Boomer Shooter is a Stupid Term and We Should Stop Using It

 

Amid Evil, more accurately categorized as a retro shooter.

Boomer Shooter is a term that's been floating around for a while, and while I'm not certain as to who is responsible for its coinage (I'm 100 percent certain that it's Generation Z), it seems to be getting traction as a genre descriptor for games such as Doom Eternal and Amid Evil, which take their gameplay cues from 90's classics like Doom and Quake. When I first came across it, I thought it made sense--those games are old, and everybody knows that the Boomers are old--but when I spent more than five seconds thinking about it, I realized that it's an inaccurate classification. The Baby Boomer Generation consists of people born between 1946 and 1964--folks who would've been between 48 and 30 in 1994, when Doom was released. John Carmack, the tech virtuoso responsible for the graphics engines powering Doom and Quake, was only 24 in 1994, making him a member of Gen X rather than the Baby Boomers. John Romero, credited as the main game designer for Doom, was a slightly older 27. Now there were Boomers on Id's team like Sandy Peterson (born 1955), but the two men chiefly responsible for the initial Boomer Shooter were members of Gen X. Both Doom and Quake were dark, moody, and irreverent (in Doom's case) games, sensibilities defined by the Grunge generation. Duke Nukem 3d, published by 3d Realms in 1996, also possessed Gen X's boundary-pushing humor (Duke can pay pixelated pool dancers for sex, and pig cops are a game monster. Hey, I didn't say it was great humor.). Hell, id even hired alt-rock hero Trent Reznor (born 1965) to compose the sound effects and music for Quake. What I'm getting at is that the first person shooter as defined by id software and its contemporaries is one of the lasting cultural legacies of Generation X, and had very little to do with the Baby Boomers. The kids that grew up playing Doom, Quake, and later classics like Half-Life and Unreal Tournament were mostly younger GenXers and Millennials such as myself. My first shooters were Wolfenstein, soon followed by Dark Forces and its sequel Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. I remember installing Quake on my middle school computers so that my buddies and I could frag when nobody was paying attention. Christ, I know I'm ancient at thirty-five compared to a Zoomer, but not everything older than a year or two should be attributed to the Baby Boomers.

There. I've had my rant. I'll go back to doing Boomer shit, like destroying the economy and ignoring global warming.