First-Person Vector Space

Geometry is stored as line segments, transformed each frame into the viewer's frame of reference, then projected onto the screen as glowing edges. No surfaces, no textures, no lighting: distance is communicated by how the lines converge and how quickly they grow. Because drawing cost scales with the number of lines rather than with pixels, large open spaces are cheap and detail is not, which is why these worlds feel empty and vast.

Battlezone put this in arcades for Atari in 1980, with a periscope hood, a tank that turns on its treads and volcanoes on the horizon. Earlier first-person experiments exist, notably the networked 1970s program Maze War, so Battlezone is better described as the moment the viewpoint reached the public than as the moment it was invented. Vector displays made the choice practical, since they draw lines directly instead of filling a raster.

Putting the camera in the body changed what a game could ask of a player: orientation, spatial memory and judging distance in depth all become skills. It also cost the player their avatar, and with it the readability of a third-person frame, which is one reason first-person games lean so heavily on their heads-up displays. Dungeon crawlers took the viewpoint into grids and menus; shooters took it into speed.