Top Ten FPS Shotguns (part 1)
The Coach Gun, the Trench Broom, the Boom Stick, the Brixton Typewriter? (Seriously?) Most commonly called the shotgun. All but harmless at a distance yet so terrifying at close quarters that the Kaiser’s Wehrmacht tried to get it banned by the Geneva Conventions, (Silly Germans, America has never signed the Geneva Convention). Still a staple of the military, police, and home defense. To say nothing of the First Person Shooter.
It’s honestly close to impossible to picture this genre of game without the shotgun. One minute you are facing a hell knight, an armored alien, or a gigantic zombie that has been painting the walls with your pixelated blood, but then you find that game’s shotgun and one earth-shattering kaboom later that monster is a mass of giblets. It almost defines the genre and it’s one of the first things that a player wants to know about a game before putting money down on it. After, (oh dear glob), thirty years it’s almost impossible to come up with a list of which FPS shotguns are the best.
Unless you don’t care about anyone else’s opinion then it’s easy.
The first time one ever employed in an FPS was…
DOOM (1993)
The weapons were intuitively accurate in function, they worked like they were supposed to do. The pistol was nearly useless against all but the weakest monsters. The Chain-gun burned ammo like 1970s incense sticks, and the rocket launcher could only be used from a distance since it caused splash damage to you, (this was actually quite the innovation. There had been rocket launchers in Wolfenstein clones but they caused no damage to the hero even if he was on top of the target). There were a couple of other plasma weapons that weren’t available on the shareware. The Plasma Rifle and the hilariously awesome BFG 9000.
But easily the most important weapon in Doom, your shield on shoulder and right hand man was the Shotgun. I don’t know if video game shotguns would have become the staple they are now if Doom had somehow gotten it wrong but they absolutely did not. The shotgun was great at hurting everything but only at close range, there was a drastic drop-off in damage the further away you got. The sound design of the blast was chef’s kiss perfect. It was meaty, chunky and impactful. That sound effect let you know that if the shotgun couldn’t kill it then it probably couldn’t die.
This was Genesis. Carmack knocked this one so far out of the park you can’t see the park from Phobos. The fact that Doom is still playable in this day and age is due to Doom-Guy’s right-hand.
The funny thing is that the reason the shotgun was included was because Doom was originally supposed to be an Aliens game and Hicks was armed with a shotgun.
Doom’s shotgun was based (for all that it matters in an idtech 1 Engine) on the incredibly disappointing Tootsie Toy Dakota. Yeah, Doom Guy’s shotgun was a toy.
Doom II
The Super Shotgun. Okay, it’s really not all that super. It’s a regular side-by side break-action shotgun. It was a simple idea that managed not quite break the game. It was a short-barreled coach gun that fired both barrels at once. The reason it didn’t break the game was because first, the reload time was a bit longer than the pump action shotgun from the first Doom. Second, since you were firing both barrels it went through your shotgun ammo twice as fast. So long as the dev isn’t too generous with the shells it becomes something you whip out when you really need it, rather than the same solution for every problem.
Unlike its predecessor, the Super Shotgun was based on an actual firearm. The Stoeger Coach Gun to be precise.
Moving on.
Blood
Look, I know you want to scream about how Doom 2 invented the Super-shotgun and you are absolutely right they did. However, there are only so many things that can be said about a super-shotgun and I have to include Blood.
Also, there is no getting around the fact that Blood is a better example of the first-generation super. While I do relish the Doom 2 super shotgun and all the carnage it brings, the Build Engine was able to do much more with the concept.
Unlike Doom, there was an actual plot in this game. Caleb’s boss Tchernobog wasn’t the brightest spark in the eternal lake of fire. His idea of fucking with his best (but clearly insane, out-of-control) gunslinger by crucifying his lover and torturing his only friends to death in order to make him grow powerful by wiping out Tchernobog’s entire cult, did work. However, it came with a significant limiter in that Caleb might become so powerful that he could kill Tchernobog. Which that show tunes-loving lunatic went and did.
Caleb’s shotgun is a side-by-side sawed-off double barrel. Unlike the Doom 2 Super, this one can fire both single or double barrel for a particularly pesky phantasm. If the angle was right you could clip out two enemies at once. The Build Engine was a literal game-changer, the Blood shotgun could actually affect what the sprites did depending on your range. The sound design made you feel like Caleb, the weird west god slayer.
