Guns, Grenades, and Grunts

First-Person Shooter Games

Gerald A. Voorhees, Joshua Call, Katie Whitlock

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781441193537
• eBook ISBN: 9781441191441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Known for their visibility and tendency to generate controversy, first-person shooter (FPS) games are cultural icons and powder-kegs in American society. Contributors will examine a range of FPS games such as the Doom, Half-Life, System Shock, Deus Ex, Halo, Medal of Honor and Call of Duty franchises. By applying and enriching a broad range of perspectives, this volume will address the cultural relevance and place of the genre in game studies, game theory and the cultures of game players.

Guns, Grenades, and Grunts gathers scholars from all disciplines to bring the weight of contemporary social theory and media criticism to bear on the public controversy and intellectual investigation of first-person shooter games. As a genre, FPS games have helped shepherd the game industry from the early days of shareware distribution and underground gaming clans to contemporary multimillion dollar production budgets, Hollywood-style launches, downloadable content and worldwide professional gaming leagues. The FPS has been and will continue to be a staple of the game market.

PART ONE

Tutorial

1

BattleZone and the Origins of First-Person Shooting Games

Mark J. P. Wolf

Atari’s arcade game BattleZone (Atari 1980) was not the first shooting game, nor the first to have a first-person perspective, nor even the first to combine the two. But the game does represent the coalescence of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre (or subgenre of the shooting game genre, since not all shooting games are from a first-person perspective), as it brought together all the necessary elements now recognized as being essential to the first-person shooter as it is typically defined today. BattleZone combined them into a single game that was commercially available in wide release to the general public, and, as such, became a milestone and turning point in the history of the FPS. The influences, precursors, and development of the elements found in BattleZone occurred over more than a century, so it is to these that we must first turn our attention, as we examine how shooting became a game, how shooting games became virtual, and finally how they arrived at the form taken in BattleZone.

Shooting Becomes a Game

If the idea of shooting projectiles developed to allow one to do damage at a distance without putting one’s self into harm’s way, that is, within reach of whatever was being shot at, it makes sense to assume that increasing one’s accuracy would be a good thing. Shooting practice would be the result, and if two or more individuals practiced shooting, it seems natural that it would turn into a competition, and finally, into a kind of game.

Shooting competitions have probably existed for as long as projectile weapons have been around, and were no doubt the inspiration for shooting galleries on carnival fairgrounds from the late 1890s onward, which we might consider the very first first-person shooting games. As a fairground attraction with less dangerous guns, shooting galleries allowed carnival patrons to try their hand at shooting even if they would normally never handle real guns. This reduced possibility of danger helped to enhance the game-like nature of competitive shooting, allowing more concentration on its more playful aspects. Shooting galleries, however, still required safety measures and operators who tended the games, and it would be some time before technology had advanced sufficiently such that these could be eliminated.

Meanwhile, other outdoor games were adapted into indoor versions. For example, croquet was turned into billiards, and during the late 1700s in France the pool table used for billiards was narrowed and posts were added, becoming the game Bagatelle. Players would use cues to send balls up the table and ricochet them off pegs and into holes. During the 1800s, Bagatelle games became smaller, and eventually table-top versions were made. French soldiers brought Bagatelle to America during the Revolutionary War, and the tables became popular in the United States. In 1869, British inventor Montague Redgrave started producing Bagatelle tables in Ohio, but he replaced the pool cues with plungers and glassed over the Bagatelle table, making the game more self-contained. After further innovation and redesign, Bagatelle became known as pinball, which went on to even greater success during the twentieth century, during which time such features as backlights, bumpers, and flippers were added, and the game was electrified.

As pinball began to find success, other fairground games were adapted into electromechanical games, and among them were shooting gallery games. The Mechanical Trading Co. produced the coin-operated Automatic Shooting Range in 1895, and the Automatic Sports Company of London, England, produced several coin-operated shooting games for the arcade into the 1920s. Automatic Sports’ coin-operated games took place in glass-enclosed cases atop fanciful pedestals designed to bring the games up to the right height for standing players. Electromechanical games further sanitized and automated shooting galleries through the use of easily resettable targets, reusable ammunition, a mounted gun, and an enclosed space that contained all the elements of the game apart from the controls of the gun. Everything stayed within the game cabinet, and targets and guns were automatically reset, so no operator was required, allowing players to play unattended and greater profits to be made. Shooting games became less like shooting with real guns; gone was the noise and recoil of a real gun, and the field of action was miniaturized to only a few feet across, making timing far less important since the short distances eliminated the need to anticipate the movements of targets and compensate one’s aim as a result (although some games did attempt to simulate these things, like Chicago Coin’s Pistol (1947), which advertised “Realistic Recoil and Report Action” on its flyer; and some games also used mirrors within their cabinets to increase the shooting distance). From a design point of view, this meant that moving targets and other elements of difficulty became more important, since the use of distant targets was no longer possible. Overall, however, encased coin-operated games abstracted shooting games to an even greater degree than had fairground shooting galleries, and skills needed for the games no longer translated into the skills needed for the use of real weaponry.

