Gun Buster: An FPS ahead of its time
39Story time!
Gun Buster was an arcade game released in 1992, what I consider one of the most important video game releases of that year (The seminal Ultima Underworld being one of the others, but that's a story for another time) and what I also consider the grandfather of all modern multiplayer based first person shooters.
Why is that? Because of 3 very notable features:
1. The year was 1992, Wolfenstein 3D had been released only a scant 5 months earlier in May and was certainly a landmark video game in its own right, Wolf 3D allowed side to side movement via a strafe modifier, but it wasn't until Gun Buster came out that the concept of "WASD" style controls was born. The arcade cabinet featured an 8 way joystick that the player would operate with his left hand and a 2 trigger swivel mounted lightgun operated with the right hand, full directional movement was controlled via the joystick, while your onscreen aiming reticule was controlled via the lightgun with the added ability to turn your view around left and right as your reticule moved away from the center allowing the ability to circle strafe around targets. If this description sounds a little familiar, it's because this control scheme is what would later mature into the classic WASD/mouse look scheme that pretty much every single modern FPS PC gamer has used at some point in their lives.
2. In 1993, id Software's critically acclaimed Doom would be released, killing productivity and paralyzing LANs in offices all throughout the world with its now famous Deathmatch multiplayer game mode, yet in 1992 the little known Gun Busters already had a 1 vs 1 and 2 vs 2 competitive mode where 4 players were placed into a red or blue team and let loose against each other in a winner stays style deathmatch battle, this was facilitated by a rather massive 2 screen cabinet with a simple divider between both screens to disallow opposing teams from looking at each others' actions, kind of sounds like the typical split screen multiplayer functionality most console based FPS games offer doesn't it?
3. And likewise, Doom's cooperative game mode where up to 4 players could work together against the AI to complete the game's campaign had been beaten to the punch by Gun Buster, which allowed 2 players to piggyback and play through the game's story mode off a single screen in a cooperative fashion.
While Doom was the game that refined the multiplayer aspect of what would later become the first person shooter genre, it was Gun Buster that was the precursor to it all.
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Other Statistics
Gun Buster Statistics For Vulkan
Vulkan currently has 5,577 views spread across 1 video for Gun Buster. Less than an hour worth of Gun Buster videos were uploaded to his channel, less than 0.07% of the total video content that Vulkan has uploaded to YouTube.