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.
Boomer Shooter = Shooter that goes boom
Okay, then riddle me this: which shooter DOESN’T go boom?
Splatoon?
That’s a good one. True enough, Splatoon doesn’t go boom, it goes splat.
An actual boomer shooter would be like Space Invaders.
But at least it’s got a name I suppose so if you like them you can find them and differentiate them from all your online XP bar tutorial modern bullshit.
I always assumed that the Boom in Boomer Shooter was more “Gun go Boom”, which seemed to fit the genre quite well.
Boomer is a state of mind, love, and this post is a shining example of boomerism.
When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old?
You mean, like most of us Millennial gamers are now (30+)? The youngest Millennials, born in 1996, will be 30 in 2 years.
These games clearly took inspiration from 90s FPS games, which 👌, but they were played mostly by Gen Xers and Millenials, not Boomers.
I’m a middle-Millennial (1988), and Doom was well before my time as a gamer. I was 5 years old in 1993. Halo (2001) was more my generation, just barely. The oldest Millennials in 1993 were 12 years old, which was not the target age group for Doom. Most of my cohort were playing Doom 3 on Xbox360, not Doom on DOS.
GenX? Sure, they played Doom, but Boomers were by far the larger age group playing “Mature” games at that time. Video games have never been just for children.
It’s marketing doublespeak dreamed up by the totally deranged and it works
You have to remember its millennials and Gen Z experiencing this genre, not boomers.
I just think of it like boom as in explosions. Boom-boom shooty-shoot; or boomer shooter if you prefer brevity.
Guys, IT ISN’T A REFERENCE TO THE BOOMER GENERATION. It’s boomer as in shotgun-go-BOOM.
It’s not meant to be taken literally. Language evolves and boomer no longer exclusively refers to baby boomers, it’s just a general Gen-Z term for older people.
I know, but just let me have my old man yells at cloud moment.
Worth noting that the boomer wojak meme started as “That 30 year old boomer”. It was never about actual Baby Boomers.
This is it, notice how Google Trends[1] shows a rise in “30 year old boomer” not long before “boomer shooter” becomes more commonplace. It’s just the whole applying “boomer” to things like being stuck in their ways or boomer-like behavior, rather than age, that took off a few years back.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=boomer shooter,30 year old boomer&hl=en
Millennials are going to be in absolute shambles if they ever find out “Okay boomer” wasn’t directly targeted at boomers.
It wasn’t? This is what Wikipedia says:
“OK boomer” or “okay boomer” is a catchphrase and internet meme that has been used by members of the Millennial generation and Generation Z (born between the early 1980s and the early 2010s) to dismiss or mock attitudes typically associated with baby boomers – people born in the two decades following World War II.
Who was it targeted at then?
It was targeted at everyone older than the younger people saying it.
It’s used as a catch all, with the intention of getting everyone riled up. Because regardless of if you’re an actual boomer or not, now you’re getting bundled together with them.
