Review: FPS: First-Person Shooter Documentary

I am the exact target audience for FPS: First-Person Shooter. The titular genre has long been my favorite, my number one game of all time is the original Doom from 1993, and I’ve played almost all of the 50 games featured in this documentary. And while it was wonderful to hear from so many of the developers behind these classics in the film, FPS suffers from two primary faults – both significant enough to diminish the impact of an otherwise comprehensive chronicling of one of gaming’s biggest and most influential genres.

The Highlights of FPS

To first celebrate what I love about FPS: Directors David L. Craddock and Christopher Stratton managed to get some big names on camera to talk about their seminal creations. id Software designer John Romero is the star of this piece, and choosing Romero as the avatar of the genre was a smart move on the filmmakers’ part. The designer of Doom, Doom 2, and Quake (and the more infamous Daikatana, which the documentary curiously leaves out) is magnetic and, more importantly, he very clearly loves first-person shooters, whether he worked on them or not. But FPS also sits down with the genre’s tech genius, John Carmack, who rarely gives interviews these days. We also hear from immersive sim guru Warren Spector, who is refreshingly honest about wanting his games to be remembered as influential. Former Epic Games designer Cliff Bleszinski chimes in on the revolutionary Unreal and Unreal Tournament days. And though they’re individually not household names, it’s a treat to get insights from multiple members of Rare’s GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark teams, Bungie’s Halo team, and Valve’s Team Fortress team.

Notable Omissions and Length

Unfortunately – though perhaps inevitably in a large-scale project like this – there are also plenty of notable omissions that I’m sure the filmmakers tried to get but couldn’t. Bungie design genius Jason Jones is famously interview-averse, 3DRealms creative mastermind George Broussard isn’t heard from here (sadly, the documentary also doesn’t spend any time on Duke Nukem Forever, one of the most historically notable games – not just first-person shooters – ever made, despite giving plenty of screen time to Seamus Blackley’s infamous FPS Trespasser), while Ken Levine and his best games – System Shock 2 and BioShock – are absent as well. Valve founder and Half-Life boss Gabe Newell is mentioned but not featured.

Still, if they had been, then FPS’s biggest problem would’ve been even worse. Put simply, it’s way too damn long. The onesheet included with our review copy of the movie touts its runtime – which is, and this is not a typo, four-and-a-half hours long, or enough to make James Cameron’s Avatar films seem brisk by comparison – as a strength. Put another way, you could watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie three times and you’d still peel your body off of your couch at exactly the same time as your friend would if he or she pushed play on FPS at the same time. It’s essentially impossible to watch in one sitting. At this length, it would’ve been better served as a four-part mini-series on a streaming service, rather than a single feature-(double)-length movie.

Lack of a Clear Narrative

But even if the runtime didn’t feel egregious, there’s one other beef I have with FPS: it lacks a throughline. Each segment – they’re mostly divided into eras – gets a chapter heading in MS-DOS-font, like “Attack of the Doom Clones” and “Enter the Arena.” But the filmmakers offer no creative voice telling us why these games matter, or why they love these kinds of games so much that they wanted to make a four-and-a-hour movie about it. Instead, it’s just one-on-one interview after one-on-one interview (how cool would it have been to have John Romero and John Carmack talking together about Doom and Quake?), hour after hour, until the end when FPS fast-forwards through the most recent decade of first-person shooters, glossing over how a new generation of id Software developers reinvented Doom for the modern era, skipping Half-Life: Alyx’s flawless fusing of FPS and VR design entirely, and not even mentioning present-day multiplayer powerhouses like Call of Duty Warzone, PUBG, and Apex Legends.