Fully 3D first-person games with restricted free look had appeared as early as 1992 on IBM PC compatibles, allowing the player to look up and down, although vision was controlled by dedicated keys rather than the mouse. At the time it was still cutting-edge technology and didn't become widespread until the age of 3D accelerators.
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, released in March 1992, as well as the later
System Shock (which was made on the same engine), allowed the player to manipulate the camera, looking left, right, up or down by using dedicated keys or by using the mouse to click on the edges of the screen.
Taito's first-person shooter
arcade video game Gun Buster, released in August 1992, has a unique control scheme where the player moves using an eight-direction
joystick and takes aim using a mounted positional
light gun. The player could turn left or right by moving the gun pointer to the left or right edges of the screen. However, the game lacked the ability to look up or down. In the 1993 game
Doom, it was not possible for the player to angle the view up or down, though
Raven Software's
Heretic, based on the same engine as
Doom and released in 1994, added a restricted free look to the engine.
Dark Forces was released in 1995 and featured 3D look, but more restricted than the free look of the earlier
Ultima Underworld and
System Shock. Raven Software's November 1994 release
CyClones has a basic implementation of the free look; main movement was via keyboard (with turning and strafing via key combinations), but the on-screen weapon aim point was moved independently via the mouse. Moving the aim point to the edge of the screen would cause the viewpoint to temporarily shift up or to the side. This system proved cumbersome and Raven Software did not develop this particular system further. The 1993
MS-DOS version of ''
Bram Stoker's Dracula'' also used the mouse to aim the player's weapon cross-hair, similar to
CyClones, but the player's viewpoint was controlled entirely by the keyboard and did not move with the cross-hair. The next major step was using the mouse to control the free look.
Marathon by
Bungie, released in December 1994 for the
Apple Macintosh was the first major release with the mouse-controlled free look that would later become universal. The first major game for
PC to allow mouselook was
Descent; it was not the default control mapping, but quickly became the de facto due to the game's inherent need to constantly be able to look in all three dimensions. The first game with full-time fully 3D mouselook by default was
Terminator: Future Shock (published by
Bethesda Softworks in 1995). However,
Terminator: Future Shock was not popular and the original
Marathon was Mac-only, so their impact was limited.
Quake (1996), is widely considered to have been the turning point in making free look the standard, in part due to its
Internet multiplayer, which allowed large numbers of mouse and keyboard players to face each other head-to-head, and proved the superiority of mouselook over keyboard-only controls. Although games using older engines continued to appear for a few years, the
3D accelerator boom in the mid-1990s meant that for the first time
true 3D engines could be run on home PCs, and free mouselook would rapidly become essential and standard in almost every 3D game.
GoldenEye 007 (1997) extended the spread of this technique, introducing it to consoles by incorporating the manual aiming of
Sega's
light gun shooter Virtua Cop (1994) in its first-person shooter gameplay. According to creator
Martin Hollis: "We ended up with innovative gameplay, in part because we had
Virtua Cop features in a FPS: A gun that only holds 7 bullets and a reload button, lots of position dependent hit animations, innocents you shouldn’t kill, and an aiming mode. When you press R in
GoldenEye, the game basically switches to a
Virtua Cop mode." ==See also==