'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

eh?

[legoburner]

No Unreal Tournament? That was the game that brought forward the genre for me though it was out at a very similar time to Quake 3. Ah well, where's the next stop Ziggy?

Re:eh?

[mgblst]

No Duke-Nukem, which bought a bit of humour, better levels (layering of levels on top of each other), and great attention to detail (you could actually play pool).

Re:eh?

[Shaper_pmp]

For games which "advanced the genre" this is a terrible list.

How can you put System Shock 2 in the top five when SS1 was the game that first introduced role playing/immersive elements into FPSs? Even the review basically admits SS2 just continued the direction SS1 had set and added more polish to the idea!

Now, SS2 might have been a better game, but it didn't "advance the genre" for shit compared to the original.

Likewise Goldeneye - what the fuck? So it was the first FPS on consoles, big whoop - it wasn't exactly groundbreaking at the time compared to what the PC was doing.

Sure it kick-started the market for FPSs on consoles, but "FPS market in consoles" != "FPS genre".

"Games such as Halo could only have been done thanks to Goldeneye" is complete bullshit, too. 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.

If, as they claim, we're rating "what pushed the genre forward", the list should have looked more like:

Wolfenstein 3D (invented the genre - try pushing harder than that!)

Doom (first made FPSs widely popular, kicked off the modding scene, invented "Deathmatch" multiplayer)

System Shock One (introduced the idea of "plot", and first to make an effort to immerse the player in a story)

Quake or Descent (first entirely true-3d games. Descent because it was the first, Quake because it was also massively popular and upped the bar for graphics/physics for all games to come)

Half-Life (upped player-immersion to truly cinematic levels, and pioneered playing the story rather than "play a bit/read some story/rinse and repeat")

Don't get me wrong - System Shock 2, Goldeneye and the rest were brilliant games (some better games than those above, but they didn't "push the genre forward" for shit.

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:From TFA...

[QuantumG]

Or, ya know, that fact that you got to kill nazis with a chaingun. That might have had something to do with it.

Re:From TFA...

[maynard]

Don't forget Asylum, which (regardless of what Wikipedia claims) was originally released on the TRS-80 in 1980 by Med Systems Software. Prior to Asylum, they released similar 3D maze games, Deathmaze 5000 and Labyrinth. The TRS-80 had a pixel resolution of 128x48, black & white. So... uh... no textures. And, oh yeah, why has everyone forgotten Battlezone?

Meh?

[JMZero]

I'd put Doom on the list before System Shock 2. Or Goldeneye. Or HL. Or Quake. Or Wolf3d.

Or System Shock 2. I mean, wtf?

I realize they didn't want to weigh down the list with Id games, but if you were going to drop one it would have to be Quake. Or Wolf3d. The BBS's were pretty excited about Wolf - but it was Doom that defined the genre and made it what it is.

Re:What?

[vain gloria]

No Daikatana?!

Bitches couldn't vote.

Re:Huh...

[Wilson_6500]

Popular does not imply genre-advancing.

Doom

[th1ckasabr1ck]

Of course Doom not being #1 is beyond ridiculous. For full disclosure I program games for a living and started with Doom mods, looking at the source, etc. - if it wasn't for Doom I would probably have a different job right now.

Doom was the first game with graphics good enough for non-gamers to understand what I was so excited about. It basically had the first big mod community, started deathmatch, brought LAN parties and big gaming tournaments into reality, etc.

Think of it this way: There were games before Doom and there were games after Doom. This division is more clear than probably any other game in history. 13 years later (or so) we're still running around in a 3D-ish world and pointing at what we want to die.

Don't get me wrong....

[JMZero]

I'd leave Quake on there too. All I'm saying is that Doom was more important.

Quake: introduced solid multiplayer over unreliable networks
Doom: introduced multiplayer

Quake: introduced quality lit/textured graphics, pushed development of 3d accelerated graphic cards
Doom: introduced graphics

I realize that's overstating the case a bit. But not much. Doom was an absolute revelation from on high - and it made waves far outside the gaming community. When Wolf3d came out, I started work on my own raycasting 3d engine. It was pretty good. When Doom came out, I started playing Doom. When Quake finally came out, I was fairly disappointed - it was nothing like the hype that preceded it. That said, Quake should clearly be on the top 5 list. But not before Doom.

actually, I'd put it on

[Travoltus]

because UT2004 brought everything together: maturity of genre, absolute adrenaline-raising fun, balanced weapons, great team play mechanics (exemplified at the next level by Onslaught, originally "invented" by threewave CTF for Quake), it made connecting to games a snap, player models worked perfectly (IME), etc etc...

UT2004 should be in the halls of fame for getting everything right and balanced, and for looking good doing it.

Disappointed

[argStyopa]

I'm actually rather disappointed in Gamasutra. It's a site I've come to respect for deep, narrow insights into the 'guts' of game programming and development. Their "what went right/what went wrong" serious is still outstanding.

But this? It's more like "quantum leap" the TV show, you know, where it starts with the premise that the main character doesn't know shit about what he's supposed to be doing?

It's nothing more than a collection of submissions with apparently very little editor review and no explanation of how they came to their conclusions, such as they are. I have no idea how they picked things, but frankly this list has no more (and possibly less) credibility than a list of what Gabe & Tycho played last year.

I mean, they simply posted the (sometime anonymous) comments from people like:
"Tribes was one of the first titles that saw the popularization of teamplay and the 'capture the flag' scenario as a critical game element."
Um, you mean ASIDE from the plethora of Quake mods that focussed PRECISELY on this like, oh, Teamfortress (which predated Tribes by 3 years)? Fact check, anyone?

I won't diss Half-Life - it really WAS a quantum leap forward in the ARTISTIC presentation of an FPS storyline (eat that, Roger Ebert), but to suggest that it somehow edges out Doom as the genesis of the genre? What universe did they live in?

And FWIW, I'd argue that 'honorable mention' should go to Gamespy. Anyone remember the horrible days of early quake connections? Gamespy (the launcher, as opposed to the megalomaniacal portal-site-empire) was a quantum leap forward in multiplaying, IMO.

Gamasutra, that was lame.

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.