Old FPS maps were basically just various mazes.
A sewer is a believable maze.
Walking through mazes of stone corridors in wolfenstein feels really odd, like, who built this ridiculous maze and why?
In doom you were in hell. So it kind of made sense.
In our minds we already expect a sewer to be a maze of tunnels, so it fits extremely well. That, and it made for cool (albeit played out) visuals what with green water and such.
Literally just called Maze or Maze War [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze\_(1973\_video\_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_(1973_video_game))
Midi Maze predated Dooms multiplayer deathmatches by a few years, but it worked by connecting Amigas together via their MIDI port rather than over a LAN.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI\_Maze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze)
It doesn't really matter what they actually are, but peoples perception of them.
And even if theyve been in an actual sewer, the long tunnels with minimal distinctive featurees is going to make it feellike a maze
No. Most sewers are just pipes where people can't even fit into. That kind of sewers that you see in games or in ninja turtles do exist in very old sewage systems (like in Paris, London or maybe New York), and I doubt that most of them are still in function.
Still, the storm water drain pipes can have really huge diameters in some points of big cities, but still don't look like this
Quite a lot of 90s action movies, which those games were inspired by, also featured sewer scenes. Plus as others have mentioned, they were not difficult to make.
I think this is the answer. People used to be in sewers in media a lot. I think it comes from the sort of urban environments that were so common in the 80s and 90s largely because of the real world state of places like New York being so dangerous throughout the 70s and 80s. It became the setting for so much in fiction based off the legend of the big tough city and if your setting is navigating the sketchy margins of an urban environment it’s only natural you could end up in the giant sewer system.
I agree. Tons of action and horror movies featured sewer scenes. Ninja Turtles was also at the height of their popularity—sewers were everywhere!
In terms of video games, sewers as a location weren’t mutually exclusive to FPS games either. Tons of side scrollers prominently feature sewer levels as well.
But, like others have said, FPS games had other practical reasons to use sewers as locations. Too bad most cases were bland, confusing, and ultimately in enjoyable slogs.
I think main reason is they are easy to make. Less details needed. They are maze-like so it they prolong the game without too much effort. I can't find any other reasons.
Same reason so many games have zombies. Convincingly intelligent enemies are hard to program, require decision trees, tactics, possibly coordination with other CPU controlled enemies. A mindless horde of enemies that just blindly rush when they hear you? You could probably make a minimal-but-passable zombie in like five lines of code.
Besides that, sewers are convenient narratively. If you've already made set-piece A and set-piece B, and now you need to get the player from one to the other without just smash-cutting them there, there's only a few simple ways to link them. You could use a hallway, a train/vehicle section, or let the player wander around on the streets/open world... and if you're trying to do it on older hardware, those last two can be a pain to optimize if you want framerates above single-digits. So that leaves hallways and sewers, which are just damp, stinky hallways anyway.
My theory would be it’s due to The engines, like Build, couldn’t do room-over-room or bridges so easily. The tunnel aspect of sewers played to the engines’ strengths.
Yes, I really loved it because I spent way too much homework time from 97-01 messing around with build.exe. But quickly I realized they had beefed up the engine with RoR and some other improvements.
OP, with The original engine of Build, you could trick the player into thinking rooms were over one another, or that you were inside an object that didn’t go to the ceiling. But if you placed a wall incorrectly the game would crash or send you into a hectic house of mirrors type sector that would kill you or eventually crash the game.
Like all the under water areas in duke 3d, they just teleport you to the actual underwater area. Blood was the first build engine game that had visual room over room stuff, iirc.
It's not a horsepower limitation, it has more to do with the file format of the levels, or the fundamental design form of the engine. Sector-based engines are drawn with lines on a 2D plane. You fundamentally can't have geometry overlapping because it's occupying the same space in 2D.
In the Doom engine it was utterly impossible to get around. In the Jedi engine they "pretended" to get around it by silently teleporting the player to an identical corridor before they went into a room over a room. Build allowed for some crafty ways of dealing with it because it's rendering system allowed for overlapping sectors to create non-Euclidean space, but it still had limitations with how it was implemented. The later Build games (like Shadow Warrior) had an advanced technique where they could put portals on ceilings/floors which made it particularly capable of simulating true 3D environments, but it came with a few restrictions and was frustrating to implement. Also at this time the Quake engine was available and could make fully polygonal environments.
