The group included Javy Gwaltney, former Paste contributor and current Game Informer Associate Editor Patrick Lindsey and Reid McCarter, game critics and co-editors of the book Shooter: 15 Critical Essays About Games With Guns Paste contributor Suriel Vazquez Paste news editor Jim Vorel former Paste games intern Eric Van Allen and Paste games and comedy editor Garrett Martin. Paste convened a small group of knowledgeable critics and FPS aficionados to wade through the genre’s history and come up with a list of the 50 best first-person shooters ever made.
Beyond commercial success, the combination of a first-person perspective and the easy-to-understand interface of shooting things has provided a reliable framework for designers to challenge and entertain players while experimenting with storytelling, world-building and notions of player choice. In the ‘90s the shooter exploded from weird shareware files we’d download from a local BBS into the biggest genre in the medium, and it still dominates the sales charts today.
Whether you like the genre or not, it’s impossible to deny that some of the biggest and most groundbreaking games ever made have been first-person shooters.
