The First Person Shooter genre is, as its name suggests defined by both the player’s perspective being the same as that of the player character’s perspective and by the core mechanic of shooting things (usually enemy NPCs) with a ranged weapon. This naturally leads FPS games to usually fall into a subcategory of Action Games.

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Early games lauded as having defined and popularised the genre include DOOM (1993) & Wolfenstein 3D (1992), which earned their developer id Software a reputation for being genre leaders ever since their release. However the first FPS games date back as far as Maze War (1973) and Spasim (1974).

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Up until approximately 2000 the genre was primarily developed for the Personal Computer, but with the release of Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) on the Xbox by Bungie and GoldenEye 007 (1997) on the Nintendo 64 by Rare the genre began to spread to home consoles like the Xbox, Playstation 2, GameCube and their successors.