Half-Life - #1 Top Shooters - IGN

When you look at the history of first-person shooters, it all breaks down pretty cleanly into pre-Half-Life and post-Half-Life eras.

In the mid 1990s we got games like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Star Wars: Dark Forces. Great games? Absolutely. But what's different in those games compared to what came after is that their worlds feel more like run-and-gun themeparks than actual places.

In November of 1998, everything changed. Suddenly shooters were all trying to copy the Black Mesa Research Facility and its amazing sense of place. Using scripted events like the classic introductory tram ride and the massacre of the scientists, Half-Life gives us the impression that this isn't a world that exists solely to give Gordon Freeman something to shoot at. It's a world where something terrible and mysterious is happening, and we just happen to be caught in the middle of it. This approach to storytelling has become the cornerstone of first-person-shooter design today.