The level of anticipation and the eventual sales of Bioshock took Irrational, 2K, and the existing fans of this sub-genre genuinely by surprise. These kinds of games have been around for a long time now; there have been hits, but Bioshock is by far the first to be a runaway success. It took the Boston-based developer the best part of a decade to get it signed, cost them their independence and at the last moment, even their humanising name. With all this success, and along with the fresh, emerging S.T.A.L.K.E.R series, it seems likely that we could see several more of these kinds of games before this generation is over. In this series of short bits (rather than a REAL feature I'd most likely get bored of before it reached a postable state), I'm going to tell the story of the First Person Looter, in brief, for the uninitiated.Bioshock is the latest in a family of games that stretches back to the early 1990s. There are generally considered to be two major schools of the first person action game: the Id Software school, and the Looking Glass Studios school. In the early to mid 1990s, pioneering designers and programmers in these two companies laid the foundations of what would become one of today's most important genres. Many of the most prolific current FPS developers' roots can be traced back to these two companies and their various offshoots. Obviously we all know which style dominated, and still dominates the field, but the Looking Glass legacy has endured nevertheless.

Looking Glass Studios was a medium sized developer of predominantly PC games whose existence spanned the 1990s. Blue Sky Productions, as they were originally founded, gained attention with its spin-off of the successful Ultima series of computer role playing games. Ultima Underworld was among the first three-dimensional first person games, and used very advanced 3D technology for its time. Id's John Carmack has claimed his inspiration for Wolfenstein 3D's graphics engine came with a technical demonstration of the Underworld engine.

After completing a second Underworld, the team decided it was bored of dungeons and dragons, and looked to develop their ideas and engine into a cyberpunk setting, and System Shock was born. The original Shock differed from its contemporaries, namely Doom, obviously with its RPG elements, complex interface and now genre staples such as the retrieval of audio diaries of NPCs which give hints and intend to convey the plot in a subtler way than cut scenes with NPCs who had no hope of being convincing with the technology at the time.

Working at Looking Glass on these games were programmer Doug Church and Producer Warren Spector, whose background lay in table-top role playing games. After System Shock, Ken Levine, a jaded film and theatre writer joined the company for a brief spell, he described working for Looking Glass as "game-design university". At least one of those names appears in the credits of every game that you can squeeze into this sub-genre, with the exception obviously of this year's Ukrainian developed 'S.T.A.L.K.E.R'.

System Shock was a critical success, but sales were slow. The game was initially released on floppy disks, the CD-ROM version with voices and higher resolution only came later, which the team later regretted. As Looking Glass moved on to develop Thief, a group of designers decided to leave, and founded their own company, Irrational Games.

>>Continue to Part 2