There are two kinds of first-person shooters:
Duck Hunt clones and
Doom clones.
Duck Hunt clones
These shooters place you in a fixed position or on a track. You cannot in general control your motion. Many games of this genre have appeared in arcades: Duck Hunt, Barker Bill's Trick Shooting, Area 51, the Virtua Cop series, Pokemon Snap, etc. In fact, Goldeneye 007 was originally developed as this type but was retooled before release as Rare's developers realized the power of the N64 hardware.
Doom clones
The first Doom-style FPS was Battlezone. It used wireframe graphics, but it did contain the essential elements of a Doom-style game: forward and backward movement, turning, and firing, from a first-person perspective. The evolution of these game engines was straightforward:
- Battlezone: wireframe polygon graphics. Battlezone was even used to train Army tank drivers.
- FaceBall 2000: flat-shaded raycasted walls and simplistic scaled sprites
- Tech demos at id Software: flat raycasted walls with better looking scaled sprites
- Wolfenstein 3D: raycasted walls now have textures, and the player can move sideways
- Doom, Heretic, and Duke Nukem 3D: walls are stored in a BSP data structure and can now be at several heights and can be placed other than north-south or west-east. The physics allow for sideways movement while turning, bringing circle strafing into play. The engine fakes pitching the camera (looking up or down) by shifting the entire view up or down a few pixels. core10k notes that games of this era often had no falling damage because it was more fun that way.
- Descent: rotation of the camera in any direction; six degrees of freedom; polygonal characters instead of scaled sprites
- Quake: a Descent-like engine with gravity in the physics. First to introduce playable remote multiplayer deathmatch (through QuakeWorld patches).
- Quake II and Half-Life: basic multitexture
- Half-Life: continuous play with no breaks between levels supports a semi-plausible storyline
- Team Fortress Classic and Counter-strike (mods for Half-Life): clever outdoor terrain hacks and focus on team play
- Quake III Arena: first time a story is applied to a straight deathmatch. Also, there are enough polys that surfaces can be curved.
- Tribes: true outdoor terrain engine