History

    Totally new to the concept of boomer shooters, or interested in diving deeper into them? Read on. Have a decent grasp of them already and want to get a better idea of what this blog is about? Visit the "About" page instead.

The definition

    Boomer shooters, perhaps more accurately identified as "retro first-person shooters" (or retro FPSes), harken back to a specific era of the FPS genre. We'll call that era "BHE," or the "Before Half-Life Era." This era falls between 1992 and 1998, though this is a simplification of the timeline. I'm not suggesting that only games released within this era are boomer shooters. Rather, to be considered a boomer shooter, a game has to feel like it was released during this era. 

The aesthetic

FPSes that were developed and released in the 90s and early 00s had a flavor that is distinctly different from what one finds in the typical FPSes of today. These games were characterized by several, if not all, of the following gameplay elements:

• Health and armor pickups (vs. today's more-common recharging health/shield bars)
• Non-reloading weapons (regardless of whether it makes any plausible sense)
• Episodes broken down into levels with clearly-defined beginnings and endings 
• Splash screens between levels to show statistics and title cards for the next level
• "Key-hunting," i.e. having to find a key for a given locked door in order to proceed through the map

    If these gameplay elements sound familiar to you, it is most likely because you've played one of the great granddaddies of all boomer shooters: DOOM, originally released in 5 BHE (aka 1993 CE). DOOM's gameplay involved all of the above, and was in many ways responsible for this pattern becoming as popular as it was for so many years. 

    While DOOM wasn't the true progenitor of all boomer shooters, it was the watermark by which virtually all were judged for a very long time, and continue to be today in many ways. There's a reason why so many of the shooters from that era remain popular now, though it wasn’t always that way. 

The schism

    Half-Life’s release in 1998 changed the FPS forever. Here was a game that felt like a first-person action movie. Scripted events in which you, the main character, take part? Heaps upon heaps of exposition that is told in-game, out loud from other characters, not just as a crawling screen of text between levels? “Levels” that elide scenes between short (for 1998) loading screens, as if we were exploring a single contiguous world and not a sequence of 32 set-pieces? This was unfathomable. It about broke my 7-year-old brain when it released. And yet, something was lost in the process.

    Don’t get me wrong, Half-Life, and many of the games that arose from it, are incredible examples of the FPS genre and ought to be remembered and lauded. But I believe that the early 2000s brought us a severe over-correction, one that lasted for the better part of two decades. While this approach began as a way to immerse the player in a more lifelike world with a gripping plot, it eventually brought us further and further down a path of "railroading," to the point where it became a meme in and of itself. 

FPS campaigns were an afterthought, more or less a tech demo for the capabilities that developers were cramming into their online multiplayer, which is where the real money was. Gameplay was sacrificed in the name of sexy set-pieces, full of scripted events and Michael Bay-esque explosions and over the top action to justify the millions of dollars being sunk into VFX and mocap. Is any of this inherently bad? No, I don't think so. But for those who were looking to scratch an FPS itch that they hadn't felt for decades, there was certainly a void in this genre.

The resurgence

    I won't wax poetic for too long on what 2016's DOOM did for the boomer shooter - there are already hours of phenomenal discourse on other platforms that can do that on my behalf. Rather, I'll simply state that id Software's return to form with this entry into their flagship series started what would eventually become a full-on boomer shooter renaissance (and, arguably, the reason for the genre becoming popular enough to garner this silly-sounding label in the first place). While it was a relatively slow trickle for a few years after 2016, notable early entries started to appear rather shortly, like 2018's DUSK and 2019's Ion Fury all the way up to monoliths like Games Workshop releasing their own entry into the genre, WH40K: Boltgun, just earlier this year. There are still plenty of modern FPSes releasing year after year (I think we're due for another info drop... for another season... of the remake... of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II any day now), but boomer shooters have staked their claim in the FPS genre and are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

 

The name

    Let's address the elephant on the webpage: no, nothing about the timeline here suggests a relationship to the generation known as the Baby Boomers. Rather, it's understood that the term came about in the same way that "OK, Boomer" developed as a tongue-in-cheek response directed at anyone older than oneself for a little while in the late 2010s. Importantly, the term is referring to the fact that these games are shooters for "boomers," which is to say that, through today's lens, if you played these shooters growing up, you're old, and if you're old, you're a boomer. Clear as mud, yeah?

    Do we expect this label to change any time soon? Good question. Historically, games made shortly after DOOM's release were known as "DOOM clones." It was simply the easiest way to identify them, because everyone know what DOOM was, and one could quickly compartmentalize the unknown to fit into that mental schema. Of course, a few years later, another very popular FPS called Quake released, and it was different enough that we started hearing about "Quake clones" after that, which were their own animal and completely different than DOOM clones. As the genre is coming into a bit of a renaissance here, I do feel that it was important that a label came into fruition that folks could agree on. And, for better or worse, "boomer shooter" seems to be it. It rhymes, it brings to mind an exact subset of games and gameplay mechanics, and folks familiar with the games could rally under the banner of the label for the sake of discussion. At the heart of it, that's the most important part here. As long as folks can use the term for the sake of discussing these games that capture a very specific slice of the industry, I think it'll stick around.