M4A1 and AK-47 from Counter Strike – automatic rifle. Genre-defining weapons – what every shooter needs
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In almost every FPS game, we strive to get a universal machine gun as soon as possible, which, with a huge reserve of ammunition, will allow us to efficiently eliminate enemies from a longer and closer distance. In many games it is usually one of the assault rifles, e.g. M4, M16, AK-47 or some fantastic equivalent. Their progenitor is the Machinegun from Wolfenstein 3D released in 1992 – an automatic weapon that we found at the beginning of the game and, depending on the hardware platform, looked like the German MP40 or Sturmgewehr 44, the real ancestor of the modern AK and M-guns. The versatility of such a weapon, however, came with time. After all, in the beginning we used a more powerful minigun in Wolf, and a shotgun in Doom. The first games where we most often used medium-powered automatic weapons were mostly fantasy-themed titles. Quake in 1996 was set in such a specific world that instead of a machine gun there was a Nail Gun, and another hit – Duke Nukem 3D had its Ripper, which was replaced by a more realistic submachine gun in versions for newer platforms. A year earlier, however, the slightly forgotten Rise of the Triad appeared, and there, just like in Wolfensteine 3D, we usually used the German MP40.
The distinctive looks of the M4 and AK have taken root so much among FPS games that even Destiny's utterly fantastic shooter offers them in its arsenal. The Khvostov automatic rifle is only a slightly reworked M4, and in the Zhalo Supercell we can easily find the shape of the AK-74 with a grenade launcher.
In 1997, the game, groundbreaking in many respects, GoldenEye 007 was released on Nintendo 64, and there the first fiddle was played by the realistic, although quite poorly recreated MP5, M16, AK-47 or P90. We also fired the German MP5 a year later in Half-Life, but it was only a modification to this game – Counter-Strike – that popularized the role of the assault rifle as the basic shooting tool on the virtual battlefield. Two models stand out here: the M4A1 and the AK-47. Both weapons are a kind of symbol of the uninterrupted struggle of two camps, be it countries or ideology in the real world, or two teams of players on the server, and it's hard to name a game that does not have these guns today.
Since then, automatic weapons have been divided into three types in many games according to their firepower: the weakest handguns, universal rifles, and the most powerful light machine guns like the M249. In older titles, we could often have all of them at our disposal, now it is more popular to classify and choose only one of them, although titles based on fantastic weapon models are more liberal here. A high rate of fire and a large supply of ammunition will provide us with a lot of effectiveness, regardless of the choice, and this can be based mainly on personal preferences.
