"boomer shooters" my ENTIRE ass

[cmdr_zoom]

You know what Boomers shot?
BB guns.

Video games weren't even invented until they were in college (Spacewar, 1962, MIT), and DOOM was first released as shareware in 1993, 30 years later.
Those were our games, damnit.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Let's see, Worm came out in the 1970s but involved no shooting.

Atari had multiple games with shooting in the 1980s.

I encountered the Asteroids table game -- a multidirectional shooter -- in the 1980s but it was old when we got it. I looked it up and the earliest date says 1979.

Oh, and some of the earliest simulators, which were not intended as games but immediately gained use as such, were aerial shooters because they were fighter jet simulators. Those go back to DARPAnet. But the earliest ones were just flight simulators for various aircraft. There's at least one WWII style dogfighter game that goes back that far, made by the war history geeks.

Insofar as I know, first-person shooters and first-person perspective in general evolved much later.

Re: Thoughts

[ninjarat]

There were a significant number of first-person, or "rat's eye view" computer games from the 1970s: Maze War (a shooter) and Spasim (an early space dogfight simulator) to name two (I've played an emulated Maze War, but I haven't had the chance to try Spasim). In arcades, we had Battlezone (1980) and Sea Wolf (1976). Just to name a few.

First person drawing was used because it was simple and fast next to third person camera views.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Wow, I never saw any of those. I wasn't a big video game buff, but my parents were -- they got the Atari "for me" but they played it far more than I did. The TRS-80 had almost all text-based games with a few illustrated scenes. But I saw references to the DARPAnet simulators which were highly visual with a pilot's eye view.

Re: Thoughts

[ninjarat]

Some the early graphical games, like Spasim and pedit5, were unique to the PLATO system at the University of Illinois and didn't have direct copies or ports to other systems. You might find working Battlezone and Sea Wolf cabinets at vintage/classic arcade museums.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Oh, that's why! We had a PLATO room at Uni High. I didn't use it because when I walked in, they all started crashing. Lots of machinery is prone to malfunction around me, but PLATO was among the most consistent.

[ninjarat]

Er. The Baby Boom generation birth years run from ~1945 to ~1965. The oldest of the generation were in high school or just graduating in 1962, while the youngest hadn't been born.

[cmdr_zoom]

Which means the youngest were 30, and the oldest in their 40s or even 50, when what we used to call "DOOM clones" or simply FPSes were at their peak.

What matters (to me) is that it's one more case of being ignored, forgotten and passed over (though in this case it's more by those who came after), which you'd think I'd be used to after spending my whole life in their shadow, but I guess not. Even now, when they're finally starting to lose their absolute grip on everything, this is what we (don't) get.

[ninjarat]

Boomer shooter is anything but.

The term boomer shooter was coined and spread in the mid or late 2010s by Generation X and Y gamers who were being sarcastic. "Boomer" to us (I'm Generation X) means anything old or antiquated, not necessarily something associated with the baby boom generation. Boomer shooter is a mocking description of contemporary games which emulate the styles of those old, antiquated, 1990s shooters.