ichtyander
Member
I think Marathon was the first game that used mouse for free look.
Bungie did it first, ha
It's worth noting there were a couple of earlier examples of using the mouse/device to look around, but the traditional free or mouse look used today (as in moving the mouse or right stick moves the center of the player's view aka rotating the player camera) was indeed fully introduced by Marathon.
The first early example is Gunbuster (1992) by Taito which used an arcade stick alongside a light gun so even though it was a light gun game, it enabled the player to move around and strafe while using the gun (which moved the targeting reticule on the screen) to aim and rotate the camera left and right (no vertical look). When the reticule gets to the edge of the screen, the view rotates in that direction, pretty much like view scrolling in RTSs or MOBAs.
The other one is CyClones (November 1994, about a month before Marathon) by Raven Software, pretty much using the same principle of having a free, mouse controlled reticule which rotates the screen by pushing the edges of the screen, with added vertical look.
I mean, Ultima Underworld ('92 and '93) and System Shock (September '94) also had a similar control scheme but you had to move the mouse near the edge of the screen and then hold left click when the cursor changes shape to actually rotate the camera, so it's a very early proto-mouselook but there's nothing "free" about it. Also, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1993, Psygnosis) had the free lightgun style moving reticule just like CyClones but the camera did not rotate by using the mouse, only by keyboard.
This edge mouselook was later reintroduced by games like Operation Flashpoint/ARMA as a mandatory or optional control scheme and what's even more interesting to me is that it's also being experimented with and considered as one of several actually usable control schemes for VR, replacing the mouse/right thumbstick with the player's head, serving as a secondary torso rotation control.