So “boomer” just means anything that’s older than the person viewing it now? Boy they’ve sure killed off any power that word ever had lol
Its especially annoying in this case since it was the boomers who actively were trying to get DOOM/Quake/whatever banned. It is the GenX/older millennials who got off on shooters with any sense of urgency or movement.
It is on the level of deciding Taylor Swift’s sub-genre of music is “Kanye-core” because Kanye was a dick to her in the past.
It is the GenX/older millennials who got off on [that].
Doomer Shooters? /s
I thought doomers were largely young millenials/Gen z?
Dude who cares? It’s funny and catchy and makes it easy to find exactly the genre you’re looking for. Also a lot of boomers did play doom.
Certified zoomer here to explain. This boomer games tag is not about old games. It’s about games that match what a boomer thinks of as an FPS (as viewed probably by a zoomer). The top 3 most popular games are made in 2020, 2023, and 2023.
Basically if the game play for the game was the style of a pre 2000 shooter it would qualify for the tag. But it could have come out yesterday.
Boomers didn’t and still don’t think of video games at all unless they’re trying to moralise it and outlaw it.
Jack Thompson Is the perfect example of a boomer and their relationship with video games.
“Boomer” has changed meaning to “old” which I view as fine. Like the popular phrase “okay boomer” started out intentionally aimed at actual boomers and now it just refers to an outdated opinion or view. I don’t think anyone who says “boomer shooter” thinks that boomers played these.
So “in the style of” ?
I do think it’s interesting that the almost fundamental definition of being a boomer would be the significant dividing line of having access to video games growing up or not, but alas, culture is what culture is.
Can you give a longer form description?
Would this be like a “fixed perspective” fps ( like of doom or quake or Wolfenstein)?
I’m thinking more arena shooters like quake and unreal.
A strict definition is hard. The first thing that came to my mind was ‘like quake’.
Fps games have come in phases. Most recently looter shooters, before that battle royals, before that hero shooters. And quite early in that chain you had boomer shooters.
Fixed pov would certainly be a step down that path but I wouldn’t call it a requirement. If Quake got a faithful remake with all the advancements of 2024 and non of the industry trends that’d be a boomer shooter.
If you made a brand new arena shooter with no classes and an array of ~8 distinct weapons (think one rocketlauncher, one SMG, one pistol etc.) laid across the map focused on something like TDM or KotH, that could be a boomer shooter.
It’s kind of like porn, you know it when you see it.
Ok makes sense, if it feels like a remake or reimagining of something that predates halo 1 it’s that
From my comment to the first guy:
They’re just shooters that are mechanically similar to old shooters like Quake and Doom, so you’re typically gonna have a mix of these traits:
- A wide range of weapons with unique uses (think rockets, railguns, shotguns, machine guns…)
- Chapters that you can complete in any order but the levels in them are completed linearly
- Colored keys to open colored doors
- A level-end screen when you reach the end of a level that tells you your completion time and what % of items/enemies are left
- And my favorite part, a lot of them have advanced movement techniques, which are usually identical to Quake (if not Quake 2/3) like bunnyhopping and rocket-jumping
Would this be like a “fixed perspective” fps ( like of doom or quake or Wolfenstein)?
That’s what “first person” means in the context of videogames lol. That’s the FP in FPS
fixed perspective fps means you can’t look around separately than your can move your character. The original doom and castle wolfenstein were like this. You can rotate your view but you don’t have an independent camera ( that came with the quake engine ).
I’m not sure I’m following. I’ve never known Quake or Doom to have a camera independent of your player character’s perspective (at least without console commands or demo tools)
I’m not sure I’m following. I’ve never known Quake or Doom to have a camera independent of your player character’s perspective (at least without console commands or demo tools)
That’s exactly the point. Your perspective isn’t independent of your plane of movement.
