What if the most profitable gaming genre in history started as something nobody intended to sell?
Call of Duty generates billions annually. Battlefield, Halo, and Apex Legends print money through season passes and cosmetic microtransactions. The first-person shooter dominates gaming revenue charts year after year. The entire ecosystem exists because some students working at NASA in the early 1970s got bored and decided to mess around with mainframe computers during their work placements. They created Maze War and Spasim as academic research projects, testing what primitive computing hardware could accomplish. Nobody planned to commercialize them. Nobody anticipated they were inventing a genre that would eventually dwarf Hollywood box office revenues.
The Accidental Inventors
Maze War emerged between 1973 and 1974 when high school and college students working at NASA facilities experimented with creating a game where players could move through 3D space and shoot at each other. The concept sounds obvious now, but computer graphics barely existed. Monitors displayed green text on black screens. The idea of rendering three-dimensional movement in real-time pushed against fundamental hardware limitations. The students built the first prototype FPS because they wanted to see if they could, not because market research indicated demand for virtual violence simulators.
The graphics were primitive even by 1970s standards. Players navigated wire-frame corridors that looked like technical drawings. Other players appeared as eyeballs floating in the maze. The visual presentation screamed “research project” instead of entertainment product. The revolutionary element was the gameplay concept, not the execution. Moving through virtual space, tracking targets, and firing weapons created an experience that had never existed before. The limitations of 4-kilobit memory systems and one-frame-per-second refresh rates didn’t stop the core idea from working.
Spasim arrived shortly after with even more ambitious goals. While Maze War focused on creating the basic FPS experience, Spasim pushed multiplayer boundaries by supporting 32 simultaneous players. Modern networking infrastructure struggles with that player count in fast-paced shooters. Spasim accomplished it on hardware that stored less information than a single modern JPEG image file. The frame rate made gameplay glacial by any contemporary standard, but the technical achievement demonstrated that networked multiplayer gaming could work decades before internet infrastructure existed to support it properly.
Research Projects, Not Products
Neither Maze War nor Spasim were designed as commercial products. They existed as academic research exploring what emerging computer technology could accomplish. The students working on these projects weren’t entrepreneurs building gaming companies or developers pitching publishers. They were researchers testing hypotheses about human-computer interaction, networked communication, and real-time graphics rendering. The games proved their concepts worked, then largely disappeared into academic archives while their creators moved on to other research problems.
The lack of commercial intent meant these projects avoided the constraints that shape modern game development. No marketing departments demanded features that would appeal to broad audiences. No publishers imposed deadlines or budget restrictions. No shareholders required quarterly revenue growth. The developers could experiment freely, implementing ideas that seemed interesting without worrying whether they would generate profits. This freedom produced innovations that commercial developers might have rejected as too risky or technically impossible.
The irony is obvious. The most profitable gaming genre emerged from projects that never intended to make money. Modern FPS games generate billions through carefully calculated monetization strategies, annual release schedules, and focus-tested features designed to maximize player spending. The foundational concepts came from students experimenting during work placements, creating experiences nobody asked for because the technology made them curious about possibilities.
From Research to Revenue
The gap between Maze War’s 1973 creation and Wolfenstein 3D’s 1992 commercial success spans nearly two decades. The core FPS concept existed throughout those years, but technology needed to catch up before commercial viability became realistic. IBM 386 processors, VGA graphics cards, and floppy disc distribution systems created the infrastructure that allowed id Software to build Wolfenstein 3D as a product consumers could purchase and play at home. The technical limitations that made Maze War a fascinating research project prevented it from becoming a commercial success.
Wolfenstein 3D generated controversy for simulating violence, established the FPS genre commercially, and sold 3.5 million copies. Doom followed in 1993, creating cultural phenomenon status and pushing the boundaries of what PC gaming could accomplish. Quake arrived in 1996 with true 3D graphics and a Nine Inch Nails soundtrack. These games built directly on concepts that Maze War and Spasim established decades earlier. The commercial developers refined the execution and made the experience accessible to mainstream audiences, but the fundamental ideas came from those NASA research projects.
Duke Nukem 3D, GoldenEye 007, Half-Life, and Halo continued the evolution through the late 1990s and early 2000s. Each iteration added personality, storytelling, or technical innovation while maintaining the core concepts that students created in the 1970s. Move through 3D space. Track targets. Fire weapons. The basic FPS formula remained constant even as graphics, sound design, and storytelling capabilities advanced dramatically.
Modern Forgetting
Ask most FPS players about genre history and they’ll mention Doom or maybe Wolfenstein 3D. Maze War and Spasim remain forgotten outside gaming history circles and academic research discussions. The games that established foundational FPS concepts get no recognition while commercial products that refined those concepts receive all the credit. The pattern repeats across gaming history where research projects and experimental prototypes create innovations that commercial products later monetize and popularize.
The commercial games deserve credit for making FPS gaming accessible and enjoyable for mainstream audiences. id Software’s contributions transformed academic concepts into cultural phenomena. The execution mattered as much as the concept. Maze War proved FPS gameplay could work but couldn’t deliver an experience compelling enough to attract audiences beyond curious researchers. Doom delivered both the concept and an execution that made millions of people want to play.
The forgetting becomes problematic when it erases understanding of where ideas originated. Modern FPS development treats the genre as something that emerged fully formed from commercial game studios. The reality is messier. Students experimenting with primitive hardware established the concepts. Academic researchers proved multiplayer networking could work. Commercial developers refined the execution and found audiences. The genre developed through collaboration between research institutions and commercial entities, not through isolated genius at game studios.
What We Lost
Modern FPS development operates under completely different constraints than the research projects that invented the genre. Every feature decision gets evaluated for monetization potential. Every design choice considers competitive balance for eSports leagues. Every visual element gets tested against market research data about player preferences. The freedom to experiment without commercial pressure disappeared as FPS gaming became a multi-billion dollar industry with shareholder expectations and quarterly earnings targets.
The loss of experimental freedom shows in how conservative modern FPS design has become. Call of Duty releases annual iterations that change cosmetic elements while maintaining nearly identical core gameplay. Battlefield makes maps larger and adds vehicles but preserves the same fundamental experience. New FPS games that attempt genuine innovation struggle to find audiences because players have been trained to expect specific features and mechanics that define the genre. The boundaries that Maze War and Spasim ignored because they didn’t know they existed now constrain every commercial FPS project.
Research-driven game development still exists but happens primarily in academic institutions studying specific problems like AI behavior or accessibility features. The game industry largely separated from research institutions as commercial pressures demanded faster development cycles and more predictable results. The experimental culture that created Maze War would struggle to survive in modern game studios where every project needs clear revenue projections and defined target audiences before receiving funding approval.
Could the next major gaming genre emerge from research institutions the way FPS gaming did in the 1970s, or have commercial pressures made experimental game development impossible outside indie studios operating on minimal budgets?
