each possessing distinctive abilities and/or weapons that are specific to them. Hero shooters strongly encourage teamwork between players on a team, guiding players to select effective combinations of hero characters and coordinate the use of hero abilities during a match. Outside of a match, players have the ability to customize the appearance of these characters, but these changes are usually cosmetic only and do not alter the game's balance or the behavior of the "hero". Hero shooters take many of their design elements from older class-based shooter,
multiplayer online battle arena and
fighting games. The class-based shooter ''
Team Fortress 2'' is considered to be the codifier of the hero shooter genre. Popular hero shooters include ''
Overwatch
''Overwatch'' is a multimedia franchise centered on a series of online multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) video games developed by Blizzard Entertainment: '' Overwatch'' released in 2016, and ''Overwatch 2'' released in 2022. Both games fe ...
'', ''
Paladins
The Paladins, also called the Twelve Peers, are twelve legendary knights, the foremost members of Charlemagne's court in the 8th century. They first appear in the medieval (12th century) ''chanson de geste'' cycle of the Matter of France, whe ...
,'' ''
Apex Legends'', and ''
Valorant''. Hero shooters have been considered to have strong potential as
esports games as a large degree of skill and coordination arises from the importance of teamwork.
Tactical shooter
Tactical shooters are shooters that generally simulate realistic
squad-based or
man-to-man skirmishes. Notable examples of the genre include Ubisoft's ''
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six'' and ''
Ghost Recon'' series and Bohemia Software's ''
Operation Flashpoint''. A common feature of tactical shooters that is not present in many other shooters is the ability for the player character to lean out of cover, increasing the granularity of a player's movement and stance options to enhance the realism of the game. Tactical shooters also commonly feature more extensive equipment management, more complex healing systems, and greater depth of simulation compared to other shooters. As a result of this, many tactical shooters are commonly played from the first person perspective. Tactical shooters may combine elements from other shooter genres, such as ''
Rainbow Six Siege'', ''
Valorant'', and
Squad, which combine the traditional tactical shooter style with the class-based gameplay of hero shooters.
Looter shooter
Looter shooters are shooter games where the player's overarching goal is the accumulation of
loot
Loot may refer to:
Film
*''Loot'' (1919 film), a film by William C. Dowlan
* ''Loot'' (1970 film), a British film by Silvio Narizzano
* ''Loot'' (2008 film), a documentary
* ''Loot'' (2011 film), an Indian film
* ''Loot'' (2012 film), a Nepali fi ...
: weapons, equipment, armor, accessories and resources. To achieve this players complete tasks framed as quests, missions or campaigns and are rewarded with better weapons, gear and accessories as a result, with the qualities, attributes and perks of such gear generated randomly following certain rarity scales (also known as loot tables). The better gear allows players to take on more difficult missions with potentially more powerful rewards, forming the game's
compulsion loop
A compulsion loop or core loop is a habitual chain of activities that will be repeated by the user to cause them to continue the activity. Typically, this loop is designed to create a neurochemical reward in the user such as the release of dopamine ...
. Loot shooters are inspired by similar loot-based
action role-playing games like ''
Diablo''. Examples of loot shooters include the ''
Borderlands'' franchise, ''
Warframe'', ''
Destiny'' and its
sequel, ''
Tom Clancy's The Division
''Tom Clancy's The Division'' is an online-only action role-playing video game developed by Massive Entertainment and published in 2016 by Ubisoft, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is set in a near future New York City i ...
'' and its
sequel, and ''
Anthem''.
Artillery game
Artillery games have been described as a type of "shooting game", though they are more frequently classified as a type of
strategy game.
Battle royale
Battle royale games are a subgenre of action games that combine
last-man-standing gameplay with survival game elements, and frequently includes shooter elements. It is almost exclusively multiplayer in nature, and eschews the complex crafting and resource gathering mechanics of survival games for a faster-paced confrontation game more typical of shooters. The genre is named after the
Japanese film ''
Battle Royale'' (2000) which itself was based on the
1999 novel of the same name.
History
The concept of shooting games existed before
video game
Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This feedba ...
s, dating back to shooting gallery
carnival games in the late 19th century,
as well as
target sports such as
shooting sports,
bowling
Bowling is a target sport and recreational activity in which a player rolls a ball toward pins (in pin bowling) or another target (in target bowling). The term ''bowling'' usually refers to pin bowling (most commonly ten-pin bowling), though ...
