You never forget your first.
It seems like there’s a fairly big movement to get back to the roots of first person shooters lately, with games like Toxikk, Xibalba, and even the Doom franchise returning to the mechanics and sensibilities that started it all. Wrack began this journey six long years ago and has almost reached its full release. If you have great memories of those early “Doom clone” days, share one with us in the comments and you can win a copy of Wrack on Steam! To get things started, some of the staff has shared their own. Just add your memory from those early corridor-stomping days in the comments, no matter how brief, before August 19th at noon Eastern time and you’re entered to win one of five Steam codes for Wrack!*
Launching Grenades in Team Fortress – Matt Snee
Back in the wild days of the ‘90s, there was no real internet except for services like AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, and BBSs where you could download porn. This was also before consoles could handle FPS games, of which there was only Doom really, so if you wanted to get your frag on, you went with a local area network -- usually only available at colleges and corporations. This was where my mind was first blown by an FPS, playing at Del Tech, a community college in Delaware where I grew up. One weekend my friends and I went down there, booted up Doom, and the rest of my life would never be the same. It was amazing -- like nothing else I had ever experienced, and I'll never forget the thrill.
As the internet improved, and the 90's grew up, we saw the release of Quake and Half-Life, which were soon blessed with online play; unheard of in those days. Fragging online was a revelation, and I weaved through bullets and blasted opponents into gib upon gib. But simple deathmatch, as amazing as it was, was nothing compared to the next step: Team Fortress.
A lot of people forget this was originally a Quake mod, and I can still remember a darkly lit, gothic 2Fort map where people battled for the flag and kills. Back then, we could rocket jump pretty easily onto the battlements, and there were grenades (the Heavy and Demoman had the best versions). I imagine grenades were eventually cut due to excessive spamming when the game was reborn in its Half-Life-based incarnation.
Half-Life allowed Team Fortress to be further refined, and its popularity and legend grew. You could still rocket jump pretty well, but the classes and weapons we have today were further ironed out, and we also saw new game play modes like Assassination, where one team would try to protect a VIP, while the other tried to kill him. It was great!
Even though Team Fortress 2 eventually escaped its development Hell, I'll never forget those early days with the original mod, crouched underneath the stair in 2fort, waiting with my grenade launcher.
Hey, Joe! Where you Goin’ with that Gun in your Hand? – Travis Hawks
Everything got completely screwed up when the school board approved “block scheduling” before my Junior year in high school. Instead of six subjects a day, we were shifting to eight classes every two days. What was tossed around as the benefit of this change is long forgotten to me, but the end result was that we had to suddenly pick two more classes to take each semester. The school panicked and created some of the sloppiest electives ever improvised by a teaching staff in the history of education. While I was registering for World Literature (to be with my girlfriend, of course) and Multimedia Technology, my friend, Joe, took a bigger risk and signed up for Computer Hardware and Repair, which turned out to be a weeks-long Doom II LAN party.
Were it not for Joe and that class, I wouldn’t have known about some demon-shooting game from the Wolfenstein 3D people. I was becoming farther and farther removed from video games of all kinds at that stage in my life (it’s that girlfriend thing again), so it was nice to hear about the latest. Every day, he’d tell me about how many “frags” he’d gotten and the amazing and violent weapons there were. It sounded intense and a little nuts that you could play against other people on different computers at the same time – the hell? His memorable stories about dark corridors filled with demons and classmates trying to shoot him even freaked me out a little and made me wonder if I would be able to even handle such a thing.
It was a few more years before I tried any version of Doom or Quake on my own, and it all felt pretty much the way I had imagined it. None of the actual games I played stick in my mind as well as Joe’s stories, though, which is a good reminder that the best parts of those early FPS days were the friends you played against and the stories you created and shared.
Mom was Coerced by James Bond – Nick DiMola
It all started with GoldenEye 007; well, that’s not entirely true. It actually started with Wolfenstein 3D, but I only had a fleeting moment with the game before having it rapidly ejected from my SNES and swiftly returned to Funcoland once my mother realized what I had bought. I got a taste of the now common FPS and wanted more. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t get back to the genre until GoldenEye 007 released some years later on the N64. But there’s no question that it was worth the wait.
On Christmas Day, I unwrapped what would quickly become one of my most treasured games. My brothers and I popped it in our N64 and huddled around the tiny TV that was set up in their bedroom. Each with a controller in hand, we dove into the game’s multiplayer. It was incredible – running through the levels, discovering all the hidden passageways, planning the best routes for sneak-attacks and gun/ammo/armor collection. Oh, and of course, the mad dash for choosing OddJob to be a cheating bastard.
It didn’t take long before we were making up our own rules and turning on different cheats to make the experience more interesting. As time went on, my brothers eventually got bored with the game and I had conquered the single player mode in 00 Agent settings, but I just couldn’t shake my need for shooting things.
When I realized that the computer we had in the basement was more than just a Jazz Jackrabbit and Sim City 2000 machine, I found myself run-and-gunning with Doom, but the inability to mouse look was a real bummer. Thankfully our old home computer was replaced shortly thereafter and I found myself becoming highly vested in Unreal Tournament, Half Life and its active mod scene, and Quake III Arena – which took several acts of God to get working on the new, but still crappy computer. Ah, those were the good old days.
Zombies and Nazis: A Winning Combo – Justin Matkowski
In the early ‘90s, my family didn’t own a PC, so my introduction to first person shooters came while exploring the claustrophobic halls of Wolfenstein 3D on my SNES. It was totally unlike any gaming experience I had up until that point, and I remember the tension of not knowing what lay beyond the next door or around the next corridor. FPS gaming was still in its infancy, and I'll never forget the sheer terror of opening a door only to find a hulking Aryan sporting a Gatling gun in each arm, and then slamming the door and hauling ass away from it like a true war hero.
Mixed in with my introduction to the frights of Wolfenstein 3D and first person shooters, I discovered Night of The Living Dead and the zombie apocalypse genre. The possibilities of player-immersion that were inherent to the FPS genre left me pining for a free-roaming epic in which the story of NOTLD never ended. I often daydreamed about an open-ended game where you traveled the country side, struggling for survival against the hordes of the undead. Interestingly enough, two decades later, I have received my wish with titles like DayZ and Sony's upcoming H1Z1.
*Steam codes only valid for U.S. accounts. Winners will be picked at random from comments that share an actual memory.
I heard they were good games from someone on pixlbit. ; )
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