In doom and the at the time doom clones you couldn’t look up and down. The world looked 3d but technically wasn’t. They couldn’t even have rooms above each other because of this. The games were at a technical level top down shooters but viewed from the first person perspective of your character with graphical renderings likely using raycasting to give the illusion of a 3d space around you.
Just because you only had one axis of camera movement doesn’t mean the camera was fixed.
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I don’t think the youngsters realize that you couldn’t always strafe. In fact, the word “strafe” in the sense used in video games had to be invented to describe the mechanic. It never refered to walking until FPS got a new groove. Here’s a small reddit post about it.
Exactly. Kids these days.
For clarification if you dont get it:
You had four keys for motion: wasd
Two for rotation: q and e.
You couldn’t necessarily change your perspective independent of your plane of movement. This had to be done simultaneously.
Strafing as its currently understood didnt exist until your ‘perspective’ became un-fixed from your ability to move. It was at this point that the shooters became ‘truly’ 3d.
It’s about games that match what a boomer thinks of as an FPS.
Can you give me an example?
I can’t think of anything in the last three years that have massively changed what an FPS looks like.
I think it is more just general trends.
Assume all dates are wrong because time has no meaning and what little grasp I had was destroyed by 2020-2022.
DOOM (1994? and especially Quake) era FPSes were very much about running into a room and murdering everything. Health was a resource and it was about combining reflxes with resource management skills. Also, the average game speed was actually really fast. I think someone did rough math and DOOM Guy was sprinting at like 90 MPH? Arena Shooters like Unreal Tournament came out of this where it was about different players seeing who can react fastest while managing those resources and the item spawns. And the level design was generally “a whole level of enemies” as it were.
Then, in the early 00s we started seeing a heavy rise in third person shooters. In large part because it was a way to show off character models and minimize the fine grain details on consoles. This, combined with REALLY shitty AI in FPSes like Iron Fist or whatever the alternate reality WW1 g ame was, very much birthed the “cover shooter” gameplay. Advance to a choke point, snipe enemies and funnel them, then hide. Lather, rinse, repeat. Which, like Half-Life before it, very much turned level design into " a series of rooms".
Which… led to Call of Duty (and, to a lesser extent, Medal of Honor before it) where the gameplay was exactly what. Stop, take out every enemy you can, and advance. Which also was because of greatly shortened time to kill and an emphasis on leaning and going prone. And multiplayer followed suit with generally much slower gameplay and a focus on “pre-firing” and “camping”. And level design became “a series of set pieces”
And… that more or less gets us to where we are today. Something like Infinite Warfare or even Titanfall are “fast” relative to Soap waiting in a shitter for the enemy to run past, but they are still REALLY slow relative to the “boomer shooters”.
In recent years (I guess since 2016?), we have seen a rise in something “else”. I like to think of them as “puzzle shooters” (and Bulletstorm was one but Bulletstorm was shit so let’s ignore it) and they are a lot closer to Hotline Miami. You are still treating every room as its own encounter, but those encounters are very frantic and more about adapting your plan depending on RNG and explosions.
Whereas the modern “boomer shooter” are almost exclusively quake-likes masquerading as doom-likes. But they are w hat we remember Quake to be, as opposed to Quake itself. Movement isn’t necessarily as fast as it used to be but it is still a LOT faster than a Call of Duty and is more about whole level encounters.
And as an aside, take a look at the Rise of the Triad remake like ten-ish years ago. That is the game which broke me and realized how slow CoD et al had become. That game is fast even compared to DOOM 2016 (and most DOOM Eternal encounters, but not all). Shame ROTT was always a mid game though.
A game like Tarkov stands in drastic comparison to a game like Quake. Compare the weapon selection (many guns for one role vs distinct but limited) or gameplay loop (enter zone->loot->fight to extract vs spawn->kill->die)
Quake, Battlefield 4, Rainbow 6 Siege, PUBG, and Tarkov are all FPS games but they’re drastically different in design.
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Duke Nukem is the quintessential boomer shooter.
