Free look

Free look (also known as mouselook) describes the ability to move a mouse, joystick, analogue stick, or D-pad to rotate the player character's view in video games. It is almost always used for 3D game engines, and has been included on role-playing video games, real-time strategy games, third-person shooters, first-person shooters, racing games, and flight simulators. Free look is nearly universal in modern games, but it was one of the significant technical breakthroughs of mid-1990s first-person perspective games. Many modern console games dedicate one of the several analogue sticks on the gamepad entirely to rotating the view, where as some older console games, when gamepads usually had fewer or only a single D-pad or analogue stick, had a feature where the single D-pad or analogue stick would move the view instead of the character whilst the player held down another button at the same time, often labelled in game as the "look button".

An early primitive example was in Taito's 1992 first-person shooter arcade game Gun Buster, which featured a unique control scheme where the player moves using an eight-direction joystick and takes aim using a mounted positional light gun. The player could turn left or right by moving the gun pointer to the left or right edges of the screen. However, the game lacked the ability to look up or down.

Fully 3D first-person games with restricted free look had appeared as early as 1992 on the PC, allowing the player to look up and down, although vision was controlled by dedicated keys rather than the mouse. At the time it was still cutting-edge technology and didn't become widespread until the age of 3D accelerators. For instance, in the 1993 seminal game Doom, it was not possible for the player to angle his or her view up or down, though Raven Software's Heretic, based off the same engine as Doom and released in 1994, added a restricted free look to the engine. Dark Forces released in 1995 and more technologically advanced, featured 3D look but more restricted than the free look of the earlier Ultima Underworld and System Shock, released in 1992 and early 1994 respectively.

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