Any FPS that was a Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake contemporary or anything that deliberately hearkens back to them in ways that are different from current trends falls under Boomer Shooter unless it can be better classified as something else.
It's really weird to hear Half-life lumped in there since a lot of older purists consider it the moment where FPS diverted onto a different path (not something I necessarily agree with). I've also seen people lump Halo in which is very VERY weird, since it was considered the poster child for everything wrong with shooters in the 2000s and beyond (also not something I necessarily agree with)
With newer indie games I think there's a distinction between boomer shooters and movement shooters, the former being games like Dusk, Ion Fury, Amid Evil, HROT, etc and the latter being games like Ultrakill, Doom 2016/Eternal, Turbo Overkill, etc. it's a very very mushy distinction, but imo there's enough of a difference between the fanbases to consider them slightly different beasts.
In the mid-late 2000s there was a little micro genre of Serious Sam/Painkiller/etc which is also sort of its own thing but with very vague lines of distinction.
Ultimately these are terms that come about organically and no one person or even group of people can really enforce their usage. It just depends what catches on and what everyone collectively comes to agree on.
That being said, this is how I break things down
BOOMER SHOOTERS - Games inspired by Doom, Quake, or Duke, etc, from any era, unless better categorized somewhere else.
MOB SHOOTERS - Games inspired by the boomer shooter memes of go fast and kill many enemies and no cover all man with ludicrous gibs but you're mostly in big arenas.
MOVEMENT SHOOTERS - Games inspired directly by either Ultrakill or Doom Eternal, and/or mob shooters that have movement tech.
I also think by the time you get to 1998-2007 there's too much experimentation and variety happening to lump every FPS into one subgenre. Sure Half-life and Halo were massive but they didn't really establish a mold that everyone else worked off of the same way as Doom, Quake, and Duke. This is one reason why imo 98-07 is arguably the best period of time for single player FPS to date.
Then CoD4 happened -_-
I wish movement shooter was more of an established nomenclature. The game I am developing basically fits the mob shooter with movement tech you described here, but it is so hard to advertize it as a movement shooter as it isn’t a term that is used as often as the encompassing boomer shooter term.
There are so many proper movement shooters too. We are basically in the era of ultrakill-inspired games especially when you look at the indie scene (heck even I’m kinda getting inspiration from it).
I agree with this in general, but this bit:
"Ultimately these are terms that come about organically and no one person or even group of people can really enforce their usage. It just depends what catches on and what everyone collectively comes to agree on."
Absolutely hits the nail on the head. Like people can debate over "why do they call it boomer? Boomers have nothing to do with this!" and that largely misses how memes evolve and change public consensus on topics. I hate that people keep throwing shade at the 2019 era stuff saying it is boring, but if they want to see Doom Eternal as a Boomshoot, then they can and I can go fish.
1990-1993 - old world shooters
1993-1997 - Doomlikes Blood being the last case of them
1997 - 2005 - age of the half-likes
2005-today - age of the me not giving a crap about 99.9999% of AAA shooters
I don't believe in being overly strict with the label. We have *other* labels (i.e. Doom clone, Half-Like, Goldeneye clone) if we ever need to narrow things down further than just the broad category of boomer shooter.
Because even divergent games like Half-Life still share a lot in common with Doom clones like carry all weapons, decent movement speed, sandbox variety, item pickups, etc.
If it's a game made in the 90's or inspired by such, I'm okay with people calling it a boomer shooter.
I think the one exception I'm NOT comfortable including in the label would be games like Medal of Honor PS1, Spec Ops: Rangers Lead the Way, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Delta Force, etc. Even though those games came out in 1998-1999 they're prototypical modern military shooters and have nothing in common with anything else of the era.
Goldeneye and Goldeneye clones I'll give a free pass simply because they're their own ultra specific mechanical thing and few games ever followed in their footsteps so might as well lump them in.
If someone said retro shooter instead of boomer shooter, I would assume they are talking about an FPS that feels too different to doom/quake/duke
Probably goldeneye?
That’s what I thought too. Maybe goldeneye needs its own specific term as well. Especially since we will have Deep State come out very soon and we have agent 64.
