How 1970s military simulations birthed FPS games—and why their forgotten roots reveal tech’s violent inheritance
Original framing: “What was the original first-person shooter? Two largely forgotten computer games from the 1970s ushered in the genre” — The Conversation - Global
The 1970s FPS games emerged from a lineage of military simulation technologies, including WWII-era flight simulators and Cold War nuclear command-and-control systems. *Maze War* (1973), for instance, was developed at NASA Ames Research Center, which had deep ties to the U.S. military’s space program (e.g., tracking satellites for missile defense). The 1960s *Tank* game, created at BBN Technologies, was explicitly designed to train naval officers in tactical maneuvering, proving that FPS mechanics were not 'invented' but *repurposed* from existing warfare tools. This history is critical because it reveals how gaming’s violent aesthetics were not accidental but a direct inheritance from state-sponsored technological militarization.
The origins of first-person shooter games are not a story of innocent innovation but a **direct inheritance from Cold War militarization**, where universities like MIT and Stanford served as nodes in a **state-corporate-entertainment complex**.
The erasure of this history allows Silicon Valley to mythologize itself as a land of 'disruptive' genius while obscuring its roots in **defense contracts, precarious labor, and violent aesthetics**. Cross-culturally, games like *Spacewar!* and *Kosmonavt* reveal how different political economies—capitalist, socialist, and colonial—similarly weaponized technology for control, yet framed it as entertainment. Indigenous and marginalized perspectives expose the **ritualistic violence** embedded in these games, while trickster readings reveal the absurdity of celebrating systems designed to **desensitize players to war**. The path forward lies in **auditing gaming’s military past**, centering **Indigenous and worker-led design**, and using **satirical remakes** to disrupt the illusion of neutral play. Without this reckoning, FPS games will remain what they were born to be: **tools of statecraft repackaged as fun**.