,
cue sports
Cue sports are a wide variety of games of skill played with a cue, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a cloth-covered table bounded by elastic bumpers known as .
There are three major subdivisions ...
,
archery and
darts. Mechanical gun games first appeared in
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...
's
amusement arcades
An amusement arcade (often referred to as a video arcade, amusements or simply arcade) is a venue where people play arcade games, including arcade video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, merchandisers (such as cl ...
around the turn of the 20th century, before appearing in America by the 1920s.
The British cinematic shooting gallery game ''Life Targets'' (1912) was a mechanical
interactive film game where players shot at a cinema screen displaying film footage of targets. The first
light guns
A light gun is a pointing device for computers and a control device for arcade and video games, typically shaped to resemble a pistol.
Early history
The first light guns were produced in the 1930s, following the development of light-sens ...
appeared in the 1930s, with the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite. Games using this toy rifle were mechanical and the rifle fired beams of light at targets wired with sensors.
Shooting gallery games eventually evolved into more sophisticated shooting
electro-mechanical games (EM games) such as
Sega's influential ''
Periscope
A periscope is an instrument for observation over, around or through an object, obstacle or condition that prevents direct line-of-sight observation from an observer's current position.
In its simplest form, it consists of an outer case with ...
'' (1965). Contemporary shooting video games have roots in older EM shooting games.
Another influential Sega EM shooting game was ''Gun Fight'' (1969), where two players control
cowboy figurines on opposing sides of a playfield full of obstacles, with each player attempting to shoot the opponent's cowboy.
It had a
Western theme and was one of the first games to feature competitive head-to-head shooting between two players, inspiring several early Western-themed shooter video games.
1960s to mid-1970s
''
Spacewar!'' (1962), recognized as one of the first video games, was also the first shooter video game; it featured two players controlling spacecraft trying to fire onto the other player.
''Spacewar!'' was the basis for the first
arcade video games, ''
Computer Space'' and ''
Galaxy Game'', in 1971.
In the 1970s, EM
gun games evolved into
light gun shooter video games.
The first
home video game console, the
Magnavox Odyssey, shipped with a light gun for a shooting gallery game in 1972.
In 1974, ''
Tank
A tank is an armoured fighting vehicle intended as a primary offensive weapon in front-line ground combat. Tank designs are a balance of heavy firepower, strong armour, and good battlefield mobility provided by tracks and a powerful ...
'' by
Kee Games adapted the concept of ''Computer Space'' into a more grounded tank combat game with simplified physics and
maze game elements, becoming a hit in arcades.
In 1975,
Taito
is a Japanese company that specializes in video games, toys, arcade cabinets and game centers, based in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The company was founded by Michael Kogan in 1953 as the importing vodka, vending machines and jukeboxes into Japan. I ...
's
Tomohiro Nishikado adapted the concept of Sega's EM game ''Gun Fight'' into a video game, ''
Western Gun'' (1975), with the cowboys represented as character
sprites and both players able to maneuver across a landscape while shooting each other, making it a milestone for depicting human shooting targets. ''Western Gun'' became an arcade hit, which, along with ''Tank'', popularized a subgenre of one-on-one dueling video games.
Midway's North American localization of ''Western Gun'', called ''Gun Fight'', also introduced the use of a
microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...
.
In 1976, Midway had another hit shooting video game, ''
Sea Wolf'' (1976), which was adapted from another Sega EM game, ''Periscope''.
Late 1970s to 1980s
The genre gained major attraction in popular culture with the release of
Taito
is a Japanese company that specializes in video games, toys, arcade cabinets and game centers, based in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The company was founded by Michael Kogan in 1953 as the importing vodka, vending machines and jukeboxes into Japan. I ...
's ''
Space Invaders'' arcade video game in 1978. It established the basis of the
shoot 'em up subgenre, and became a cultural phenomenon that led into a
golden age of arcade video games that lasted until around 1983.
In contrast to earlier shooting games, ''Space Invaders'' has targets that fire back at the player, who in turn has multiple
lives. Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, who combined elements from his earlier ''Western Gun'' (such as
destructible environmental objects) with elements of
Atari's ''
Breakout'' (1976) and
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...
media, ''Space Invaders'' established a formula of "shoot or be shot" against numerous enemies.