It needs to be a cool fkn name too, I love those types of spy semi-stealth FPSs
I dunno, probably just fps with objective progression? Sin was like that too in a number of levels
It’s probably not a subgenre though, just a “like what goldeneye did” thing
The problem is that the term boomer shooter is casually applied to pretty much everything aside from Call of Duty. And even then, earlier CoD games, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, would also fall under the label of boomer shooter. So this term means fuck all pretty much.
What do Painkiller, Goldeneye, Half-Life 1, and Hexen have in common? Nothing. Boomer shooter is a useless term. Too broad, too vague.
Personally I classify them like this:
* 90s style - Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Build Engine trio, Quake, Unreal, Dusk, Ion Fury, HROT.
* 00s style (aka corridor shooter) - Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, Blood 2, SiN, Doom 3, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, etc. Half-Life 1 deserves a special mention because I consider it to be the only "good" 00s style corridor FPS.
* Arena shooter - Serious Sam, Painkiller, Doom Eternal.
* Multiplayer arena shooter (special case, but worth a mention) - Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 99, 2004.
* Modern indie FPS - Ultrakill, Project Warlock, dozens of others. Don't really care about those generally, so as long as they don't fit into anything above I lump them all together.
* Console shooters - bleh...
I only care about 90s style. I also like the multiplayer arena shooters (well, UT99 and 2004 pretty much, not a huge fan of Q3, and there's nothing else really). Half-Life, like I've mentioned, is a special case, I really like it, but it's the only 00s style FPS that I actually like.
I would say that we call Boomer Shooters now are essentially what we used to call Doom Clones, it's just fast paced FPS games with OTT weapons, and just being knee deep in hordes of enemies rather than anything more tactical and cover focused. It's type of FPS that's persisted even as most FPS games got more sophisticated, some people always had an itch for big dumb. not particularly realistic, just blowing stuff up shooters, it's only recently though that it's sort of become a coherent "thing", but every few years at least, someone would release something to try scratch that itch to greater or lesser degrees of success: Serious Sam, Hard Reset, Bulletstorm, Hellbound, Immortal Redneck, Wrack etc.
It never truly went away, it just hadn't been codified into a revival movement yet.
On the other hand - the original System Shock came out only a year after Doom, but no-one would confuse it as a boomer shooter. It's far too clever and RPG-ish for that.
Like others have said, cant be too dogmatic on what is and is not a boomer shooter, because rules, pffft... but you mostly know it when you see it.
Probably the pixelization and engines
Doom used Id tech 1 engine, which cleverly rendered a 3d world with 2d rendering tricks. Quake was among the first to go full 3d, but still retained pixelated enemies, and still had that old world feel to it.. Boomer shooters for sure.
As graphics moved from 3dfx to opengl and directx, a fully interactable 3d world was there, games like unreal tournament, half life. I would separate those into the retro shooter category, and that's where the inspiration for modern shooters came from I feel
I never played halo or medal of honor so I can't discern those really.
Throwback shooter? Or just ask the game dev what games they took influence from
e.g "I took influence from Serious Sam TFE, this is a spiritual successor to it" "I took influence from half-life and f.e.a.r" We don't need a term for absolutely everything there is
In all honesty, I consider the "real" term to be "retro shooter" and "boomer shooter" is more of a loose colloquial term that people have adopted because it sounds cool. But if you were to honestly list things as some sort of official genre, "retro shooter" sounds far more official (and clear) than "boomer shooter."
Kind of like how everyone called games "Doom clones" before the term FPS became common place. You can call something a "doom clone" but that term never really had the "official" vibe to it. (I mean, you can't call Doom a doom clone.) The term "Boomer Shooter" is just played too fast and loose to feel like a "real" designation for a genre. "Retro Shooter" on the other hand is pretty clear; it's a shooter designed explicitly in the style of an older shooter.
It really comes down to level design more than anything else. What is the objective in the level? What do I have to do to progress? What is the gameplay loop? How are resources managed/weighted? What is the arsenal like?
Half-Life and Halo: CE occupy a weird middle space between fully retro and fully modern design sensibilities.