Thanks to v0.19, you can’t hide your deleted comments from me!
TIL millennials are boomers
So arena shooters Ala quake and unreal basically.
That and older titles like doom and quake and Wolfenstein.
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And Doom(2016)
Nah because it covers stuff like Duke or Shadow Warrior, which are large sprawling campaigns on, for their time, large open maps.
It’s literally just all FPS games from before like 2003 and those that look like those generations of graphics.
The “boomer” in “boomer shooter” refers to the style, not the release date lol. Most games with that tag are actually pretty new. They’re just shooters that are mechanically similar to old shooters like Quake and Doom, so you’re typically gonna have a mix of these traits:
- A wide range of weapons with unique uses (think rockets, railguns, shotguns, machine guns…)
- Chapters that you can complete in any order but the levels in them are completed linearly
- Colored keys to open colored doors
- A level-end screen when you reach the end of a level that tells you your completion time and what % of items/enemies are left
- And my favorite part, a lot of them have advanced movement techniques, which are usually identical to Quake (if not Quake 2/3) like bunnyhopping and rocket-jumping
I recommend Dusk or Ultrakill if you wanna try a really good (and cheap) boomer shooter that came out in the last few years.
It’s shooters in the style that Boomers and Gen X (but no one ever addresses Gen X) played. Like Doom, Wolfenstein, etc. Sure millennials played them too, but they weren’t the target age demographic.
Cultic is a good modern boomer shooter if you want to try one.
Ain’t no Boomers playing Doom, Quake, or Wolfenstein back in the 90s. These games were directly aimed at the Gen-X and early Millennial generations. And by god, did we ever play the shit out of them.
Boomers did not fucking play Doom in any numbers, they were in their 50s.
They were playing minesweeper and tetris and solitaire if they played any computer games.
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Honestly, yes.
Boomer shooter is a real genre that has defined qualities. If you did even a cursory Google search you would see that.
Just because something doesn’t make sense to you at face value doesn’t mean it’s arbitrary/makes the term toothless. You’re just uninformed.
Is Left 4 Dead a Boomer shooter?
I remember shooting Boomers point blank and triggering hordes…
well played lol
No
Every single time this comes up: We all understand it is a (sub-)genre. Believe us, we know and we love it. We have loved it since the 90s.
The issue is the name. It attributes a genre to a generation that actively fought against it and tried to get it banned.
It isn’t a bad genre. It is a bad name.
I like the name. For me it has the double meaning of a shooter that goes BOOM. Makes me think of what I feel was a better time for shooters. I always think of the rocket launcher in Doom. And I like that it rhymes with Doom.
Just showed my son Doom. He loved it. And he was amazed at how fast Doomguy is. Then he discovered the run button.
Have you shown him strafe running yet??
It’s not about belief. It’s a thing you can literally search and confirm online right now. I don’t know who “us” is either.
I also didn’t say it was a good or a bad genre. I just said it is one that has a definition.
As for correcting me with “sub” I sort of just rolled my eyes and moved on, until I noticed you then called it a genre at the end of your comment. Kind of funny is all.
Kinda seems like point.
Ok booner
Boomer is a state of mind.
Boomer.
That’s a very boomer comment.
Boomer.
Always has been. Nobody was saying “okay boomer” to senior citizens. It was always to Gen X and now it’s being applied to Millennials. If you have songs on your playlist from the 2000s and don’t watch tiktoks, you’ve become a boomer.
Okay boomer was an insult for the baby boomer generation, now it’s being used for anyone older. Both are acceptable.
Yeah it was originally shit like “you sound like a 60 year old trump supporter who hasn’t gotten with the times”. It was “I’m not going to bother fighting with you, so I’m going to treat you like the uncle i only deal with on thanksgiving”
Just before okay boomer caught in “shut up boomer” was a bit of a thing.
Ah, so it means anyone who you disagree with who happens to be a few years older than you… So it’s pointless?
