Not to say I hate the genre, I actually love me some Dusk or Turbo Overkill, but why, oh why are they called Boomer Shooters?
These games clearly took inspiration from 90s FPS games, which 👌, but they were played mostly by Gen Xers and Millenials, not Boomers. When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old? I’m sure some of them played FPS games, but there is no way they were the majority.
Whenever I see the term Boomer Shooter, my mind goes to games like Shootout! for Magnavox Odyssey. Can’t we call them something else, like Retro FPSes or something?
Anyway, rant over. Thank you for your time.
Because Wolfenstein-like is a mouthful.
e: How about Catacomb-like?
When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old?
You mean, like most of us Millennial gamers are now (30+)? The youngest Millennials, born in 1996, will be 30 in 2 years.
These games clearly took inspiration from 90s FPS games, which 👌, but they were played mostly by Gen Xers and Millenials, not Boomers.
I’m a middle-Millennial (1988), and Doom was well before my time as a gamer. I was 5 years old in 1993. Halo (2001) was more my generation, just barely. The oldest Millennials in 1993 were 12 years old, which was not the target age group for Doom. Most of my cohort were playing Doom 3 on Xbox360, not Doom on DOS.
GenX? Sure, they played Doom, but Boomers were by far the larger age group playing “Mature” games at that time. Video games have never been just for children.
Old=boomer sorry. That’s just the way it turned out, nothing we can do about it. Raging against new slang is just gonna make us more out of touch, and intensify the feeling of being old, so I just accept it and try to keep up. Boomer is old now, not just the Baby Boomers.
I’m 26 and I’ve already been called a boomer by younger people. I don’t really see the problem as to me it’s just funny and reminds me to try my best not to eventually become a boomer that hates everything that isn’t how it used to be.
Don’t be such a tardigrade.
Raging against new slang is just gonna make us more out of touch, and intensify the feeling of being old, so I just accept it and try to keep up.
NEVER! I choose to embrace my inner geriatric and complain about kids these days and their hippy-hop music.
Boomer basically means 20+ years old nowadays as far as I can tell. Or older than zoomers.
If it helps, this is the first time I hear it 🤷♂️
I just think of it like boom as in explosions. Boom-boom shooty-shoot; or boomer shooter if you prefer brevity.
An actual boomer shooter would be like Space Invaders.
But at least it’s got a name I suppose so if you like them you can find them and differentiate them from all your online XP bar tutorial modern bullshit.
I love the term. For me it’s not just a shooter in an older style but also a shooter that goes BOOM. Much better than boring cover shooters.
Oh, they’re definitely better, no question. But by that definition, wouldn’t that make them Boom Shooters?
Na, because the newer shooters still go boom. But boomer shooters are just boomer. And everybody’s waiting for the coming of the boomest shooter.
We’ve already seen the boomest shooter. Our savior hath already come and gone and left us behind to witness his passing. His name was Ultrakill.
I would love to see that take place, so sign me up for the Church of the Boomest Shooter. My only real concern is where do we go from boomest?
Helldivers 2 wins. You get to drop orbital strikes, launch ICBM nukes, call in cluster munitions, etc.
Boomestest, obviously.
That’s the neat part, we don’t. Can’t have the messiah coming for real. Otherwise you get splinter religions.
Now I feel like playing Messiah.
I kind of enjoy this take lol
I dunno, my rich uncle is a boomer and back in the 90s he was one of the only people I knew who could afford a gucci PC and every big box FPS game. So it kinda makes sense from that perspective.
I get that the term doesn’t line up age wise with actually Boomers in terms of calendar years, but also video game generations are shorter than social generations. We’re currently on the “ninth-generation” of video games, and Doom came out at the beginning of the third generation of video games. So you could consider Doom-likes to be 6 generations old, and baby-boomers to be 4 generations old. So in terms of “generations”, Boomer shooters should maybe be named after an older generation such as the “Greatest Generation” (6 generations ago). Therefore I propose we call Doom-likes “Greatest Shooters” instead of “Boomer shooters”.
It is utterly bizarre to me out of all the misnomers and ridiculous (sometimes offensive) terms out there in the media/hobby world, I see “boomer shooter” complained about so much more than any other. This is like the third rant I’ve seen about it in a week.
I thought Twitter and such were making a mountain out of a mole hill with how people responded to the term “Boomer“ in past years but clearly it ruffles peoples feathers way more than it should. Half the time I go through the comment histories and these are the same people that use ableist slurs regularly. I am not suggesting that OP does, I have not looked at their comments. Just a general observation.
If you were around back in the 90s, you might appreciate why this annoys so many older gamers. Boomers lost their fucking minds over video games. Millennials and Gen-Z weren’t the first generation that had to deal with their bullshit.
I never even considered that the name referred to baby boomers I thought it just meant they went “boom”
Back to Doom-clone it is then.
Oldskool FPS. There. That’s the correct term. Now, who’s up for some DM-Morpheus with instagib mutator?🤘
…and volatile ammo. I’m in.
I call them id-style shooters myself, but there is a bit of word play I like in the term ‘boomer shooter’. On top of referencing the age of the audience when they first arrived (albeit incorrectly), it is also a reference to the fact that the optimal strategy for these games is simply to blow things the fuck up. There is very little tactical play beyond what weapons to use for a given situation, and these games really love their explosive barrels and rocket launchers.
