I hate the term "Boomer Shooter"

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.

Boomer is a state of mind, love, and this post is a shining example of boomerism.

You seem like an intelligent and discerning person, so I'm sure you'll appreciate that the only possible response to this is "ok boomer"

Ok Boomer.

Lol try being a Roguelike fan.

You correctly tell people that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is a Roguelike and they look at you like you've grown a second head.

Sometimes this stuff happens, and there's basically nothing you can do about it.

Guys, IT ISN'T A REFERENCE TO THE BOOMER GENERATION. It's boomer as in shotgun-go-BOOM.

I love the term. For me it's not just a shooter in an older style but also a shooter that goes BOOM. Much better than boring cover shooters.

Oh come on. It's funny. Boomer is more of a state of mind descriptor at this point. Don't be such a boomer bro.

Boomer Shooter = Shooter that goes boom

I call them id-style shooters myself, but there is a bit of word play I like in the term 'boomer shooter'. On top of referencing the age of the audience when they first arrived (albeit incorrectly), it is also a reference to the fact that the optimal strategy for these games is simply to blow things the fuck up. There is very little tactical play beyond what weapons to use for a given situation, and these games really love their explosive barrels and rocket launchers.

I never even considered that the name referred to baby boomers I thought it just meant they went "boom"

Worth noting that the boomer wojak meme started as "That 30 year old boomer". It was never about actual Baby Boomers.

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Old=boomer sorry. That's just the way it turned out, nothing we can do about it. Raging against new slang is just gonna make us more out of touch, and intensify the feeling of being old, so I just accept it and try to keep up. Boomer is old now, not just the Baby Boomers.

I always assumed that the Boom in Boomer Shooter was more “Gun go Boom”, which seemed to fit the genre quite well.

Oldskool FPS. There. That's the correct term. Now, who's up for some DM-Morpheus with instagib mutator?🤘

Who says boomer shooter?

We were calling them Doom-likes before FPS became a thing, maybe it's time to bring it back as a sub category.

I dunno, my rich uncle is a boomer and back in the 90s he was one of the only people I knew who could afford a gucci PC and every big box FPS game. So it kinda makes sense from that perspective.

My dad helped me install the original Wolfenstein 3D on DOS when I was a kid. And he's 100% a boomer (b.1947). So for that reason it always feels accurate to me.

It is utterly bizarre to me out of all the misnomers and ridiculous (sometimes offensive) terms out there in the media/hobby world, I see “boomer shooter” complained about so much more than any other. This is like the third rant I’ve seen about it in a week.

I thought Twitter and such were making a mountain out of a mole hill with how people responded to the term “Boomer“ in past years but clearly it ruffles peoples feathers way more than it should. Half the time I go through the comment histories and these are the same people that use ableist slurs regularly. I am not suggesting that OP does, I have not looked at their comments. Just a general observation.

Yeah, it drives me nuts as well! Boomers hated video games. They still hate video games. They had congressional hearings about the evils of video games. Stupid name.

I just think of it like boom as in explosions. Boom-boom shooty-shoot; or boomer shooter if you prefer brevity.

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 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".

Back to Doom-clone it is then.

I've been saying this forever too! Boomers were the ones complaining about thier kids playing them back in the day because of the violence and demonic imagery.

In the 90s people called them "Doom-like"s. I usually just say "90s FPS games". Which I guess could be confusing and make people think I'm talking about framerate, but eh.

Boomer today is used for anything that's old, and I wouldn't be surprised if you get Gen Xers that get called boomers. Since boomer shooters are a homage to old shooters, we call them boomer shooter. The ultimate problem is that it's just catchy, so unless you find a more catchy term, you're shit outta luck.

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.

Millennials are going to be in absolute shambles if they ever find out "Okay boomer" wasn't directly targeted at boomers.

If it helps, this is the first time I hear it 🤷‍♂️

played mostly by Gen Xers and Snake People

For a moment there I was really confused, I forgot about this wonderful extension

It's such a fun phrase to say, though.

Boomer basically means 20+ years old nowadays as far as I can tell. Or older than zoomers.

Back in my day, we used to call them shooters..

But we had to fight uphill, both ways...

I think they're called that because they postdate the "looter shooter" that combined Diablo-esque "action RPGs" with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. "Looter" without the "shooter" is a much better name for Diablo's genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.

I'm still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don't know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn't also get assigned the label of "boomer shooter", because then it'll be harder for both audiences to find what they're looking for.

Sorry it bugs you, but it's far better than the entirely uninteresting/unoriginal "Doom-like". I get it's standard practice at this point, but I'm happy whenever we get an actually interesting, poignant name.

So do I. But it is a term from Gen Z to piss off Gen X.

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.

Think about it this way, it's not that the majority of people playing those games are boomers, but the majority of games that boomers play are those games.

Also, this has caused me to look up the formal definition of Gen X vs Boomer, and I did not realize that everyone born after 1964 is considered Gen X. In my head Gen X went from ~1975-1990, everyone before that being a boomer, so assuming other people have the same conception of boomer in their head, then the majority of people able to afford gaming PCs in the mid 90s would be boomers....

They also do just go boom and have stuff like the BFG ...

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Because boomers programmed them originally.

There's a video on this, but that's just the name that stuck. Its not derogatory at this point, just a way to differentiate a good shooter from a game like CoD

TIL the term Boomer Shooter exists.

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.

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.

Gen-X: Whatever.

*continues to slay in Warhammer 40K: Boltgun*

Maybe it works if read as "games made by boomers?" ... Yeah I have no idea how old anyone was/is. Time and I don't really get along 🤷

Also, going along with a thing I've been seeing in these comments, I'm idly curious as to whether anyone who isn't a Boomer cares about use/misuse/abuse of the term "Boomer" 🤔

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If it helps try thinking of it as a "boomer shooter" because of the proliferation of rockets and rocket physics in classic games like Unreal and Quake

It's so curious, I swear I heard "boomer shooter" used to refer to another type of FPS... But then again I guess the definition has changed. What term do people use nowadays for slow FPSes that are more tactical, rather than twitch-reflex reliant, like ARMA?