No they don’t have to be older. If I had a friend who was a year older than me and I said “battle passes, looter shooters, and tik tok are dumb” he could call me a total boomer.
It’s about someone harnessing an older perspective.
Sounds like it’s just become a synonym for a curmudgeon.
Or neither are, depending upon your view of bigotry.
Bigotry requires prejudice, boomers aren’t clumped together, just called out when the situation requires it.
Calling someone a Karen isn’t bigotry so why would boomer?
, said every “I don’t see color” White Nationalist I’ve ever met.
Funny, are you being prejudiced against people who use boomer and Karen and clumping them all together…?
That’s mighty bigot and hypocritical of you.
Context matters, if someone uses the term correctly and not prejudiced against an entire group, why shouldn’t that be allowed? There goes supporting my drag queen friend and gay associates I guess, can’t call them gay apparently.
Few issues with that. And let me preface all of this with: I do think “boomer” is a shit insult but I also don’t care since baby boomers can fuck right off for all they have done to humanity.
The use of the term as a derogatory one IS prejudice. If saying “Boomer” was not a negative term, it wouldn’t be used. Not sure what the equivalent to godwin’s law is, but it is comparable to the people who insist the n-word isn’t about black people and is only about the black people who are acting like n-words.
Also: “Karen” actually IS a rather problematic term with a lot of roots in misogyny. It very much is built around the idea that women shouldn’t complain and when they do they are just being contrary/annoying/nagging and so forth. I don’t think everyone who uses the term is a misogynist, but they are making the world a shittier place.
Also “Karen” in particular REALLY fucking sucks if that is your name.
Yes some people use the terms as bigotry that happens with everything and shouldn’t be a reason to not use it.
Calling someone gay isn’t instantly bigotry. Context and tone* matters, and yes unfortunately in text tone doesn’t come across, but we do get context.
The word has a definition. Its defined meaning of ‘born during this era’ is the only none bigoted means of use. Example of another word which is often used as a bigoted insult: “The plant’s growth was retarded by the lack of Sun light.” See if you can pick out the word so you can defend its use as an insult simply because it is in line with your bigotry.
… I did not have “And it is okay when I insult someone by calling them ‘gay’ depending on the context” on my bingo card for this thread.
Holy fuck
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The insult is that you have a word with a definition which you are using as an insult. It is insulting to the demographic age group since you intend it as an insult. By the very definition of the word insult, the folks in the proper definition must be in some way offensive/inferior/bad. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an insult to use. Should be fairly obvious to anyone whose English isn’t retarded through lack of Education.
Are you actually saying Karen is worse than boomer?
And you think Karen is misogynistic it boomer isn’t ageist?
Like neither is actually bad, but Karen is the most mid shit ever.
Yup. Karen is as much a bigoted insult as boomer.
You think we were saying “okay boomers” to people barely a few years older than us?
It was always about baby boomers, the entitled generation.
That is exactly who we were saying “OK boomer” to: Baby Boomers.
It was always to Gen X
No it was definitely to Baby Boomers, then it morphed into an insult that you direct at anybody acting like a boomer/giving off Boomer energy (hence calling Gen X/Millenials/any non-boomer out with “ok boomer”)
Boomer shooters never get played by boomers, what a shame
Seriously tho a boomer shooter would be like maze war not DOOM, by the time this genre of games was created (by GenXers) and played by Millenials, they were becoming geriatric but whatever
Yeah, I’m around 40 and I played these games as they were coming out back in the 1990s. I call them either “FPS” or “Retro FPS”…
People born in the 1940s/50s never played them much. Although my dad did play Wolfenstein3D and Doom some, but that was not common for people in his age group.
Well, it was boomers that made them, so presumably SOME of them played them.
The term boomer has degraded over the last several years. I think of mid 90s fps games. And that’s fine. I grew up during that era.