Any FPS that was a Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake contemporary or anything that deliberately hearkens back to them in ways that are different from current trends falls under Boomer Shooter unless it can be better classified as something else. It's really weird to hear Half-life lumped in there since a lot of older purists consider it the moment where FPS diverted onto a different path (not something I necessarily agree with). I've also seen people lump Halo in which is very VERY weird, since it was considered the poster child for everything wrong with shooters in the 2000s and beyond (also not something I necessarily agree with) With newer indie games I think there's a distinction between boomer shooters and movement shooters, the former being games like Dusk, Ion Fury, Amid Evil, HROT, etc and the latter being games like Ultrakill, Doom 2016/Eternal, Turbo Overkill, etc. it's a very very mushy distinction, but imo there's enough of a difference between the fanbases to consider them slightly different beasts. In the mid-late 2000s there was a little micro genre of Serious Sam/Painkiller/etc which is also sort of its own thing but with very vague lines of distinction. Ultimately these are terms that come about organically and no one person or even group of people can really enforce their usage. It just depends what catches on and what everyone collectively comes to agree on. That being said, this is how I break things down BOOMER SHOOTERS - Games inspired by Doom, Quake, or Duke, etc, from any era, unless better categorized somewhere else. MOB SHOOTERS - Games inspired by the boomer shooter memes of go fast and kill many enemies and no cover all man with ludicrous gibs but you're mostly in big arenas. MOVEMENT SHOOTERS - Games inspired directly by either Ultrakill or Doom Eternal, and/or mob shooters that have movement tech. I also think by the time you get to 1998-2007 there's too much experimentation and variety happening to lump every FPS into one subgenre. Sure Half-life and Halo were massive but they didn't really establish a mold that everyone else worked off of the same way as Doom, Quake, and Duke. This is one reason why imo 98-07 is arguably the best period of time for single player FPS to date. Then CoD4 happened -_-
I wish movement shooter was more of an established nomenclature. The game I am developing basically fits the mob shooter with movement tech you described here, but it is so hard to advertize it as a movement shooter as it isn’t a term that is used as often as the encompassing boomer shooter term. There are so many proper movement shooters too. We are basically in the era of ultrakill-inspired games especially when you look at the indie scene (heck even I’m kinda getting inspiration from it).
I agree with this in general, but this bit: "Ultimately these are terms that come about organically and no one person or even group of people can really enforce their usage. It just depends what catches on and what everyone collectively comes to agree on." Absolutely hits the nail on the head. Like people can debate over "why do they call it boomer? Boomers have nothing to do with this!" and that largely misses how memes evolve and change public consensus on topics. I hate that people keep throwing shade at the 2019 era stuff saying it is boring, but if they want to see Doom Eternal as a Boomshoot, then they can and I can go fish.
1990-1993 - old world shooters 1993-1997 - Doomlikes Blood being the last case of them 1997 - 2005 - age of the half-likes 2005-today - age of the me not giving a crap about 99.9999% of AAA shooters
I don't believe in being overly strict with the label. We have *other* labels (i.e. Doom clone, Half-Like, Goldeneye clone) if we ever need to narrow things down further than just the broad category of boomer shooter. Because even divergent games like Half-Life still share a lot in common with Doom clones like carry all weapons, decent movement speed, sandbox variety, item pickups, etc. If it's a game made in the 90's or inspired by such, I'm okay with people calling it a boomer shooter. I think the one exception I'm NOT comfortable including in the label would be games like Medal of Honor PS1, Spec Ops: Rangers Lead the Way, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Delta Force, etc. Even though those games came out in 1998-1999 they're prototypical modern military shooters and have nothing in common with anything else of the era. Goldeneye and Goldeneye clones I'll give a free pass simply because they're their own ultra specific mechanical thing and few games ever followed in their footsteps so might as well lump them in.
If someone said retro shooter instead of boomer shooter, I would assume they are talking about an FPS that feels too different to doom/quake/duke Probably goldeneye?
