I’m trying to rebuild the exact timeline in my head, but there are five that come to mind:
Doom - I have a memory of playing this on our home PC, but I don’t think it was my first. I think I found it after having tried others; I remember having fun and thinking the presentation was quaint. I spent a few afternoons with it at most.
Goldeneye N64 - I watched someone play this like once, and then maybe once or twice after I played it with a few friends.
Rainbow Six [1998] - My dad was a Tom Clancy nerd and got this close to release. It was complicated as all get out and I distinctly remember playing it with him a few times. We got stuck on the first mission because we didn’t know how to signal ready to our squad and breech the first door. We tried a bunch of different stuff before learning from the manual that the “O” key was used for lockpicking.
TimeSplitters - This is the first one I spent any real time with, we rented it a few times for our PS2. We played death match as a family and did a few of the story missions on co-op. I vividly remember the setting progression of Egyptian tomb to gang-infested Chinese restaurant to future space bullshit. It’s the first time I played a twin-stick console shooter and the first one that really made an impression. It was a bomb-ass game.
Halo - Duh. This is the game that made all my friends get Xbox’s. We played the shit out of it. I remember hiding this fact from my parents because it was violent and bloody (the blood in CE looks so quaint now, but I was a sheltered kid, my Dad’s games notwithstanding. The “blood” and “gore” is what bothered them specifically). My high point with the game was at a Halo 2 release party with a different friend group where after doing middlingly well at the sequel, we busted out the original and I was the undisputed champion. I never saw some of those kids again but I still remember pistol sniping them across the map on Hang ‘em High while they begrudgingly acknowledge that I was actually good at the first game.
Call of Duty [2003] - A friend clued me in to the demo which I played through dozens of times; I still know many of the beats to the daytime St. Mere Eglise level. My Dad bought the full game for me to play on his new laptop when I went with him on a business trip. This was the first FPS I truly owned myself and I played through it over and over. I bought United Offensive with my own money the day it came out and took the manual to school with me to read since I couldn’t get very far in the campaign the evening before. I preordered COD2 as well, and sometimes I play both it and the first game on lower graphics for that extra nostalgia.
It took me really thinking about this to realize that in terms of hours played, I think I’ve spent more time with shooters than with any other genre. Which is weird because I would not have given that as my first guess if asked the question directly. A big chunk of that is TF2, but that’s a story for a different day.
