'Quantum Leap' Awards For FPS Games Revealed

simoniker writes "As voted by game industry professionals, the results of the Quantum Leap Awards for the first-person shooter genre have been revealed, honoring the titles which 'brought the FPS genre forward' in the biggest ways. The winner is a truly classic title, but there's at least one seminal FPS that, surprisingly enough, didn't make the top 5." The top 5 are, from 1 to 5, Half-Life, Quake, GoldenEye, Wolfenstein, and System Shock 2.

Comments

From TFA...

[AKAImBatman]

Wolfenstein 3D - because it was the first.

Historical Correct: Wolf3D was the first popular First Person Shooter. It was preceeded by Id Software's [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_3D]Cata comb 3D[/url], which was itself preceeded by [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertank_3D]Hov ertank 3D[/url]. The main technological difference between Hovertank and Catacomb is that Catacomb introduced textured walls.

Wolf3D's success over Catacomb probably had more to do with Apogee's marketing muscle than with it being truly the first FPS.

Re:Funny thing about halflife...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh god. How geeky am i? I know exactly what your talking about, but didn't suffer from it myself. There is actually a fix for this, use the console to change your field of view settings - don't remember the command myself, but google HL2 nausea and field of view. A lot of people complained about this and my wife got nauseous looking over my shoulder while playing.

Re:eh?

[anti-human 1]

"Halo was originally being developed for the PC before Microsoft bought Bungie, so we clearly would still have seen Halo, just on a different platform."

Halo was being developed for the Macintosh. Of course, (assuming) thanks to Microsoft, it was the last platform to have the game released upon. Remember how Bungie used to make games for the Mac? Oh man, what was that one game.... Marathon?

Marathon got an honorable mention, but I'm sure would have rated higher if it didn't have such a limited user base during its original lifetime. Of course, anyone can play it now with Aleph One.

Descent!

[ReverendLoki]

I would personally put Descent in over Quake. I remember trying to explain to a friend in a multiplayer game how to navigate to a certain spot, and just causing confusion. When he finally got there, turns out our "ships" were upside down to one another. The fact that there really was no universal up or down, just in relation to your ship, was great, and something I really haven't seen since. It was a pain to play with just a keyboard though.

I'm surprised that no mention was made of the Half Life mod community. Sure, Doom started the FPS modding in earnest, but it really flourished with HL.

It seems like the editors mostly agree with us

[mbessey]

It seems like the editors mostly agree with the Slashdot crowd, regarding games which should have been on the list but weren't.

On the following pages, we'll first present eight "honorable mentions" - games that, while certainly innovative and important, did not receive enough votes to make it into the top echelon.

Following this, we'll present the top five first-person shooters voted for by our readers, in reverse order, ending with the overall receipient of Gamasutra's first Quantum Leap Award, which received the largest amount of votes from game professionals.

So, they tallied up the votes, then decided that the results were totally stupid, and put some "honorable mentions" at the front of the list, including:
Doom
System Shock (the first one)
Marathon
Deus Ex
Alien vs Predator
Descent
Tribes

I think I like the "honorable mentions" list better than the actual top-5 list. I wonder if part of the problem was people not voting for Doom because it was "too obvious", and the wanted to pick something different.