In an interview today with Wired, John Carmack, the programmer of Doom and grandpapa of the first-person shooter, had the following to say about the longevity of the battle-worn genre. 

I think that first-person shooter is a stable genre that’s going to be here forever, just like there are going to be driving games forever. There’s something just intrinsically rewarding about turning around a corner and shooting at something.

This is similar to the old adage about rock and roll never dying. While there will always a place for a kick-ass four- (or five-) man bands like The Strokes, rock has evolved from its early days of rockabilly into a wide breadth of musical styles, from black metal to shoegaze. 

Though the virtual shotgun has only been around for a relatively short period when compared to the Stratocaster, we’re already starting to see the conventions of the shooter being reconfigured into entirely different types of games. The most obvious example is Portal, in which the stereotype of the big-f’ing-gun was rethought, instead using the action of shooting to bend physics and solve puzzles through space and time. 

The evolution of the first-person shooter can be seen in many titles since, from games that use guns to do the unexpected, like rotating planets in MirrorMoon, to games that ditch the guns altogether, but stick with the input conventions, like Gone Home. The FPS may never die, but it won’t be the same forever. 

(image via Tonedeaf)