Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 216)

Trigger Happy
218
supposed viewpoint of the player’s character wandering
around an enemy-infested arena with a battery of
projectile weaponry.
30
Yet Battlezone, more than a decade previously, was
in effect a first-person shooter, and the first-person
viewpoint had even been crammed into a game released
for the Sinclair ZX81 home computer, 3D Monster
Maze, in which the player had to negotiate a black-and-
white maze (drawn in a very low-resolution
approximation of wireframe) while avoiding a
marauding Tyrannosaurus rex; the entire game, a
beautifully terrifying experience for any nine-year-old
of the day (me, for instance), ran in a mere 16 kilobytes
of code, which wouldn’t be nearly enough to run even
the joystick drivers for modern games.
Yet it was Wolfenstein that first situated the player
in “rooms,” connected by doors, with walls receding
realistically into the distance and other humans
wandering around to be killed. (In this case they were
Nazi officers, so no compunction need be felt about
blasting them to their doom.) Wolfenstein’s illusionism
was rather crude: there was no texture to the floors or
ceiling to aid the impression of forward
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30 With wry names. In the follow-up, Doom, the most potent weapon was
known by the acronym BFG: “big fucking gun.”