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Trigger Happy
50
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