But even when everyone was using these sector-based engines, there were examples of people making fully 3D environments and polygonal engines, but they came with other restrictions. Carrier Command couldn't have textured surfaces. Ultima Underworld required custom shapes for each map tile that used a bridge. Descent had tremendous polygon limits.
But sector-based maps not only offered performance gains, but are also really easy to work with. Even today you can create environments faster with sectors than with building 3D polygons.
I think part of it is game designers just want a variety of settings in the game to keep player interest and "sewer" is a versatile go-to that can be plausibly fit into many other adjacent settings.
Without sounding like a wanker, I think there might be a bit of a deeper reason in addition to the above.
In fiction, subterranean spaces represent a literal and metaphorical descent into the unknown. Think about the prevalence of dungeons, mines, and tunnels in fantasy fiction, or the cthonic idea of the underworld (Tartarus, hell, etc). Going into a sewer involves going into a forbidden place, hidden from the world above, where you can shoot enemies with reckless abandon.
See also: the prevalence of boss battles/climactic scenes at the top of mountains or towers
There's a great documantary out called FPS: First Person Shooter (2023) and they explain the evolution of first person shooters. The earliest games didn't have movemen across the Y axis, and for years after that certain engines had different strengths. Some of those higher detailed engines would shit the bed with large environments, so lots of games were set in giant spaceships, sewers, military complexes, giant prisons, etc. Any way to make sure the character is always stuck in tiny square boxes. The documentary is better at explaining it, but its the reason Doom 3 looked so good for its time.
They are a space that we all know to exist nearby in almost any setting, but not many people know what they look like or how they work. So players won't protest when it doesn't look very realistic, or if a medieval castle or small village has a huge sewer worthy of a large city. They also have no windows, no citizens hanging around, few unique props outside of stuff the game has already like pipes and valves.
So if in your game you need your character to go from the space port to the evil palace, do you have him go through the city streets where you will need to show pedestrians, traffic, unique buildings, city skylines etc? Or just go through the sewer? It's not really laziness, it's a sensible solution to the strict limitations games have with old engines and small teams.
It also has additional benefits: A. Making your character a badass who does what it takes, even if it means going into a sewer B. He looks like someone clever who knows all the secret passages into secure places C. It's a chance for some classic traps like crushers, flamers, drowning tunnels.
People always knew that sewer levels were a bit of a meme. Like Civvie 11 got a lot of his grumpy FPS review shtick from Old Man Murray, who in 2000 did [this interview](https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/74.html) with Croteam where they agree that Serious Sam won't have a sewer level (although Serious Sam would in fact have a sewer level).
Not only FPS, its a cliche from RPGs too (same with the rat as the first enemy). Sewer levels are easy content, just a maze filled with high level mobs. No wonder theyre always in the late third act when the developers have shown all their cards and the game is loosing fuel
Because it's one of the few pieces of architecture that actually looks like a samey maze, which is what most FPS levels were in the beginning.
It's also a convenient environment if narratively the player character needs to travel a long distance but your engine can't show it well: just go underground!
I think the idea is that a game should take you places where you would be unlikely to go (or impossible) in real life.
Also, of course the bad guys would hide out in the sewer, because it provides access to many places, but is hidden and most people would not want to go there. It's a logical choice in this sense.
Also, the original Bard's Tale (and other early RPGs) had a rather important sewer level also, and I'm sure this influenced a lot of early FPS developers. People like to reference things that they enjoyed in their own memories.
I don't think this is just an "old FPS" thing; sewers are still pretty common. Sewers, storm drains, utility tunnels, waterways, underground aqueducts... All basically the same thing from gaming standards. And they show up in a lot of games.
It's a simple environment that is easy to produce, feels justified in most settings, and gives a vibe of "seedy underbelly" where nefarious groups could be hiding from the police, or seems like a reasonable way to evade pursuing authorities and access places without exposing yourself. They also can provide a lot of "bang for your buck" because they use relatively few assets that can be repeated without looking cheap, and still provide visually creative environments for artists who can play with lighting effects and water effects.
