You can blame many sleepless nights on Doom, the granddaddy of first-person shooters. Even in simplistic pixelated form, the imps and zombie chain-gunners that wandered the corridors of a hellish Mars base were enough to give gamers cold sweats. Each subsequent first-person shooter on the market added some new innovation ("hey, you can look up!"), and no other video game format could create the sensation of fear and peril so easily; players could believe they were trudging through some forsaken corridor, and jumping out of their skins whenever the digitized sound of some beast came out of their Sound Blaster cards.
Star Wars entered the first-person fray with Dark Forces in 1995. It doesn't matter how manly Kyle Katarn is; the dianogas of Anoat City are terrifying. The third mission of the game has you trudging through the sewers of the abandoned city, where the primary threat were voracious dianogas that would strike in the dark. Whenever a periscope-eye would penetrate the murky surface, you'd run away like crazy, scuttling backwards to keep the eyeball in your sights while unleashing a barrage of blaster fire. Only once the riddled carcass floated to the surface would you breathe a sigh of relief.
