What was the original first-person shooter? Two largely forgotten computer games from the 1970s ushered in the genre

Answering a reader's question, this piece traces the first-person shooter genre to ‘Maze War,’ built at a NASA research center starting in 1973, and ‘Spasim,’ developed a year later at the University of Illinois on the PLATO networked system. Both let players move through a 3D space and shoot at other players or robots, using vector graphics because the hardware behind PONG and the Magnavox Odyssey couldn't render true depth.

‘Maze War’ let players move smoothly down hallways but turn only in 90-degree increments, and introduced the unsettling possibility of being shot from behind by someone never seen. Because both games ran on hardware most people never had access to, NASA minicomputers and university networks, they were largely forgotten until vector-graphics arcade hits like ‘Battlezone’ popularized the genre in 1980.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.