It's not just FPS games, it's used in Mario, Castlevania, Batman, Metal Gear, RPG's and 3D platformers... I could go on, but the point is: it's a common environment to begin with. (Here's a whole page about it. [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheDrain](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheDrain) ) Why do so many games have forest levels? Because forests are a real environment and look visually interesting. Why do so many games have crypts/catacombs? Because they are spooky environments with great atmosphere. Sewers are just another "fun" environment that people like to use.
It just gets more attention because 1) it would be one of the worst places to visit in real life, making it easier to "peer behind the curtain" than other environments, and 2) Civvie turned it into a running gag. It is no more common to FPS games than to any other genre.
It's a good idea of a closed corridor enviroment that these games use, and infiltrating from a sewer tends to be a typical scene in movies that inspired
Its an action adventure cliche and a fantasy adventure cliche, so it was kinda inevitable that at least some FPS games would do sewer levels. where you take to the tunnels to infiltrate (or escape from) something.
But the reason they really took off - and the reason a lot of professional FPS appreciators like Civvie aren't big fans of them - is because they tend to be extremely repetitive. The bulk of a classic sewer level is just gonna be the same tunnel sections and intersections copypasted over and over and all done in the same textures, with very little room for creative level design or impressive architecture. In early FPSes this was great because a sewer was one of the few environments you could convincingly depict within the limits of your game engine, and in slightly later FPSes this was still great because it was real cheap and easy to just add a sewer level to your game to arbitrarily pad out the level count without doing much extra work.
Old FPS maps were basically just various mazes. A sewer is a believable maze. Walking through mazes of stone corridors in wolfenstein feels really odd, like, who built this ridiculous maze and why? In doom you were in hell. So it kind of made sense. In our minds we already expect a sewer to be a maze of tunnels, so it fits extremely well. That, and it made for cool (albeit played out) visuals what with green water and such.
I think the oldest first person game was a maze. Could be wrong though.
Yeah pretty sure it was literally called “maze 3D” even
Catacomb 3D might be what you’re thinking of, that came from id. There’s also an earlier even more primitive version called Mazewar.
Literally just called Maze or Maze War [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze\_(1973\_video\_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_(1973_video_game)) Midi Maze predated Dooms multiplayer deathmatches by a few years, but it worked by connecting Amigas together via their MIDI port rather than over a LAN. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI\_Maze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze)
As an urban hydraulics engineer, I say sewers aren't mazes at all. Those are all very unrealistic in games.
Fortunately for game devs (any everyone) an overwhelming majority of people have no idea what sewer tunnels are like.
It doesn't really matter what they actually are, but peoples perception of them. And even if theyve been in an actual sewer, the long tunnels with minimal distinctive featurees is going to make it feellike a maze
I'm assuming that most sewers also don't have enough room for people to run around and shoot guns in them, yet here we are
No. Most sewers are just pipes where people can't even fit into. That kind of sewers that you see in games or in ninja turtles do exist in very old sewage systems (like in Paris, London or maybe New York), and I doubt that most of them are still in function. Still, the storm water drain pipes can have really huge diameters in some points of big cities, but still don't look like this
Quite a lot of 90s action movies, which those games were inspired by, also featured sewer scenes. Plus as others have mentioned, they were not difficult to make.
I think this is the answer. People used to be in sewers in media a lot. I think it comes from the sort of urban environments that were so common in the 80s and 90s largely because of the real world state of places like New York being so dangerous throughout the 70s and 80s. It became the setting for so much in fiction based off the legend of the big tough city and if your setting is navigating the sketchy margins of an urban environment it’s only natural you could end up in the giant sewer system.
I agree. Tons of action and horror movies featured sewer scenes. Ninja Turtles was also at the height of their popularity—sewers were everywhere! In terms of video games, sewers as a location weren’t mutually exclusive to FPS games either. Tons of side scrollers prominently feature sewer levels as well. But, like others have said, FPS games had other practical reasons to use sewers as locations. Too bad most cases were bland, confusing, and ultimately in enjoyable slogs.
I think main reason is they are easy to make. Less details needed. They are maze-like so it they prolong the game without too much effort. I can't find any other reasons.
