15 Video Game Firsts We Take For Granted
14. First-Person Shooters
When you think first person shooters, you probably think of the big and bombastic juggernauts like Call of Duty or DOOM: Eternal.
A modern first-person shooter is all about big setpieces, explosions, gore, loads of guns to choose from, or it's a more calculated, stealthy adventure. In fact, the first-person shooter genre has become so vast, there's been countless video games which all try and do it a little differently.
But do you know what game was the first ever first-person shooter?
That honour goes to the 1974 title Maze War. Originally written for the Imlac PDS-1 graphic display systems at NASA, the programme allowed the 'player' to navigate mazes from a first-person perspective.
From there, the programmers found that being in a maze alone was boring. That's when they found out how to hook up two of the Imlacs together and added some guns. The rest, as they say, is history.
There is some controversy surrounding Maze War, and whether another title named Spasim, released in the same year, was the first to the first-person shooter crown. John Bowery, who created Maze War, even offered a reward to anyone who could confirm that Spasim wasn't the first!