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.
“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 Like the popular phrase “okay boomer” started out intentionally aimed at actual boomers and now it just refers to an outdated opinion or view.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.
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)?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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)
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.
I’m just explaining what they meant, that’s just being pedantic now.
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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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.