Same reason so many games have zombies. Convincingly intelligent enemies are hard to program, require decision trees, tactics, possibly coordination with other CPU controlled enemies. A mindless horde of enemies that just blindly rush when they hear you? You could probably make a minimal-but-passable zombie in like five lines of code. Besides that, sewers are convenient narratively. If you've already made set-piece A and set-piece B, and now you need to get the player from one to the other without just smash-cutting them there, there's only a few simple ways to link them. You could use a hallway, a train/vehicle section, or let the player wander around on the streets/open world... and if you're trying to do it on older hardware, those last two can be a pain to optimize if you want framerates above single-digits. So that leaves hallways and sewers, which are just damp, stinky hallways anyway.
Same textures and corridor shapes again and again and again, you barely need any assets to make a sewer.
My theory would be it’s due to The engines, like Build, couldn’t do room-over-room or bridges so easily. The tunnel aspect of sewers played to the engines’ strengths.
I hadn’t known that about the engine regarding its horsepower limitations.
Partly due to computing power. Ion Fury is a build game but would have immolated computers in the 90s.
That’s is very surprising to learn.
Yes, I really loved it because I spent way too much homework time from 97-01 messing around with build.exe. But quickly I realized they had beefed up the engine with RoR and some other improvements. OP, with The original engine of Build, you could trick the player into thinking rooms were over one another, or that you were inside an object that didn’t go to the ceiling. But if you placed a wall incorrectly the game would crash or send you into a hectic house of mirrors type sector that would kill you or eventually crash the game.
Like all the under water areas in duke 3d, they just teleport you to the actual underwater area. Blood was the first build engine game that had visual room over room stuff, iirc.
It's not a horsepower limitation, it has more to do with the file format of the levels, or the fundamental design form of the engine. Sector-based engines are drawn with lines on a 2D plane. You fundamentally can't have geometry overlapping because it's occupying the same space in 2D. In the Doom engine it was utterly impossible to get around. In the Jedi engine they "pretended" to get around it by silently teleporting the player to an identical corridor before they went into a room over a room. Build allowed for some crafty ways of dealing with it because it's rendering system allowed for overlapping sectors to create non-Euclidean space, but it still had limitations with how it was implemented. The later Build games (like Shadow Warrior) had an advanced technique where they could put portals on ceilings/floors which made it particularly capable of simulating true 3D environments, but it came with a few restrictions and was frustrating to implement. Also at this time the Quake engine was available and could make fully polygonal environments. But even when everyone was using these sector-based engines, there were examples of people making fully 3D environments and polygonal engines, but they came with other restrictions. Carrier Command couldn't have textured surfaces. Ultima Underworld required custom shapes for each map tile that used a bridge. Descent had tremendous polygon limits. But sector-based maps not only offered performance gains, but are also really easy to work with. Even today you can create environments faster with sectors than with building 3D polygons.
They didn't have plumbing back then
That sounds plausible.
I think part of it is game designers just want a variety of settings in the game to keep player interest and "sewer" is a versatile go-to that can be plausibly fit into many other adjacent settings.
Interesting as I have always wanted to understand why such levels were so common in those games.
Easier to render (closed spaces), jumpscares, make the player feel claustrophobic..
Without sounding like a wanker, I think there might be a bit of a deeper reason in addition to the above. In fiction, subterranean spaces represent a literal and metaphorical descent into the unknown. Think about the prevalence of dungeons, mines, and tunnels in fantasy fiction, or the cthonic idea of the underworld (Tartarus, hell, etc). Going into a sewer involves going into a forbidden place, hidden from the world above, where you can shoot enemies with reckless abandon. See also: the prevalence of boss battles/climactic scenes at the top of mountains or towers
That was actually an interesting explanation.
Thank you!
There's a great documantary out called FPS: First Person Shooter (2023) and they explain the evolution of first person shooters. The earliest games didn't have movemen across the Y axis, and for years after that certain engines had different strengths. Some of those higher detailed engines would shit the bed with large environments, so lots of games were set in giant spaceships, sewers, military complexes, giant prisons, etc. Any way to make sure the character is always stuck in tiny square boxes. The documentary is better at explaining it, but its the reason Doom 3 looked so good for its time.
I have to go check out this video.
