After completing Super Mario Galaxy I finally had the chance to sit back and not play games for a whole day and thats when I noticed that the last 4 games I bought, pre-mario, are all FPS! Bioshock, The Orange Box, Halo 3 and last of all Metriod Prime 3!

The last few months some of the most awesome FPS have come on to the market but I have to say I have started to feel a little jaded and as such Mario felt all the more fresher.

It seems like FPS have become the gaming bread and butter much like platformers where during the 90s and I though maybe it was something to do with technology coming to a point that many devlopers imaginations could finally be realised.

What are everyones elses thoughts? :)

I would say in PC terms between Quake and Quake 2. By the time Quake 3/UT had come around almost everything was FPS.

In console terms. Xbox360.

They have always been popular, its just that consoles were never able to have pc quality FPS games until the original xbox came out. The controls never felt right before until the xbox game pad and xbox had higher 480 p resolutions which back then were revolutionary. Halo or maybe goldeneye can be credited to making it mainstream to consoles and Halo 2 made online multiplayer FPS games mainstream in the living room especially to casual gamers. FPS games was sadly overlooked genre on the PS2.

First came doom, then god saw it and it was good.

from when xbox launched thats when a whole lot of fps's started to release,i think its mostly cause of halo

Yeah, FPS games became mainstream when people realized that Grand Theft Auto San Andreas's closest competitor was Halo 2.

 For PC it was around 97/98 with Quake 2, Half-Life and 3D cards etc.

 For consoles it was Halo back in 2001. It escalated with Halo 2 and a lot of other shooters and has now become the biggest genre for consoles as well.

Yeah, Halo and GTA 3 were probably the two most influential games last gen. It'll be interesting to see in what direction this gen's greater Nintendo success will push industry.

What vengi and kilik said... which really made PC gaming boring and killed off a lot of good games from other genres (some still live, though)

Fixed.