Great Year For Shooters?

I was going to write about the bumper crop of shooters expected this year: Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Crysis, Bioshock, Unreal Tournament 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, but that topic got me thinking about games of the past, and I recalled the first video game that every gripped me, the first to which I was ever addicted.

I played "Raiders Of the Lost Ark" years before I ever saw the movie. Not that the game resembled the movie that closely (The Indy sprite you controlled didn't look much like Harrison Ford since it didn't have a head, just a fedora floating above a body). Still, many of the elements from the film appeared: the whip, the revolver, the Map room. The Map room was what did it for me.

All of the video games I'd played to that point were arcade titles; you move a sprite around and shoot things or avoid getting shot/eaten yourself. That's what I expected Raiders to be. I had a gun, and I had a whip. I'd walk around and there would be bad guys. So I walked. At one point I walked by what appeared to be an empty room, but I saw something flicker. At first I thought it was just the CRT, but then I walked by again, and the flicker wasn't across the entire screen; it was only in that room. I walked back and stopped at the entrance, and there was revealed to me the Map room. Without knowing the film, I hadn't a clue that I was seeing, but the mystery of it was enough. It was a puzzle, and this time I wasn't just shooting or evading, I was investigating.

For a few days that game became all I could talk about. I found secret doors and mysterious artifacts. Soon I'd solved it, but I never figured out how to unlock the creator's initials, until now.

"Raiders Of the Lost Ark" was published in 1982, making it one of the first adventure games. For all that they lack in adrenaline-pumping action, titles of that genre dominate my gaming memories. I wonder how memorable this year's crop of shooters will remain in twenty-five years.