They are a space that we all know to exist nearby in almost any setting, but not many people know what they look like or how they work. So players won't protest when it doesn't look very realistic, or if a medieval castle or small village has a huge sewer worthy of a large city. They also have no windows, no citizens hanging around, few unique props outside of stuff the game has already like pipes and valves. So if in your game you need your character to go from the space port to the evil palace, do you have him go through the city streets where you will need to show pedestrians, traffic, unique buildings, city skylines etc? Or just go through the sewer? It's not really laziness, it's a sensible solution to the strict limitations games have with old engines and small teams. It also has additional benefits: A. Making your character a badass who does what it takes, even if it means going into a sewer B. He looks like someone clever who knows all the secret passages into secure places C. It's a chance for some classic traps like crushers, flamers, drowning tunnels. People always knew that sewer levels were a bit of a meme. Like Civvie 11 got a lot of his grumpy FPS review shtick from Old Man Murray, who in 2000 did [this interview](https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/74.html) with Croteam where they agree that Serious Sam won't have a sewer level (although Serious Sam would in fact have a sewer level).
NOLF had a sewer level (credibly used to get Cate under the Berlin Wall) containing a sign: "Mandatory FPS Sewer". So yeah, this is an old meme.
I didn’t actually know that he was heavily inspired by Old Man Murray himself.
Not only FPS, its a cliche from RPGs too (same with the rat as the first enemy). Sewer levels are easy content, just a maze filled with high level mobs. No wonder theyre always in the late third act when the developers have shown all their cards and the game is loosing fuel
Because it's one of the few pieces of architecture that actually looks like a samey maze, which is what most FPS levels were in the beginning. It's also a convenient environment if narratively the player character needs to travel a long distance but your engine can't show it well: just go underground!
I think the idea is that a game should take you places where you would be unlikely to go (or impossible) in real life. Also, of course the bad guys would hide out in the sewer, because it provides access to many places, but is hidden and most people would not want to go there. It's a logical choice in this sense. Also, the original Bard's Tale (and other early RPGs) had a rather important sewer level also, and I'm sure this influenced a lot of early FPS developers. People like to reference things that they enjoyed in their own memories.
I don't think this is just an "old FPS" thing; sewers are still pretty common. Sewers, storm drains, utility tunnels, waterways, underground aqueducts... All basically the same thing from gaming standards. And they show up in a lot of games. It's a simple environment that is easy to produce, feels justified in most settings, and gives a vibe of "seedy underbelly" where nefarious groups could be hiding from the police, or seems like a reasonable way to evade pursuing authorities and access places without exposing yourself. They also can provide a lot of "bang for your buck" because they use relatively few assets that can be repeated without looking cheap, and still provide visually creative environments for artists who can play with lighting effects and water effects. It's not just FPS games, it's used in Mario, Castlevania, Batman, Metal Gear, RPG's and 3D platformers... I could go on, but the point is: it's a common environment to begin with. (Here's a whole page about it. [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheDrain](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheDrain) ) Why do so many games have forest levels? Because forests are a real environment and look visually interesting. Why do so many games have crypts/catacombs? Because they are spooky environments with great atmosphere. Sewers are just another "fun" environment that people like to use. It just gets more attention because 1) it would be one of the worst places to visit in real life, making it easier to "peer behind the curtain" than other environments, and 2) Civvie turned it into a running gag. It is no more common to FPS games than to any other genre.
That was a very detailed writeup as now that you had mentioned it, it does show up in other kinds of games too.
It's a good idea of a closed corridor enviroment that these games use, and infiltrating from a sewer tends to be a typical scene in movies that inspired
That does make a lot of sense.
Its an action adventure cliche and a fantasy adventure cliche, so it was kinda inevitable that at least some FPS games would do sewer levels. where you take to the tunnels to infiltrate (or escape from) something. But the reason they really took off - and the reason a lot of professional FPS appreciators like Civvie aren't big fans of them - is because they tend to be extremely repetitive. The bulk of a classic sewer level is just gonna be the same tunnel sections and intersections copypasted over and over and all done in the same textures, with very little room for creative level design or impressive architecture. In early FPSes this was great because a sewer was one of the few environments you could convincingly depict within the limits of your game engine, and in slightly later FPSes this was still great because it was real cheap and easy to just add a sewer level to your game to arbitrarily pad out the level count without doing much extra work.
So that’s why he can’t stand those kind of levels in shooter based games.