"FPS documentary" review
FPS stands for First.Person.Shooter, so games like Call of Duty, Doom, Battlefield, Wolfenstein, Bioshock, Ghost recon, etc. The documentary follows what started as programming experiments in isolated laboratories holding wall to wall computers to becoming an industry and genre of gaming worth billions of dollars.
The majority of the documentary focuses on the innovations made in the 80s-90s and gives what comes across at footnotes to the 2000s era. So you'll see interviews with John Carmack and John Romero and extended members of their team talk about how games were sold, financed, inspired and ended up inspiring each other in the span of months to years.
I understand why it's there but I was moreso looking forward to see the documentary cover the 2000s as that's what I grew up with. As when I see "F.P.S" I'm thinking games like: COD modern warefare 1-3 , spec ops the line, Battlefield bad company, Battlefield 3, Bulletstorm, Dark void, Portal, Resistance 1-3, Painkiller and Vanquish. I was let down to see at most a couple references to the popularity of games like Gears of war and the eventual evolution we have now which is either a hero shooter like Overwatch or the more indie focused Boomer shooter revival via games like "Dusk"
Why not mention the over the top arena gameplay that sprung from Quake Arena that IMO got perfected in games like Painkiller and Serious Sam that were some of the best 1 man army games ever made. Or about how the Asian market approached shooting games, the third person slip and slide power armor game Vanquish plays like a B movie sci fi with the budget of a marvel movie.
The one unique aspect of this film that I desperately want more film companies to take on is to use the internet to distribute their film beyond the clutches of Netflix, Amazon, etc. That's right, the makers of this film host the film on their own website for purchase where after the purchase, you can directly download the whole four hour documentary onto your hard drive. The digital bundle option comes with an 80s synthwave soundtrack and some wallpapers, part of the reason I bought it is to "vote with my wallet" so other filmmakers hopefully see this approach gain some success and follow suit.
This whole review sounds petty but I do think there were whole decades of serious culture, memes, controversy and evolution happening in the shooter genre that just weren't touched on at all. Maybe that's free real estate for a sequel in the works but as it stands I walked away from this documentary entertained but not really resonated. If the early eras of shooter games and the culture surrounding their development interest you then check this documentary out.
You can see a trailer and purchase the F.P.S documentary for $18 at: https://fpsdoc.com/