Why is there all the sudden an influx of Boomer shooters?

[Kweeb]

Did people not think about making any 10 or 15 years ago?? Or have a few released every other year or so? Like why now???
I'm not complaining just curious.

[Mega Ultra Chicken]

Originally posted by BlackDragon875:

People wish they were boomers

just kidding, they just went back into style

[Haruspex]

I remember about 10 years ago reading someone saying, "Why are there so many retro pixel games?", or something to that effect. A comment said it all: (paraphrasing)

"Nostalgia. People are trying to capture that feeling they had gaming when they were younger. Right now it's the pixelated games of the 80s into the early 90s. Soon it will probably be early 3d games like the shooters and platformers of the late 90s. Get ready for a flood of low poly Quake clones."

[Daenoxiis]

Because the only two other options are hero shooters and battle royale, which both get boring.

[Reported.]

Or COD. Or Live Services.

I just want a game with a very clear beginning, middle and end with zero additions, zero DLC, zero mtx, etc. Is that too hard to ask? Apparently it is.

Apparently games these days without microtransactions, expansions or DLC are boring, and no one would want to buy them. Or they are boring because they are not Live Services. Or "franchises".

[Tonepoet]

Originally posted by sfnhltb:

There are no such thing as boomer shooters because video games didn't exist when boomers were teenagers, and almost none of the boomers I know play video games even now, except maybe things like freemium games on facebook or mobile and that sort of thing.

You went a little too far. If you had simply said there were no F.P.S. games when boomers were teenagers, that'd be one thing but the baby boomer generation has a cutoff of 1964.

13 years after 1964 is 1977. which is the year the Atari 2600 released. We have a window of 7 years for those very last baby boomers to be video game players as teenagers, and a 7 year window for boomers to stop being teenagers in the year the Atari 2600 was released. Space Invaders was released just the year after, and heck, it's even technically a shooter of sorts, although admittedly it is more of a shoot 'em up than an F.P.S.

Seven years after 1977 is 1984, so we have pacman from 1980, Donkey Kong was released in 1981, Galega (also in 1981) and Ms. Pacman was released in 1982, as was Yar's Revenge. Plenty of Boomers liked the Pacman games. Pac-man Fever was one of the top ten Bilbord 100 songs, ranking in at no. 9 in its peak. The first major video game celebrity, Billy Mitchell, just barely misses the cutoff date of being a literal boomer by just one year (he was born in 1965, so he's an early member of Gen X instead). Incidentally, 7 years is also the average length of time between major video game console refreshes (excluding the Dreamast, since it was killed early).

It can thus be assumed that baby boomers were the first proper generation of video game players. However, with that having been said, it's not a shared experience across the generation, since somebody born in the late 1940s is unlikely to have taken up video games as a pastime. There's likely a subdivide somewhere in the 1950s of baby boomer who is likely to have played video games and baby boomer who is unlikely to have played video games.

Now granted, you reach the age of majority and have to get an occupation that eats away at your free time before you stop being a teenager, so maybe the cutoff date is a couple of years earlier, but even so, you can be born a baby boomer and still be in the nick of time for all of the games I mentioned anyway.

Anyway, getting to the main topic, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's a modern F.P.S. made to look and feel like Doom, I think, kinda like Prodeus.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/964800/Prodeus/

It is a bit of a misnomer since Doom is from the 1990s though. Baby Boomers don't play F.P.S. It's just called that 'cause the actual baby boomers are getting up there in age, and it's kinda popular to derisively call anybody who's old fashioned a boomer these days. Can't use the term retro-shooter 'cause that's reserved for the F.P.S. games that actually existed in the good ol' days, such as Doom itself. Probably doesn't hurt that boom is the onomatopoeia for such explosive forces as shooting, as in "Boom! Headshot."

Anyway, the rise of the boomer shooter isn't really all that surprising. The 2016 reimagining of Doom was very popular, and it puts credit on the franchise's name, so it likely makes people reminisce over the original and want to pay homage to it, in the same way that people pay homage to S.N.E.S and Sega Genesis games with pixel art graphics.

It's also not very hard to make a game like that with the advantages of modern tech and game engines, including the fact that the doom Engine itself was open sourced by id software in 1997. (This only applies to the engine though, and the rest of the game data is still proprietary.)

Still though, even with those advantages, game development likely takes a bit of lead time, so I think people may just be finishing up their projects. Either that or people who enjoyed the first wave of boomer shooters they were inspired to make another.

