1992, id Software's Wolfenstein 3D introduced me to the peculiar concept of controlling a game from the perspective of the main character's own two eyes.

I was a fan of id's first successes with the Commander Keen series and thought that the technology used in this Nazi-killing game was interesting. For everything Wolfenstein 3D was though, the game mechanics never occurred to me as being something indicative of the future of interactive storytelling. The bulk of my interest in the game was almost entirely informed by a recently-developed thirst for the Third Reicht's blood gained during a much-enjoyed play-through of LucasArts' Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure. Had the Nazi subject matter not been hot on my mind, I probably wouldn't have given Wolfenstein 3D much consideration beyond the cool perspective gimmick. I definitely didn't play it more than several hours. I was nine years old. Sue me.

A year-and-some-change later, id made yet-another contribution to the still-experimental FPS genre with DOOM. Now at the ripe age of ten, I had slightly more freedom to play games on my own terms and bury my eyes into my dad's monitor for hours at a time. I experienced new emotions playing that game that no movie, book, or TV show could ellicit. Nonetheless, I still believed it was just another isolated example of a neat programming trick and eventually turned my attention back to the SNES and Genesis, which were both hitting their strides in the software department at the time.

Fast-forward several more years to 1996. My opinion of the first-person genre hadn't changed much. The recently-released Sony PlayStation had already introduced the "mainstream" consumer market to three-dimensional environments and character models, but this was a simple time before analog sticks, so camera control was nonexistent. Quake--id's next attempt at evolving the genre they created--hit in June, several months before the release of the Nintendo 64 and its revolutionary, analog-stick-equipped controller. As was the case for many, Quake was my first experience with a freely-controllable first-person camera in a three-dimensional game environment.

Given my long history with the interactive entertainment medium, I wouldn't blame you for expecting me to now expound on the life changing experience that running the Quake executable for the first time was for me; how my eyes were finally opened to the infinite possibilities that this magical technology embodied.

You, ma'am or sir, are wrong.

Oh Quake. I eagerly navigated my mouse cursor to your "New Game" option and clicked. My heart palpitated with anticipation as the percentage-loaded of your first level slowly crept towards 100%. Success. Quake, ooh-- oh, you are so pretty. I gently pushed up on my new, sparkling-clean mouse, certain you wouldn't have minded, and . . . what . . . what the hell was going on? Is that the ceiling? The floor? My hand recoiled in shock, sending the camera spinning further. Chaos. Every push of the mouse dragged me further into a state of complete disorientation, something I failed to come to grips with at the time. It seems odd now looking back, but I was at a loss. I turned off my computer, unable to comprehend what had just occurred. Confused, I returned to my predictable console world without even the briefest thought of looking for answers. Quake was just crazy, abstract nonsense as far as I could tell. My experience was akin to handing someone with not even the slightest fundemental understanding of gyroscopic technology a PlayStation 3 SIXAXIS controller and telling them to play Flower.

You are thinking right now, "this guy is an idiot."

I don't blame you. But I have an excuse. Kind of. The internet as we know it today was in its infancy and, as much as I loved the video game magazines of the era, I spent more time looking at screenshots of games than reading boring words about them. I mean, every jerk knows a picture is worth a thousand words right? Well, because of this gap of knowledge I had inadvertently created for myself, the paradigm shift in camera controls introduced in Quake was utterly alien to me. It was a foreign concept of which I had no point of reference to help me understand what I was experiencing. With Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, perspective was limited to an--as I saw it--manageable, single horizontal plane. It wasn't until Super Mario 64 was released several months later that I was able to finally wrap my head around having free-range control over a first-person camera in a 3D environment, quite possibly only due to how relatively slow and clunky it was in its use of the "C" buttons compared to the agile, mouse-controlled Quake camera.

I've long since embraced the near-infinite potential of the first person shooter mechanics which were introduced in the original Quake. Quake didn't exactly tell much of a story itself, but it certainly opened the door technologically for both the Thief and Half-Life series,' which led to more recent games such as Bioshock, Far Cry 2, and Fallout 3. Each of these epitomize the broadly-used phrase "immersive storytelling" while being as wildly different from Quake as they are one in the same. We are lucky to be able to experience the foreign worlds game designers have always strived to place us in from a perspective that is not so different from how we see our own world. As more games with rich stories use the camera system introduced in Quake, aren't afraid to take or leave the "shooter" in FPS, and create realities that are less and less distinguishable from our own, try to keep in mind that not so long ago, their existence was--at least to some people like myself--totally unfathomable experiences that may just of well have never existed.