This shotgun was the very best of the 2.5D shotguns. It was just incredibly gratifying to fire. And if you got the guns akimbo token you would make that game live up to the name.
Caleb’s shotgun was a purely fictional creation. However, it was based on a real shotgun, the one Ash was using in Army of Darkness. Ash claimed that his Boomstick was a 12-guage double barrel Remington made in Grand Rapids. Sadly, it’s been a while since Remington was located in GR and I’m afraid the quality has slipped since Remington started getting passed around more than Jada when Will is at the bathhouse.
Also, it wasn’t a Remington it was another IGA Stoeger Coach Gun.
Half-Life
Run Think Shoot Live
That does sound quite a bit better than “John Romero is going to make you his bitch.”
Half-Life was a very influential game but for unfortunate reasons. The video game industry took all the wrong lessons away from Half-Life. The game’s plot was a linear sequence of events, each event was designed to draw you into the next event. The thing is Half-Life didn’t just have devs that had put together dungeon crawls on the weekends, they had Marc Laidlaw who is an actual horror writer who understands the limitations of video games. More importantly, he understood the elements of horror; fear, dread, and shock.
The game started with a train ride and some opening credits that let you know what the setup is. This is the first FPS that took time to show you what was going on and set the tone for the rest of the game. Then you get to see the thing that went wrong with the teleporter. The FPS was invented in 1993 and a mere 5 years later, ‘Our teleporter just made a boo-boo’ was already cliche. But the thing is cliches tell an audience what is coming and what to expect, you can use that to create dread if you are telling a horror story, which Half-Life is.
The big thing is that players had never gotten to see it happening before, just the result. I can’t overstate how big a deal it was twenty-five years ago to finally see one of these horrifying events happening.
Half-Life overshadowed every game that was released in 1998, which is a pity because that was one of the greatest years for gaming releases ever, Baldur’s Gate, Grim Fandango, Rainbow Six, Starcraft, Thief, The Dark Project. All of them were were eclipsed by Half-Life.
The other studios took the wrong lesson home. Half-Life’s linear sequence of scripted events was taken by others and turned into the hated cut-scene. Even Doom (2005) did it and did it poorly. This was just about the time that video games started drifting left and these two things were inexorably entwined.
Gamers were mourning the FPS as a thing of the past when two games came out of nowhere to save the genre. Two remakes came out of nowhere to save the beloved FPS, the janky as all hell Rise of the Triad and (of all things) Shadow Warrior. But that will be another post.
Half-Life’s shotgun was based on the Terminator’s “Italian Auto-loader.” The SPAS 12. Half-Life’s weapons weren’t really that great but the SPAS 12 was good (enough, I guess). The all-important sound design was spot on, and the reload (which was new at the time) was crisp and enjoyable.
And it had no place in reality.
Loading a SPAS 12 will be one of the most unpleasant experiences of your life just short of getting shot by one. It has a locked reloading gate that is almost impossible to unlock. You have to put it on the ground and use both hands which is at best a problematic feature in a combat shotgun.
F.E.A.R.
I just did a RE:View of F.E.A.R. and honestly, there isn’t a lot for me to add. If you want to read it again here’s the link:
The FEAR VK-12 shotgun.
“Ever since DOOM Ep 1 level 1, the most critical acid test for any FPS game was how good is the shotgun? Fail that and the entire game is a waste. If I ever get around to making my retro-shooter boomstick listicle this thing is going to be in the running for number one. Monolith made two of the best FPS shotguns of all time. It was absolutely devastating. Pull the trigger at close range and the NPC would ragdoll away in an amazing manner. It had more power than the grenades. It was OP as all AF, totally broken. Shattered the game like a Faberge egg hit with a rocket-powered baseball bat. Reload time for TWELVE rounds is two seconds. Mash bullet time and Wade into the ATC clone troopers blasting away with the shotgun that is tossing your enemies out of your way without breaking stride, and the prophecy of Harlan Wade comes true, “You will be a god among men.”
Again, this was based on the SPAS 12, although this one is much better than Half-Life’s both are more pleasant to shoot than a real one.
If you really want an Italian autoloader for the love of Glob, get a Berretta 1301. It’s worth the price.
End of Part One
