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.
I never even considered that the name referred to baby boomers I thought it just meant they went “boom”
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”.
Oh, I’m liking this take. Get ready for “Z Shooters” and “Alpha Shooters”.
Maybe it works if read as “games made by boomers?” … Yeah I have no idea how old anyone was/is. Time and I don’t really get along 🤷
Also, going along with a thing I’ve been seeing in these comments, I’m idly curious as to whether anyone who isn’t a Boomer cares about use/misuse/abuse of the term “Boomer” 🤔
From what I’ve seen, Boomer Shooters were actually often developed by Gen Xers (and played by Millennials), and both of them despise being lumped with the boomers - hence why they dislike the term :p
I guess that makes sense. I’d be upset if critters kept associating me with boomers 😼 I don’t play those so I guess I just haven’t been around the term enough to get a feel for it.
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.
Ok.
We were calling them Doom-likes before FPS became a thing, maybe it’s time to bring it back as a sub category.
Appending “-like” to any genre is so unoriginal and uninteresting.
It isn’t intended to be interesting
That’s abundantly clear.
The burn you think you are deploying, to a casual categorical label and those who use it, is not very effective.
It’s an observation, not a “burn”.
If you observed it to be abundantly clear you wouldn’t have made your original comment.
Speak for yourself. I comment on obvious things all the time.
Not a bad idea, but like which DOOM?
I ask that sarcastically, but 90’s DOOM, 00’s DOOM, and 10-20s DOOM all play very differently lol
Any of them would be more accurate than Boomer shooter.
Doom clones!
.
I always assumed that the Boom in Boomer Shooter was more “Gun go Boom”, which seemed to fit the genre quite well.
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.
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.
NEVER! I choose to embrace my inner geriatric and complain about kids these days and their hippy-hop music.
Can recommend, but only when you’re subverting expectations. Young student is unloading a bunch of empty beverage crates from the elevator on the ground floor, making you wait, already looking quite self-conscious about it? Bellow, loud but not shouty, “Unbelievable, the students of today”. See them flinch and cower, “oh fuck this again”. Continue, with flawless timing, “why isn’t that beer?”.
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.
My dad helped me install the original Wolfenstein 3D on DOS when I was a kid. And he’s 100% a boomer (b.1947). So for that reason it always feels accurate to me.
I had just assumed it was for the generation whence a chunk of the programmers came
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.
Think about it this way, it’s not that the majority of people playing those games are boomers, but the majority of games that boomers play are those games.
Also, this has caused me to look up the formal definition of Gen X vs Boomer, and I did not realize that everyone born after 1964 is considered Gen X. In my head Gen X went from ~1975-1990, everyone before that being a boomer, so assuming other people have the same conception of boomer in their head, then the majority of people able to afford gaming PCs in the mid 90s would be boomers…
They also do just go boom and have stuff like the BFG …
It’s such a fun phrase to say, though.
It does roll off the tongue nicely, I have to admit.
Because boomers programmed them originally.
No.
They were actually mostly programmed by Gen Xers.
Yup! John Carmack is 53.
Well, this one is a bit special case. One of a generation…
Oh come on. It’s funny. Boomer is more of a state of mind descriptor at this point. Don’t be such a boomer bro.
Get off my lawn and leave me to my prune juice.
I’ve been saying this forever too! Boomers were the ones complaining about thier kids playing them back in the day because of the violence and demonic imagery.
In the 90s people called them "Doom-like"s. I usually just say “90s FPS games”. Which I guess could be confusing and make people think I’m talking about framerate, but eh.
