7 Groundbreaking FPS Games No One Cares About Today

Usually, the history of the first-person shooter gets told through about eight games. More often than not, Doom, Half-Life, Halo, Call of Duty 4, and a short list of others carry the whole narrative as their own sort of wrecking crew, and everything else gets filed under "influence." The thing is, this breakdown usually conflates being remembered with being first, and that often isn't the case.

As I see it, all seven games below have been more or less power-washed from the collective consciousness, and as sad as that seems, it's not unreasonable. Particularly because—unfortunately—most of those shooters are now hard to buy, hard to run, or both. Nonetheless, credit is owed where credit is due. Though nobody cares about these titles today, each has a tab to settle for doing something unique or doing something revolutionary that the genre later adopted wholesale.

The Operative: No One Lives Forever

Eleven AI Stimuli, 1,700 Polygons, And Zero Legal Copies

Considering how uniquely groovy The Operative: No One Lives Forever looks in retrospect, when it shipped in November 2000 as the first game built on LithTech 2.5, its ambitions were as technical as they were tonal. Monolith's own materials described an AI sensory system responding to eleven separate stimuli—steps, gunfire, flashlights, footprints left in snow, bodies left where you dropped them, etc.—alongside a claim that its characters carried more polygons than any other PC action game on the market. It also had a weighted skeletal animation system with blending, which is why guards sit down at desks, stand back up, pick up mugs and open doors instead of standing in place waiting for a player to trip a trigger volume.

That may all seem milquetoast now, but in its time, Jeff Orkin, who engineered the AI for the sequel and later for F.E.A.R., placed NOLF as a key title in the generation that taught shooter enemies to find cover and flip furniture to make their own. The fact that it plays a sort of grandfatherly role to F.E.A.R., the game people still nominate whenever anyone asks about the best AI in a shooter, says more than I ever could. Unfortunately, No One Lives Forever cannot be legally bought anywhere, because the rights are split three ways between Warner Bros., Activision, and the former 20th Century Fox, and it seems none of the above wish to do anything about it.

Prey

Eleven Years In Development, Two (Nearly) Revolutionary Mechanics, And Only Three Years On Sale

In July 2006 (fifteen months before Portal arrived to define both of these ideas in the public consciousness), Prey had working portals and gravity that changed depending on which surface you were standing on, and that's pretty neat. Of course, Prey's portals were fixed in the world rather than player-placed, and Valve's team had been building Portal since mid-2005, after hiring the students behind Narbacular Drop. But even then, Scott Miller, who oversaw production of the game, has also said that a portal gun was cut for time somewhere in the game's eleven-year development hell.

Unfortunately, despite Prey's many under-recognized qualities—which include an incredible usage of Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper"—it was pulled from Steam on December 28, 2009, because it ran out of CD keys mid-sale. Every digital copy was drawn from a finite pool, and 2K never manufactured more, so the game was swapped for BioShock for the remainder of the promotion. It's an almost comically sad fact, but given the Sisyphean tragedy that is this franchise's history, perhaps it's at least fitting.

Kingpin: Life Of Crime

Fifteen Targetable Body Parts, Nine Months Before Soldier Of Fortune

In 1999, Kingpin: Life of Crime made locational damage a mainstream expectation, and almost nobody credits it for that. The game's developers, Xatrix Entertainment, rewrote Quake 2's model format specifically to support articulated characters, then split every human in the game into fifteen separate targetable pieces—feet, upper and lower legs, pelvis, torso, upper and lower arms, hands, head. As boilerplate as that may seem now, it was a truly impressive feat for the time.

Kingpin was not the first to do it in absolute terms, since Chasm: The Rift was shooting limbs off enemies back in 1997, but it was the game that put the system on the dominant commercial engine of the era. Soldier of Fortune usually receives the credit here, as it turned up nine months later with Raven's GHOUL damage model, but mostly, that comes down to circumstance. Columbine happened two months before Kingpin's release; in the tragedy's wake, retailers dropped it, Congress discussed it, and though it's now available through digital storefronts like GOG and Steam, the most forward-thinking thing about the game vanished under the weight of unjust controversy.

Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic

Booting Enemies Off Ledges Six Years Before Dishonored

Look, I get that Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is not (technically) a first-person shooter, but it belongs here anyway, because Arkane's first-person Source-built middle child truly is a marvel. In fact, the gameplay vocabulary that defined Dishonored's rise to stardom—multiple approaches, environmental problem-solving, first-person combat with real weight—all came from Dark Messiah, and not enough people know that.

Of course, saying it taught Arkane everything would be an overstatement, as Arx Fatalis had already established the studio's immersive-sim instincts back in 2002. But Dark Messiah influenced Dishonored through speed, physics, and the ability to kick stuff, one small joy that ends up carrying the entire combat system. It's a shame that these roots have been somewhat forgotten due to the mere passage of time. Thanks to Dark Messiah (which is thankfully still available for purchase), I'd wager I might've kicked more orcs into spike pits and off ledges than I have fired bullets in most generic shooters.

Singularity

The Last Game Raven Software Could Call Its Own

Though each worked very differently, there were three distinct time-centric FPS games in the three years from 2007-2010. Singularity was the last of the bunch, and it had more of an object focus. The central design concept was a Time Manipulation Device that works on specific objects, and the game's levels act as a puzzle box built from that distinction. In practice, it was a somewhat generic shooter made significantly more interesting by a time glove that could un-rust a collapsed staircase or hold a grenade in midair until you decided where it should go.

Frankly, the biggest problem with Singularity was that it sold under 400,000 copies; hardly anyone noticed it at the time because Activision released it with no advertising whatsoever. Despite that baffling decision, Activision was disappointed enough to scrap sequel plans. After a round of layoffs that year cut Raven to a single development team, the studio has spent every year since working as a Call of Duty support house. Despite still being available across most storefronts, much of what made Singularity interesting has been sadly relegated to the genre's past, as the last game Raven Software truly owned.

TimeShift

A Good Game Released In A Year Of Greats

TimeShift is another third of this time-focused FPS group—the first of the bunch, in fact—and it broke time in the opposite direction. Where Singularity has a tool that edits single objects, TimeShift allows players to stop, slow, or rewind the world itself. In the moment-to-moment gameplay, that meant being able to reposition enemies, dodge bullets, or freeze a room, walk through it, and pull weapons out of an enemy's frozen hands.

Ironic as it is, the game's real problems were with timing of a different sort. Although Saber Interactive had been building it since 2003, it had to endure a publisher handoff from Atari to Sierra and Vivendi, then a complete late-stage rebuild that swapped out the protagonist and threw away the original art direction. On top of all that, it landed on October 30, 2007, inside a twelve-month window that also produced Portal, BioShock, Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Crysis, Mass Effect, and Assassin's Creed. It was a good product in a year often described as the best in the medium's history, and though it's still available for purchase, it's never truly recovered any long-standing legacy.

Darkest Of Days

300 AI Soldiers On Screen, And A Tool That Outlived The Studio

Darkest of Days completes this accidental time trilogy, and it is the one that took the worst kicking on arrival. It doesn't manipulate time so much as tour through it, dropping players into Antietam, Little Bighorn, Tannenberg, and the eruption at Pompeii with a mix of period rifles and futuristic weaponry. Reviewers were unkind about the invisible walls and the rough edges, and they had a point in retrospect.

However, what endures about Darkest of Days is the fact that its Marmoset Engine put over 300 individual pathfinding AI soldiers on screen at once in 2009. In fact, midway through development, the team released its internal art viewer for free to the Polycount community; by their own account, the response convinced them they were better at making tools than they were at making games. Ultimately, developer 8monkey Labs disbanded, and that viewer became Marmoset Toolbag, which is still in active use across the industry. The shooter it was built to produce has been delisted on Steam since 2021, though.