Space shooters subsequently became the dominant genre in arcades from the late 1970s up until the early 1980s.
Most of these shooting games were presented from a 2D top-down-style perspective, with either a fixed or
scrolling field. Games like ''
Space Wars'' (1977) by
Cinematronics and ''
Tempest'' (1981) by Atari used
vector graphics displays rather than
raster graphics, while Sega's ''
Zaxxon
is an isometric shooter arcade game, developed and released by Sega in 1982, in which the player pilots a ship through heavily defended space fortresses. Japanese electronics company Ikegami Tsushinki is also credited for having worked on the de ...
'' (1981) was the first video game to use an
isometric playfield.
In the early 1980s, Japanese arcade developers began moving away from space shooters towards character
action games. On the other hand, American arcade developers continued to focus on space shooters during the early 1980s. According to
Eugene Jarvis, American arcade developers were greatly influenced by Japanese space shooters but took the genre in a different direction from the "more deterministic, scripted, pattern-type" gameplay of Japanese games, towards a more "programmer-centric design culture, emphasizing algorithmic generation of backgrounds and enemy dispatch" and "an emphasis on random-event generation, particle-effect explosions and physics" as seen in arcade games such as his own ''
Defender'' (1981) and ''
Robotron: 2084
''Robotron: 2084'' (also referred to as ''Robotron'') is a multidirectional shooter developed by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar of Vid Kidz and released in arcades by Williams Electronics in 1982. The game is set in the year 2084 in a fictional wo ...
'' (1982) as well as
Atari's ''
Asteroids
An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter; they are rocky, metallic or icy bodies with no atmosphere. ...
'' (1979).
Nevertheless, Japanese developers occasionally released defining space shooters in the early 1980s, such as Sega's
isometric shooter
Shoot 'em ups (also known as shmups or STGs
) are a sub-genre of action games. There is no consensus as to which design elements compose a shoot 'em up; some restrict the definition to games featuring spacecraft and certain types of charact ...
''Zaxxon''
and
pseudo-3D
2.5D (two-and-a-half dimensional) perspective refers to gameplay or movement in a video game or virtual reality environment that is restricted to a two-dimensional (2D) plane with little to no access to a third dimension in a space that otherwis ...
rail shooter ''
Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom'' (1982) demonstrating the potential of
3D shoot 'em up gameplay.
Shooter games diversified by the mid-1980s, with first-person light gun shooting gallery games such as
Nintendo's ''
Duck Hunt'' (1984), pseudo-3D third-person rail shooters such as Sega's ''
Space Harrier'' (1985) and ''
After Burner'' (1987), and military-themed scrolling
run-and-gun shooters such as
Capcom's ''
Commando'' (1985),
Konami
, is a Japanese multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Chūō, Tokyo, it also produces and distributes trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, pachinko machines, slot machines, and arcade cabinets. Konami has ca ...
's ''
Green Beret'' (1985) and
SNK's ''
Ikari Warriors'' (1986). In the late 1980s, Taito's ''
Operation Wolf
is a light gun shooter arcade game developed by Taito and released in 1987. It was ported to many home systems.
The game was critically and commercially successful, becoming one of the highest-grossing arcade games of 1988 and winning the G ...
'' (1987) popularized military-themed first-person light gun rail shooters.
1990s to present
''
Doom
Doom is another name for damnation.
Doom may also refer to:
People
* Doom (professional wrestling), the tag team of Ron Simmons and Butch Reed
* Daniel Doom (born 1934), Belgian cyclist
* Debbie Doom (born 1963), American softball pitcher
* ...
'' (1993) by
id Software is considered the first major popular
first-person shooter
First-person shooter (FPS) is a sub-genre of shooter video games centered on gun and other weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action through the eyes of the protagonist and controlling the p ...
(FPS), and it was a major leap forward for three-dimensional environments in shooter games as well as action games in general. While the earlier games ''
Spasim'' (1974) and ''
Maze War'' (1974) for mainframe computers were effectively first-person shooters, they featured wireframe graphics and lacked the fidelity of texture that ''Doom'' brought. And while first-person perspectives had been used by rail shooter and shooting gallery games, they lacked player-guided navigation through a three-dimensional space, a defining feature of FPS games.
