text: History Even before the term deathmatch was first used, there existed games with a similar gameplay mode. MIDI Maze was a multiplayer first-person shooter for the Atari ST, released in 1987, which has been suggested as the first example of deathmatch gameplay. Sega's 1988 third-person shooter arcade game Last Survivor featured eight-player deathmatch. Another early example of a deathmatch mode in a first-person shooter was Taito's 1992 video game Gun Buster. It allowed two-player cooperative gameplay for the mission mode, and featured an early deathmatch mode, where either two players could compete against each other or up to four players could compete in a team deathmatch, consisting of two teams with two players each competing against each other.
  The phrase death match was originally used in wrestling, starting in the 1950s, to denote certain brutal hardcore wrestling fights. The term "death match" in this sense appeared in the 1992 fighting arcade game World Heroes, where it denotes a game mode taking place in an arena with environmental hazards.
  The term deathmatch in the context of multiplayer video games may have been coined by game designer John Romero, while he and lead programmer John Carmack were developing the LAN multiplayer mode for the video game Doom. Romero commented on the birth of the FPS deathmatch:
  "Sure, it was fun to shoot monsters, but ultimately these were soulless creatures controlled by a computer. Now gamers could play against spontaneous human beings—opponents who could think and strategize and scream. We can kill each other!' If we can get this done, this is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!'"