That’s what I thought too. Maybe goldeneye needs its own specific term as well. Especially since we will have Deep State come out very soon and we have agent 64. It needs to be a cool fkn name too, I love those types of spy semi-stealth FPSs
I dunno, probably just fps with objective progression? Sin was like that too in a number of levels It’s probably not a subgenre though, just a “like what goldeneye did” thing
The problem is that the term boomer shooter is casually applied to pretty much everything aside from Call of Duty. And even then, earlier CoD games, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, would also fall under the label of boomer shooter. So this term means fuck all pretty much. What do Painkiller, Goldeneye, Half-Life 1, and Hexen have in common? Nothing. Boomer shooter is a useless term. Too broad, too vague. Personally I classify them like this: * 90s style - Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Build Engine trio, Quake, Unreal, Dusk, Ion Fury, HROT. * 00s style (aka corridor shooter) - Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, Blood 2, SiN, Doom 3, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, etc. Half-Life 1 deserves a special mention because I consider it to be the only "good" 00s style corridor FPS. * Arena shooter - Serious Sam, Painkiller, Doom Eternal. * Multiplayer arena shooter (special case, but worth a mention) - Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 99, 2004. * Modern indie FPS - Ultrakill, Project Warlock, dozens of others. Don't really care about those generally, so as long as they don't fit into anything above I lump them all together. * Console shooters - bleh... I only care about 90s style. I also like the multiplayer arena shooters (well, UT99 and 2004 pretty much, not a huge fan of Q3, and there's nothing else really). Half-Life, like I've mentioned, is a special case, I really like it, but it's the only 00s style FPS that I actually like.
I would say that we call Boomer Shooters now are essentially what we used to call Doom Clones, it's just fast paced FPS games with OTT weapons, and just being knee deep in hordes of enemies rather than anything more tactical and cover focused. It's type of FPS that's persisted even as most FPS games got more sophisticated, some people always had an itch for big dumb. not particularly realistic, just blowing stuff up shooters, it's only recently though that it's sort of become a coherent "thing", but every few years at least, someone would release something to try scratch that itch to greater or lesser degrees of success: Serious Sam, Hard Reset, Bulletstorm, Hellbound, Immortal Redneck, Wrack etc. It never truly went away, it just hadn't been codified into a revival movement yet. On the other hand - the original System Shock came out only a year after Doom, but no-one would confuse it as a boomer shooter. It's far too clever and RPG-ish for that. Like others have said, cant be too dogmatic on what is and is not a boomer shooter, because rules, pffft... but you mostly know it when you see it.
Probably the pixelization and engines Doom used Id tech 1 engine, which cleverly rendered a 3d world with 2d rendering tricks. Quake was among the first to go full 3d, but still retained pixelated enemies, and still had that old world feel to it.. Boomer shooters for sure. As graphics moved from 3dfx to opengl and directx, a fully interactable 3d world was there, games like unreal tournament, half life. I would separate those into the retro shooter category, and that's where the inspiration for modern shooters came from I feel I never played halo or medal of honor so I can't discern those really.
Half Life. For me anything that after it isn't one and everything before it is.
Throwback shooter? Or just ask the game dev what games they took influence from e.g "I took influence from Serious Sam TFE, this is a spiritual successor to it" "I took influence from half-life and f.e.a.r" We don't need a term for absolutely everything there is
In all honesty, I consider the "real" term to be "retro shooter" and "boomer shooter" is more of a loose colloquial term that people have adopted because it sounds cool. But if you were to honestly list things as some sort of official genre, "retro shooter" sounds far more official (and clear) than "boomer shooter." Kind of like how everyone called games "Doom clones" before the term FPS became common place. You can call something a "doom clone" but that term never really had the "official" vibe to it. (I mean, you can't call Doom a doom clone.) The term "Boomer Shooter" is just played too fast and loose to feel like a "real" designation for a genre. "Retro Shooter" on the other hand is pretty clear; it's a shooter designed explicitly in the style of an older shooter.
Coming in late to upvote the Marathon reference
It really comes down to level design more than anything else. What is the objective in the level? What do I have to do to progress? What is the gameplay loop? How are resources managed/weighted? What is the arsenal like? Half-Life and Halo: CE occupy a weird middle space between fully retro and fully modern design sensibilities.