IGN have undertaken the mammoth task of compiling the Top 100 First Person Shooters of all time from all of the shooters released in the past 20 or so years. It’s great to see Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory make the list a full decade after its release, deploying in the #84 spot.
Back in the dark age of the FPS, multiplayer was nothing but a bunch of people running in every direction at once with their triggers held down like savages. Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory wasn't the first game to feature objective-focused, class-based competitive play, but its free, open-sourced nature exposed a massive amount of new players to the concept, opening the door for what eventually grow into a much larger trend in multiplayer design.
As a reboot of the franchise that started the genre, Return to Castle Wolfenstein had a lot to live up to. And though it didn't constitute the wheel re-inventing some had hoped it would be, it was still an excellent take on the space between fighting soldiers and fighting hellspawn. In many ways it was just a natural extension of Wolfenstein 3D's controversial final boss, taking historical myths about the Nazis dabbling in the occult and swinging for the fences with them. But it would be the multiplayer that would be remembered most fondly, keeping scads of frag-heads tethered to their gaming rigs until the wee hours for months and years to come.
The great-granddaddy of first-person shooters, Wolfenstein 3D launched the genre we take for granted today. It was inspired by Castle Wolfenstein and its sequel, a pair of relatively crude 2D stealth shooters that pit you against Nazi guards. The metamorphosis into 3D (well, pseudo 3D) was like sorcery in 1992. Gone were the stealth elements; the golden age of run-and-gun shooters erupted with the roar of a chaingun as you blasted through three glorious episodes filled with Nazis and even Adolf Hitler himself as a boss. Id's breakout achievement directly (and indirectly) gave birth to Doom, Rise of the Triad, and every other shooter that followed.
You can check out the rest of the list over at IGN.
Source: ign.com | etpro.de | splashdamage.com