The use of
texture-mapped
Texture mapping is a method for mapping a texture on a computer-generated graphic. Texture here can be high frequency detail, surface texture, or color.
History
The original technique was pioneered by Edwin Catmull in 1974.
Texture mapping ...
3D polygon graphics in shooter games dates back to
Sega AM2's light gun rail shooter ''
Virtua Cop'' (1994),
followed by Sega's
mech simulation shooter ''
Metal Head'' (1995)
and
Parallax Software's FPS game ''
Descent'' (1995). ''
GoldenEye 007'' (1997) for the
Nintendo 64 later combined the FPS sub-genre with light gun rail shooter elements from ''Virtua Cop'', popularizing FPS games on consoles.
In the late 1990s, FPS games became increasingly popular while rail shooters declined in popularity, as FPS games were generally able to offer more variety, depth and sophistication than rail shooters.
One of the last mainstream light gun rail shooter franchises was ''
The House of the Dead''
horror game series in the late 1990s, which along with ''
Resident Evil'' had a significant cultural impact on
zombie media including
zombie films
A zombie film is a film genre. Zombies are fictional creatures usually portrayed as reanimated corpses or virally infected human beings. They are commonly portrayed as cannibalistic in nature. While zombie films generally fall into the horror ...
by the 2000s.
Controversy
Due to its violent nature, some consider the shooter game genre to be a representation of real world violence. Debate regarding
video games causing violence were exasperated by the 1999
Columbine High School massacre
On April 20, 1999, a school shooting and attempted bombing occurred at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States. The perpetrators, 12th grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered 12 students and one teacher. ...
, whose perpetrators,
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
Eric David Harris (April 9, 1981 – April 20, 1999) and Dylan Bennet Klebold (; September 11, 1981 – April 20, 1999) were an American mass murder duo who perpetrated the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999. Harris and Klebol ...
, were fans of the game ''Doom.''
Similarly, in Germany,
school shootings such as those at
Erfurt
Erfurt () is the capital and largest city in the Central German state of Thuringia. It is located in the wide valley of the Gera river (progression: ), in the southern part of the Thuringian Basin, north of the Thuringian Forest. It sits in ...
,
Emsdetten
Emsdetten (; Westphalian: ''Detten'') is a town in the district of Steinfurt, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
Geography
Emsdetten is situated on the river Ems, approx. south-east of Rheine and north-west of Münster.
Neighbouring place ...
and
Winnenden, resulted in conservative politicians accusing violent shooter games, most notably ''
Counter Strike'', of inciting young gamers to run amok. Several attempts were made to ban the "Killerspiele" (killing games) in Germany and the European Union. Shooter games were further criticized when
Anders Behring Breivik
Fjotolf Hansen (born 13 February 1979), better known by his birth name Anders Behring Breivik () and by his pseudonym Andrew Berwick, is a Norwegian far-right domestic terrorist, known for committing the 2011 Norway attacks on 22 July 2011. On ...
, perpetrator of the
2011 Norway attacks, claimed that he developed target acquisition skills by playing ''
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2''. This has led to a plethora of experimental research to determine the true effects. Experimental Research, focusing on the short term effects, found that playing violent games can increase the player's aggression.
In a
2011 Supreme Court case involving a California law, Justice Antonio Scalia stated that there was some correlation between violent video games and increased aggression, but very little real-world effects.
An experiment by C.A. Anderson and K.E. Dill, in which they had undergraduates randomly play either a violent or non-violent game, determined that the students who played the violent game were more susceptible to primed aggressive thoughts.
Further studies have shown that there are some limitations with the research.
Many research studies have not taken into account that violent video games tend to be more competitive, have a higher playing difficulty, and are more fast paced than non-violent games.
Past research also shows that the way aggression was measured in the studies could be compared to the way competitiveness is measured, leaving the question of whether or not the effects of violent video games are forms of aggression or competitiveness.
See also
*
Combat flight simulation games, many of which contain shooter game elements.
*
Walking simulator, adventure games played from a first-person perspective
References
{{Video game genre
Video game genres
Violence in video games
Video game terminology
id:Shoot'em up