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 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”.