[Γαῖα]

What is it with todays people and labels.
How is old school shooter not good enough anymore.

[Plaid]

Originally posted by Tonepoet:

It is a bit of a misnomer since Doom is from the 1990s though. Baby Boomers don't play F.P.S. It's just called that 'cause the actual baby boomers are getting up there in age, and it's kinda popular to derisively call anybody who's old fashioned a boomer these days. Can't use the term retro-shooter 'cause that's reserved for the F.P.S. games that actually existed in the good ol' days, such as Doom itself. Probably doesn't hurt that boom is the onomatopoeia for such explosive forces as shooting, as in "Boom! Headshot."

technically, "retro" refers to something new that mimics something old
. So "retro-shooter" is actually the more appropriate term for new games coming out, rather than for the OG's.
But it's true, Carmack is a Gen-X'er.

(I'm sure some baby boomers play FPS games too)

[sleeps]

probably some doom fan project or something

[WhiteKnight77]

Originally posted by Plaid:

Originally posted by Tonepoet:

It is a bit of a misnomer since Doom is from the 1990s though. Baby Boomers don't play F.P.S. It's just called that 'cause the actual baby boomers are getting up there in age, and it's kinda popular to derisively call anybody who's old fashioned a boomer these days. Can't use the term retro-shooter 'cause that's reserved for the F.P.S. games that actually existed in the good ol' days, such as Doom itself. Probably doesn't hurt that boom is the onomatopoeia for such explosive forces as shooting, as in "Boom! Headshot."

technically, "retro" refers to something new that mimics something old
. So "retro-shooter" is actually the more appropriate term for new games coming out, rather than for the OG's.
But it's true, Carmack is a Gen-X'er.

(I'm sure some baby boomers play FPS games too)

The whole reason for me to buy a computer was to play Rainbow Six, and that was the first game I bought (Gold Edition). The next was a flight sim.

[WhiteKnight77]

Originally posted by Noxλ2:

Mainly due to the fact that what you young disrespectful idiots consider to be a "Boomer Shooter" were once known as FPS or whatever. You kids are infatuated with re branding terms that already have a definite understanding or meaning that was already established before your arrival on this planet. Yet, you kids think you're so important and special that you all will destruct communication such as meaning of words itself.

I agree, it seems as if everything is getting new name descriptions no matter for games or other things no matter if it fits or not.

[Hobbit XIII]

Originally posted by sfnhltb:

There are no such thing as boomer shooters because video games didn't exist when boomers were teenagers, and almost none of the boomers I know play video games even now, except maybe things like freemium games on facebook or mobile and that sort of thing.

They did have shootemups it was called the Vietnam war.

[Haruspex]

Originally posted by Γαῖα:

What is it with todays people and labels.
How is old school shooter not good enough anymore.

We should go back further and just call them "Doom clones".

Originally posted by Plaid:

But it's true, Carmack is a Gen-X'er.

Right, so we're just off a generation. When these games were made, Gen-X'ers were young adults and Millennials were kids and teenagers. Then there was the whole 1990's thing where everything had to be X-Treme! and "So intense you'll vomit all over your stepmom and your eyes will bleed!" Or something.

Maybe we should call them, "X-Shooters", as in made by Gen-X'ers. "X-Games"? Pretty sure that one is taken...

[kilésengati]

Because as boomers are retiring, they become a capitalisable demographic for videogames again. Pulling the nostalgia strings, developers and publishers are merely recapturing a market they lost during the 90s to the workforce and families.

[Sidakte]

Originally posted by Kweeb:

Did people not think about making any 10 or 15 years ago?? Or have a few released every other year or so? Like why now???
I'm not complaining just curious.

why now? idk. all i know is that peeps around in forums and on Discord etc started talking about perhaps some old school shooting going on again, Half-Life style, or Doom or Quake.
then it took off after a while. Prodeus is a good example, WH40K: Boltgun, Bloodhound, Chasm: The Rift, Core Decay, Disdain, Dread Templar, Dross, Ghostware, Hellbound, Ion Fury etc.

[Kobs]

Originally posted by sfnhltb:

There are no such thing as boomer shooters because video games didn't exist when boomers were teenagers, and almost none of the boomers I know play video games even now, except maybe things like freemium games on facebook or mobile and that sort of thing.

And just how many boomers do you know.... your granpa and who else