First Person Shooters On Xbox

The most popular genre on any console, thanks to awesome groundbreaking games offering up carnage and immersion in equal measure, it was Xbox that truly redefined the FPS.

- Chris Burke/Adam Bryant/Robin Valentine

Xbox absolutely owns shooters. Alright, so first-person shooters had a long history before Microsoft’s console hit the market in 2001, but when Bungie and Microsoft declared that launch game Halo was Combat Evolved, this was no empty boast. That Microsoft built its entire gaming empire on Master Chief’s utterly superior FPS is a matter of historical fact, so as far as we’re concerned, 2001 might as well be Year Zero when it comes to shooters. Over the following pages, OXM presents a brief history of the FPS, and we round up the best shooters you can play right now on Xbox One.

Let us briefly return to a time before Halo, or ‘BH’, as we’ll henceforth never refer to it. Pioneer of the genre, id Software developed Doom and Wolfenstein 3-D in the early ’90s, inspired by MS-DOS game Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (a first-person RPG with texture-mapped environments where you could, gasp, look up and down). Doom was so successful that long before the term FPS was coined, other FPS games were known as ‘Doom clones’. Around this time, Chicago lads Alex Seropian and Jason Jones, influenced by id’s work, were making the Wolfensteinhomaging Pathways Into Darkness for the Apple Mac, as the fledgling Bungie. Unveiled at the 1999 Macworld Conference, this was going to be another Mac game from Seropian and Jones. They’d already by this point enjoyed success with FPS Marathon on the Apple computer. But in 2000, Microsoft bought Bungie, and its upcoming Halo project became the Xbox’s flagship title.