As a Gen-Xer who used to twitch with the best of the younguns, I can vouch that we’re playing a lot fewer games that require reflexes that can’t be made up for with strategy and treachery (e.g. exploits).
Mostly I play dad games like Satisfactory or Subnautica but do pretty well for my crew in Deep Rock Galactic
If a boomer shooter is a classic run-and-gun shooter (contrast: tactical shooters or first-person survival) I’d still do fine unless its bullet hell or something. Serious Sam had the tendency to teleport in dozens of shooters on a plain with no cover, or send me into a dark place teeming with climbing ninja monkeys.
Deep rock is peak video game for me
Rock and Stone, Brother!
FOR KARL!
Rock and Stone
Finally someone did the math!
As the exact target audience for classic shooters (ion fury is gooooooood))
Idk, I find this term lighthearted and endearing, maybe it makes finding that exact kinda game finally easier
Yeah I love the term. It’s funny, unique, and you know exactly what they’re talking about.
I always preferred the term “Arena Shooter” but it may have more specific meaning than any game that vaguely has elements popular in fps games of the 90s that I think “Boomer Shooter” is usually trying to communicate.
I mean… I wouldn’t really say Doom or Duke Nukem or whatever were arena shooters, though? Something like Quake 3 certainly is, but I feel like anything that vaguely has a map that you progress through instead of having a round of a fixed length / kill count in a smaller space doesn’t scream “arena shooter” to me.
Doom had multiplayer over lan that I would say fits in that definition. For me personally arena shooters are more about movement speed and how weapons/health are managed as power ups to be found and managed as a recourses. I don’t consider multiplayer to be a requirement for the genre basically.
Doom multiplayer is kind of arena shooter, I’ll agree. Something like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament fits the term much better to me. Genres are pretty arbitrary, though.
I had to look it up because I thought it was about “making boom and shoot”.
Also it’s a bit weird because I don’t know any boomer who played a shooter. Actually I don’t think I know any boomer who played video games, others than mobile word games.
The only people I know who played shooters in the 90’s were Gen X kids like me.
Anyway, I guess I’m a grumpy old man now but it’s a bit annoying that “boomer” has become synonym with “old people” and “millennial” with young people, while Gen X are close to retirement and millennials are clearly no longer young.
You guys get to retire?
Check out a YouTuber named Civvie 11 if you haven’t already. He covers so many good and bad boomer shooters from old school to mkdern while going pretty deep into their history.
Also, dont sleep on turbo overkill. It’s everything right and then some about the genre.
thanks for the suggestions, but turbo overkill looks a little to too doom 2016 for my taste
Doom is Gen X if anything. Boomers are pongers.
Age 35+
Boomer
Age 1-34
Millennial
Literally A Baby
Zoomer
Cool. I don’t really care about the name if it means that finding games that I like gets a little bit easier.
“Back in my day, we could only render 3 polygons at a time, and by god, we were grateful!”
It’s worth noting that boomer games didn’t render polygons
Yeah, the sticks, rocks, and pine cones of their day probably didn’t make great GPUs.
Vectrex enters the chat
Okay I know what you mean, but… Technically you could even consider text to be polygons. Or anything on your display could be considered to be made of single pixel polygons.
Like, you could argue that a sprite based game doesn’t have any polygons because it’s just blitting sprites onto the screen, but a sprite is kinda just a textured rectangle, which is a polygon. Rendering a sprite isn’t all that different than rasterizing a more general polygon either, it’s sort of just a special case where the math is really easy. I’m just being a pedant, though. I blame math class.
I don’t know what you’re considering to be a boomer game, though. Maybe you just mean hoop and stick doesn’t have polygons.
Pixels so many boomer pixels.
Am I the only one that actually doesn’t mind the term boomer shooter? I find it hilarious and accurate for the most part.
It’s just a harmless joke, most boomers never actually played DOOM and it’s not even used in a pejorative manner.
