1) Aiming Down the Sights (ADS)
First seen in: Vietcong – PC (2003)
Since the dawn of time, man has been fascinated with guns (this may not be strictly accurate as guns were not invented at the dawn of time). The first game a kid learns is ‘Cowboys and Indians,’ the casually racist game that simply involves making a gun with your fingers and running round shooting imaginary bullets. It’s an odd fascination, but one I must admit to being partial too. For a long time, though, its representation in videogames was a static, from the hip, approach – which as anyone that’s ever fired a gun will tell you, is not really how they work.
Otherwise decidedly average shooter Vietcong was the first game to make the distinction between wildly spraying from the hip and physically lifting the gun to your eye for more accurate fire, and wow did that stick. Even now, in games that are neither first-person, nor hardly even shooters, it’s become ingrained that a squeeze of that left trigger will zoom the camera in one way or another.
There’s still a few nostalgic dreamers that buck the trend of course, most notably Source games such and Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, and the mighty Counter Strike. Even notorious shooter pioneer Halo decided to try and catch up by sneaking this feature in the back door of its fourth sequel, and I’ll eat my wristwatch if it isn’t a full-blown feature by the time number five comes around.
Questions? Disagreements? What shared video game trope would you like to have identified as the innovator? Let us know in them comments!
