Deathmatch - History

History

The origin of the term deathmatch in the context of video games is disputed, especially as it is not well-defined; for pointers, the term might have been coined by game designer John Romero while he and lead programmer John Carmack were developing the LAN multiplayer mode for the video game Doom, another source to investigate is the fighting game World Heroes 2, also developed and released in the early 1990s as an early use of the term. However, the latter's usage was different as it referred to the players' environment (arenas which housed dangerous hazards) rather than to the game itself. Both of these claims are controversial as the term's common definition as used by gamers (to describe a video game match in which players kill each other over and over, respawning after each time they die) predates both titles by over a decade. Romero commented on the birth of the FPS deathmatch:

"Sure, it was fun to shoot monsters, but ultimately these were soulless creatures controlled by a computer. Now gamers could play against spontaneous human beings—opponents who could think and strategize and scream. We can kill each other!' If we can get this done, this is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!'"

Games that had such gameplay features beforehand did not use the term, but later it gained mainstream popularity with the Quake and Unreal Tournament series of games. MIDI Maze was a multiplayer first-person shooter for the Atari ST, released in 1987, which has also been suggested as the first example of deathmatch before the term was used.

Some games give a different name to these types of matches, while still using the same underlying concept. For example, deathmatch in the Halo series of games is named "Slayer", and in Perfect Dark the name "Combat Simulator" is used.

An early example of a deathmatch mode in a first-person shooter was Taito's 1992 video game Gun Buster. It allowed two-player cooperative gameplay for the mission mode, and featured an early deathmatch mode, where either two players could compete against each other or up to four players could compete in a team deathmatch, consisting of two teams with two players each competing against each other.