I know it’s not meant to be pejorative so I really don’t take offense except I’ve been playing video games since pong in the early 80s so they’re talking about me. I’m only 53 and no freakin’ boomer.
GenX shooter… ok maybe. Gex shooter … GX shooter…. Something like that. I don’t know of a single boomer playing games. I know there are some I just don’t personally know any.
It’s too bad they’re an entire generation off. But whatever tag line gets them the most sales, right?
Are they seriously calling arena shooters that? I’m mad. This should be generation X shooter!
I dislike the term, but I think Arena shooter implies multiplayer whereas a Boomer Shooter is a modern, retro inspired single player shooter
I don’t think an arena shooter necessarily has to be multiplayer (but they’re mostly only fun when they are)… but it heavily implies that the maps are… arenas. Smaller areas that you backtrack through constantly with no “end”. Matches probably end by a condition like a timer or kill count or something. That said, I think we use “arena shooter” to distinguish games like Quake 3 from CoD (with some differences like weapons being on the map and players spawning with the same barebones kit)… but arguably CoD isn’t that far removed from something like Quake 3 (which I know is heresy and they play very differently, but the fundamentals aren’t so different).
millenial shooter
I agree with the other guy, I’ve always thought of “arena shooter” as describing the multiplayer aspect. IMO, “boomer shooter” is a good way of distinguishing the game from being more similar to Quake’s multiplayer vs singleplayer
Arena shooter is descriptive of certain mechanics. Armor/weapons with tinted spawns on the map, usually some kind of bunny hopping, but that’s not mandatory, and often portals/verticality.
I’m talking about quake, unreal, warsow, xonotic, etc…
I think what you guys are on about are games like doom, Wolfenstein, Duke nukem and so on. Not so much quake but single player.
Why are you mad? How is this affecting your life?
It’s not that deep bro.
There are some really great explanations of “boomer shooter” itt, and you should read them before just reacting to the headline.
I had no idea it was a thing but there are some extremely insightful comments in here that imo totally justify the definition.
If you’re interested in the genre, Quake 1 just got a remake and there’s no better place to start than the originals B)
Ultrakill is also very good. It’s only a few years old
If you’re interested in the genre, Quake 1 just got a remake and there’s no better place to start than the originals B)
I started my PC gaming journey with Wolfenstein3D and Return To Castle Wolfenstein. DukeNukem3D, and RTCW were my jam and I was high ranked on public servers (was in clans, etc. all that). After that I joined the Navy, got into Warcraft (was easier for LANs in the barracks, wc2 and wc3). From then on stuck to mobas for my competitive fix and never really went back to fps.
I had no idea there was an actual genre defined by these though. It totally makes sense. Wolfenstein was soooooo much faster than later games like COD.
Oh I guess I’m preaching to the choir lmao
hey, now i can finally have an easier time looking for Retro-style FPS.
assuming the games are tagged correctly.
I skimmed through the list and it’s pretty accurate. If you’re interested in the genre, I’d recommend trying the Quake 1 remaster. Ultrakill is also very good if you want something newer.
Makes perfect sense. Boomer as in old school, and it conveys these games are action “boom” packed.
i thought boomer shooter ment anything that had explosions every 30 seconds to keep the tweens attention.
It’s games like Quake, which does have it’s fair share of explosions but it’s mostly about emulating what games like Quake had to offer. Like high skill-cieling movement and/or combat.
Does it mean a shooter for boomers, or do you get to shoot boomers?
Pills here!
Finally, a tag for me.
So is it shit like og DOOM or is it shit with explosions. Or both?
It’s more like Quake than DOOM in terms of shooter mechanics (but the levels are very similar to both). They usually have rocket-jumping/bunnyhopping and stuff. IMO, the high skill-cieling movement and/or combat is integral to living up to the OG boomer shooters like Quake and Unreal
Watch civvie11 on youtube. He kinda specializes in boomer shooters and slav jank.
