Steam adds "Boomer Shooter" as an official tag
Steam adds "Boomer Shooter" as an official tag
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Boomer Shooter
138 comments
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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
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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.
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Well, it was boomers that made them, so presumably SOME of them played them.
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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.
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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.
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Finally someone did the math!
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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
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Yeah I love the term. It’s funny, unique, and you know exactly what they’re talking about.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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thanks for the suggestions, but turbo overkill looks a little to too doom 2016 for my taste
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Doom is Gen X if anything. Boomers are pongers.
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Age 35+
Boomer
Age 1-34
Millennial
Literally A Baby
Zoomer
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Cool. I don't really care about the name if it means that finding games that I like gets a little bit easier.
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"Back in my day, we could only render 3 polygons at a time, and by god, we were grateful!"
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It's worth noting that boomer games didn't render polygons
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Yeah, the sticks, rocks, and pine cones of their day probably didn't make great GPUs.
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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.
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Pixels so many boomer pixels.
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Vectrex enters the chat
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Am I the only one that actually doesn't mind the term boomer shooter? I find it hilarious and accurate for the most part.
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It's just a harmless joke, most boomers never actually played DOOM and it's not even used in a pejorative manner.
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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.
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It’s too bad they’re an entire generation off. But whatever tag line gets them the most sales, right?
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Are they seriously calling arena shooters that? I'm mad. This should be generation X shooter!
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I dislike the term, but I think Arena shooter implies multiplayer whereas a Boomer Shooter is a modern, retro inspired single player shooter
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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).
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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
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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.
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millenial shooter
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Why are you mad? How is this affecting your life?
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It's not that deep bro.
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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.
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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
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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.
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hey, now i can finally have an easier time looking for Retro-style FPS.
assuming the games are tagged correctly.
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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.
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i thought boomer shooter ment anything that had explosions every 30 seconds to keep the tweens attention.
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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.
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Makes perfect sense. Boomer as in old school, and it conveys these games are action "boom" packed.
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Does it mean a shooter for boomers, or do you get to shoot boomers?
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Pills here!
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Finally, a tag for me.
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So is it shit like og DOOM or is it shit with explosions. Or both?
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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
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Watch civvie11 on youtube. He kinda specializes in boomer shooters and slav jank.
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How long until someone re-skins boomers onto a shooter?
That kinda sounds like something s serial killer would do...Ed Gein...
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Now if they could do something about games falsely tagged as immersive sim... no, F1 23 is not an immersive sim. It is a sim that is immersive, yes.
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Does that make 1999 a boomer shooter year? Because Q3A vs UT was one of the great joys of this GenXers early 20’s…
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Yes it's annoying because realistically they should be called millenial shooters or something, but "boomer shooter" is somewhat alliterative so I get it
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Damn. I'd play all those games, too.
138 comments
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.
Doomer Shooters? /s
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.
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)?
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.
So arena shooters Ala quake and unreal basically.
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:
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.
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...
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.
Ok booner
Kinda seems like point.
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.
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.
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")