text: According to Romero, the deathmatch concept was inspired by fighting games. At id Software, the team frequently played Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting during breaks, while developing elaborate rules involving trash-talk and smashing furniture or tech. Romero stated that "what we were doing was something that invented deathmatch" and that "Japanese fighting games fueled the creative impulse to create deathmatch in our shooters."
  Some games give a different name to these types of matches, while still using the same underlying concept. For example, in Perfect Dark, the name "Combat" is used and in Halo, deathmatch is known as "Slayer".
  Precursors
  It has been suggested that in 1983, Drew Major and Kyle Powell probably played the world's first deathmatch with Snipes, a text-mode game that was later credited with being the inspiration behind Novell NetWare, although multiplayer games spread across multiple screens predate that title by at least 9 years in the form of Spasim and Maze War.
  Early evidence of the term's application to graphical video games exists. On August 6, 1982, Intellivision game developers Russ Haft and Steve Montero challenged each other to a game of Bi-Planes, a 1981 Intellivision release in which multiple players control fighter planes with the primary purpose of repeatedly killing each other until a limit is reached. Once killed, a player would be respawned in a fixed location, enjoying a short period of protection from attacks. The contest was referred to, at that time, as a deathmatch.