Talk to anyone over the age of 50 about video games and chances are the first images that will resonate are those involving first-person shooters. Talk to anyone over the age of 15 and you've got a good shot at sparking memories of Call of Duty.

It's one of the most evocative, controversial genres - and also one of the most critically important in the development of gaming. FPS games have typically laid the groundwork and set the benchmark for other games in other genres, often pushing the boundaries of technology and moving the entire industry forward.

But the genre itself has also become a microcosm of gaming in general, gravitating towards different trends as tastes change and exploring different environments and elements such as stealth, vehicular combat and sprawling, open-worlds.

According to Wikipedia, one of the very first games to kickstart the genre was Maze War for the Xerox Alto. In the video below, Maze War was developed towards the end of 1979, although there are accounts of earlier versions being created for the Imlac PDS-1 in 1973.

"Not long after this the Imlacs were networked to the IBM 1800, and someone else took over the program.... and converted Maze to use the network and allow multiple machines to play Maze. A lot of time was used playing Maze (generally at night)," programmer Steve Colley, who worked at the AMES Research Centre for NASA in the early 1970s, wrote as part of a commemoration for the 30th anniversary for Maze War.

Roughly around the same time Spasim was developed for the PLATO Network (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations). Spasim was a 32-player networked game that allowed eight players each to inhabit one of four planetary systems. Rudimentary wire-frame graphics were used to depict planets, other ships and the world in general, as you'll see in the video below.

Space combat would continue to be a popular avenue for shooters for the late 70s and early 80s, although it's undeniable that the success of Star Wars in 1977 may have been a strong contributing factor among programmers (many of which had an affinity for the sci-fi genre).

The release of Star Raiders for the Atari 800 at the end of the 70s wasn't the progeny of first-person combat on the system, but its distinctive graphics at the time set the bar. It wasn't unusual for computer stores selling the system to put the Atari 800 in the window with Star Raiders running to draw customers in (also known as an "attract mode").





But the one game that many Generation X'ers will identify with when it comes to first-person shooters belongs to Atari and the green, wire-frame worlds within Battlezone.

Battlezone was released in the arcades in 1980 and quickly became one of the defining games of the era; Atari later ported the game to a range of operating systems and computers, such as MS-DOS, the Commodore 64, Apple II and the Game Boy.

But the first-person view wasn't going to be limited towards the world of tanks, with a young Richard Garriott - more commonly known as Lord British, developer of the Ultima series - releasing what would later become the genesis for a new age in role-playing games.

Akalabeth: World of Doom started development in Garriott's bedroom when he lived with his parents in the 1970s. Using D&D as a working title - and using several Dungeons & Dragons friends to help playtest - the young coder continued to work on the title until he came across Apple systems.

Garriott coded the game for the new system and successfully pitched Akalabeth - the new title - to his boss at a ComputerLand retail store in Texas. Despite only 16 copies being sold, Garriott's boss sent one of the 16 to the California Pacific Computer Company, which liked the game enough to purchase the publishing rights.

Through a deal that saw Garriott receive $5 for every copy sold, the young programmer netted himself US$150,000 (which is, according to the Inflation Calculator, worth approximately US$417,000 in today's money). The game became the basis for the Ultima series - indeed, much of the code used to render dungeons in the first Ultima was taken straight out of Akalabeth.

Many of the concepts already used in the games before were then upgraded and worked on over time. 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1981 took the idea of a 3D maze and pitted the player against a Tyrannosaurus Rex; Maze and 3D Maze, released a year later, would add colour, while games like Capture the Flag would add different elements.

It wasn't until a few years later that developers started to truly break away from established themes and conventions. Tau Ceti was one that led the trend with its visuals and a massive game world inspired by the space trading classic Elite. (Warning: the following video is ridiculously long, but it's the only one I could find that, for some reason, didn't spoil the ending.)

Towards the end of the 80s, the leap in technology with the Apple, Commodore 64 and Amiga systems was phenomenal compared to what came before. Games were more vibrant, expansive with a greater emphasis on sound and overall aesthetics.

Games like Dungeon Master and The Bard's Tale used all the basic elements and concepts established a decade ago, but were able to make them so much more engrossing now that the RAM and CPU restrictions were not so extreme.

Other games took advantage of computers' new capabilities in unusual ways, like The Sentinel: a game for the Atari ST that revolved around absorbing trees so you could create a vantage point high enough to spot your opponent. While certainly not a "first-person shooter" by any means, it was another expansion of the first-person viewpoint by using three-dimensional landscapes in a very different way.

It's worth noting that a lot of these games wouldn't stand as first-person shooters in today's age. Many of them aren't shooters at all. But it for games like DOOM, Quake, Call of Duty to exist, programmers had to develop the technology and become familiar with what the boundaries of what was possible - and then learn all the different ways they could push the limits.

Of course, the history of first-person shooters doesn't stop there. We'll return to the genre later this year, taking a look at some of the titles that changed not only first-person shooters - but gaming itself.

Alex Walker is the regular gaming columnist for ABC Tech + Games. You can follow him on Twitter at @thedippaeffect.