Electromechanical games were the dominant coin-operated arcade games from the late 1930s to the early 1970s, and shooting games released during this time included such games as A. B. T. Manufacturing Corporation’s Challenger (1939), Chicago Coin’s Pistol (1947), Genco’s Sky Gunner (1953), Midway’s Trophy Gun (1964), and Chicago Coin’s Super Circus Rifle Gallery (1969) and Sharp Shooter (1971). Although today the abilities of electromechanical games seem very limited when compared with possibilities that video games offer, by the time arcade video games appeared in 1971, electromechanical games had become quite advanced, even to the point of offering competitive machine-controlled players. Midway’s Wild Kingdom (1971), for example, had “Jungle Charlie” who competed against the player; according to pinball and game collector Clay F. Harrell,

Midway’s Wild Kingdom is a very challenging gun game because the player is shooting against “Jungle Charlie”, a 3“ high moving mechanical marksman on the game’s playfield. Unlike say Haunted House where the player can take their time and shoot as slow as they want, Wild Kingdom forces the player to shoot fast. After the first shot is taken, the player is shooting against Jungle Charlie (the first shot is a ‘warm up’ shot and the player can take as long as they want for the first shot). If the player takes too long to shoot, Jungle Charlie shoots the animal instead causing the animal to retreat, and Jungle Charlie *never* misses. To slow Jungle Charlie, the player can fire his gun – Jungle Charlie can not shoot if the player is shooting (and likewise the player can not shot [sic] if Jungle Charlie is shooting). Each game gets 25 shots, with Jungle Charlie shooting out of the 25 shots. If the player is slow he may only get the first shot, and Jungle Charlie will use the other 24 shots! Jungle Charlie’s movement speed can be adjusted. If he’s adjusted too fast the game is nearly impossible to shoot as Jungle Charlie is too quick. At 3000 points the game automatically speeds up Jungle Charlie too. (Pinrepair.com 2011b)

Although early video games represented a technological novelty, they could not provide some of the kinds of play experiences that electromechanical games could. Eventually, video games improved and surpassed electromechanical games, ending their dominance in the arcade, and video games offered additional benefits for arcade operators as well, especially when it came to repairs.

Whereas electromechanical arcade games did not need constant supervision from a human attendant the way that carnival games did, they still needed frequent maintenance due to their many moving parts and occasional breakdowns. Video games, with far few moving parts (usually only the controllers), were less likely to break down and more reliable, and technologically they were much less idiosyncratic in their design; all used a monitor for their imagery instead of plastic or metal models that had to be painted, assembled, and tested. After PONG (Atari 1972) proved that arcade video games could be successful, it was natural that games would begin the transition from electromechanical contraptions to virtual on-screen versions of the same activities. But shooting games had already begun the process of becoming virtual as early as the 1920s.

Shooting Games Become Virtual

The first element of shooting games to become virtual was ammunition. So long as actual physical projectiles of some kind flew through the air between the player’s gun and the target, the field of action between the two had to be encased for safety reasons, as well as to recycle the ammunition and keep it from leaving the system. By using a light beam instead of a physical projectile, guns could once again be used in the open air just as in carnival shooting galleries; all that was needed was a way to sense when the beam of light struck its target.

William Gent used an electrical light gun in his Electric Rifle game of the 1920s (Pinrepair 2011c), and in 1936 the jukebox manufacturer Seeburg Corporation used the newly invented phototube, a vacuum tube with a light sensor inside it, in a duck shooting arcade game called Ray-O-Lite (Pinrepair 2011a). Players held a full-sized rifle which shot a light beam at the moving targets, each of which contained a phototube inside it; when the phototube detected the light beam, the hit was registered and the score increased. The “Ray-O-Lite” technology went on to be used in other Seeburg games like Shoot the Bear (1947), and other companies began to use similar light gun-based technologies. Eventually light gun technology became available in a consumer product for home use; in 1970, Nintendo released Gunpei Yokoi’s Beam Gun toy, a light gun that came with targets with photoelectric cells on them.

The Magnavox Odyssey was the first home video game system with a light gun peripheral (released in 1972, and based on Ralph Baer’s prototype of 1968), and reversed the usual hardware configuration by putting the photoelectric cell inside the gun barrel, where it would detect the light of the target on the television screen (though it would also register hits if pointed at a light bulb or any light source). Four Odyssey games used the light gun (Prehistoric Safari [1972], Shooting Gallery [1972], Dogfight [1972], and Shootout [1972]), in which the player fired at on-screen targets. The Odyssey’s shooting games represented a further advancement of the first-person shooting game into the virtual realm, as both their ammunition and their targets were now virtual.

Virtual shooting found its natural home in the video game, and video games had involved shooting from their very beginning. The first patent for an interactive electronic game, United States patent #2,455,992, “Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device,” was filed by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on January 25, 1947 and issued on December 14, 1948 (it did not involve a video signal, however, and could therefore arguably be denied the status of a “video” game). The description of the proposed device’s content describes a scenario with shooting going on:

In carrying out the invention a cathode-ray tube is used upon the face of which the trace of the ray or electron beam can be seen. One or more targets, such as pictures of airplanes, for example, are placed upon the face of the tube and controls are available to the player so that he can manipulate the trace or position of the beam which is automatically caused to move across the face of the tube. This movement of the beam may be periodic and its repetition rate may be varied. Its path is preferably caused to depart from a straight line so as to require an increased amount of skill and care for success in play...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction—Things That Go Boom: From Guns to Griefing
• Part One Tutorial
• Part Two Campaign
• Part Three Multiplayer
• About the Contributors
• Index of Authors
• Index of Games
• General Index
• Copyright