Genre-Defining Weapons - Guns That Every Shooter Game Needs
Rifles, pistols, shotguns, sniper rifles, explosives – over the years, a set of weapons has been accompanying us in most games. What were the most significant guns that inspired subsequent developers?
Table of Contents
- Genre-Defining Weapons - Guns That Every Shooter Game Needs
- Crowbar from Half-Life, or something for direct encounters
- The pistol from Wolfenstein 3D – absolute basics
- A Doom shotgun, i.e. power at close range
- M4A1 and AK-47 from Counter Strike – automatic rifle
- AWP from Counter-Strike, a sniper rifle
- Bow from Thief, for silent kills
- Grenades from Deus Ex, i.e. explosive surprises
- HECU RPG from Half-Life, the rocket launcher
- BFG 9000 from Doom, a weapon of mass destruction
- Gravity Gun from Half-Life, a strange weapon
Grenades from Deus Ex, i.e. explosive surprises
Grenades are the silent heroes. We never see them on the screen for more than a few seconds, they are not iconic, they do not offer a great feeling, recoil – but they are always somewhere at hand, and when they are not there, we usually feel very bad about it. They are slightly less powerful than rocket launchers, require more precision aiming dexterity, but are deadly to anyone standing too close to the blast site. The first game with grenades was the great Star Wars: Dark Forces in 1995, a "doom-like" (as it was called then) game from the Star Wars universe. Players could utilize a Thermal Detonator known from the movies, which operated in two modes – explosion on impact and a 3-second delay. They later appeared in the groundbreaking GoldenEye and Half-Life. In both games, these were the American Mk 2 grenades, the production of which was discontinued during the Vietnam War. The physics of throwing the explosives was then still greatly simplified, and the operation was limited only to the explosion itself.
Deus Ex from 2000 brought much more to the topic of grenades – there, we could use, among others, mandatory today in every futuristic EMP or gas grenades. At the same time, Project I.G.I. added a deafening flashbang. Two years later, America's Army had a full kit, including smoke and incendiary grenades. The explosive arsenal in FPS games didn't stop there. Various grenade launchers became available, with the popular M203 at the forefront, and the Duke Nukem 3D remotely detonated bomb was replaced with C4 charges over time. The final scream of fashion are RC cars exploding upon reaching their destinations.
