Absolutely the best time for FPS!

Even a bit earlier than that, I started with Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D (got both in a bundle). Both however a very simplistic, even compared to Wolfenstein 3D.

And while we're at it, I need to mention Hexen and Heretic. FPS in a medieval high fantasy setting, yay!

This does seem like the correct answer, although I've never played a ton of shooters, so I'm hardly one to judge too well. For a bit of variety, I'd like to add Operation Flashpoint, even though I'm not exactly very familiar with it.

It's pretty funny how most of the posts here so far favour the time(s) when console shooters weren't really a huge thing yet. The pre-analog stick era seems to be the most popular so far, then it's the early analog stick era. I wonder if it's just the small sample size we have here or if consoles did something detrimental to shooters. I'm guessing it's a bit of both. Another potential factor is online play, which can be fun but probably doesn't contribute well to creating classics: games with a heavy multiplayer focus seem to be less likely to become classics, but shooters are a genre that works particularly well in multiplayer.

Yeah the 360 had so many bangers; Bioshock trilogy, Halo, COD at its peak, Bulletstorm, FEAR, Singularity, Wolfenstein the New Order, Prey, The Darkness, Far Cry 2/3/4...

Hexen and Heretic were great, I played them in 3D with shutter glasses.

I was gonna mention Descent, but it's not a first "person" shooter, at least that's how I interpret that. But yep my first 6 dof shooter, amazing.

Most my time was spend between UT and HL death match. Both top notch in LAN, and with the fledgling internet no shortage of extra levels and mods like the grappling hook for HL. Back in the days where one physical copy gave you 4 instances of the game to play in LAN together.

Technically I started with "The Wreck" on MSX, 1984



First time I see it in color, I only had a 12" B&W monitor at the time.

Mouse is just so vastly superior for looking around and aiming that I never really got on with analog sticks. It's fine for 3rd person but 1st person still feels wrong. I'm just starting to like fps again in VR, head look and free aiming. The first time I tried Halo on XBox was miserable, never finished the game. Also online play moving from LAN parties with friends to assholes online got me off multiplayer. Even with friends it was vastly inferior not being in the same room. So yep, analog sticks and online play kinda ruined it for me, while split-screen always had issues compared to having multiple PCs, each their own screen. Consoles slowed the pace of shooters down as well to cater to the inferior controls. Wrath: Aeon of Ruin on PSVR2 feels like a proper fps again (and runs on the Quake engine!)

So so many, and with the rise of online gaming it just made FPS even more exciting. 

I know there was online gaming before Gen 7 with PC but MS really made a huge impact on online console gaming.

Yeah, I almost refuse to play shooters on consoles, just due to the aiming method. For me, that includes 3rd person as well. I can aim well enough with a controller, or at least I think so, but it's just not enjoyable. It feels like a constant battle against the control method. Also, to elaborate, I won't choose to play anything with a major shooting component on consoles if PC is an option, and if it's a consoles-only shooter, I probably won't play it, period. Games like Uncharted are kind of OK still, because shooting doesn't play that big a part (although it's still big).

I also don't play a lot of online games, but there's several reasons for that:

• Other people online can be really annoying, especially in games.
• Anticheat software on PC is pretty draconian, and PC is my main platform.
• Online games didn't use to have such a strong voice communication component, but now they seem to now, and with streaming and to some extent video recording as well, I'd probably get my voice recorded somewhere sooner or later. I value my privacy enough to consider this utterly inacceptable.
• There's just not a lof of games I'd be interested in playing online anyway, at least with strangers.

On the other hand, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is still one of my favourite games ever, and it was multiplayer-only (and for most use cases, its multiplayer was really online multiplayer).

Yeah competitive online multiplayer doesn't appeal to me either, I'm pretty bad at games so I just lose all the time and get salty. I'm purely a single player guy.

As far as control methods go, I can tolerate dual analogue, though I find gyro aiming or the Wiimote pointer far superior.

As others have pointed out KB+M is the superior control method for FPS games. 

But a thing not mentioned is that FPS on consoles is the epitome of dumbing down games for consoles with basically all of them having aim-assist/auto-aim.

Possibly a hot take, but I reckon there are a ton of great console FPS, a ton of great FPS post the 2000s, and a number of really good COD games.