OK Boomer Shooter: The Etymology of a Subgenre

Boomer Shooter. I’m sure just typing out the name of that subgenre has caused a visceral response in a good percentage of the folks reading this.

You’re not going to find anything approaching an official definition of Boomer Shooter on the Internet, which is fine, because generational theory doesn’t really work that way. Instead, it’s all about what feels right. And to most players, a Boomer Shooter is a first person shooter inspired by the genre’s roots in the 1990s. Titles that blended a focus on frenetic shooting (often at non-human enemies) and breakneck speed with wild color palettes and an otherworldly sense of place. Games like Doom and Quake and Duke Nukem 3D instantly spring to mind. Those are the original Boomer Shooters (and then known as Doom Clones) and they are the games that many of today’s developers look to for inspiration when dabbling in the subgenre today.

Amusingly, only a few actual Boomers (that’s folks born between 1946 and 1964) were responsible for the games that inspired today’s Boomer Shooters. Instead, most of those genre-defining games were actually created by Gen Xers like John Romero and John Carmack.

Anyway, a little over a year ago (as reported by GameSpot), Valve took a step to make the subgenre just a little more official when it added Boomer Shooter as a tag on Steam.

After the news broke, composer Andrew Hulshult took credit for popularizing the phrase during the development of Dusk:

A few years before it was added to Steam, Boomer Shooter felt like it emerged from the ether as a fully-formed entity. No matter where the words were written, or even when, everyone knew exactly what they meant.

But where did it come from? And, as PC Gamer asked in a 2023 editorial, why can’t we call this subgenre of games something else?

The latter question is beyond my grasp, but I’ve spent the last year trying to answer the former.

The earliest usage of Boomer Shooter that I can find goes back to a YouTuber named Civvie 11, who casually dropped the phrase during an introduction to a playthrough of Bethesda’s Terminator games in December 2018. Right at the top of the video, Civvie tells his viewers, “Welcome back to the dungeon where I play a bunch of Boomer Shooters from the 90s and get angry at video games.”

Kate Willaert, one of the best game historians working today, reached out to Civvie to see what he remembered about the birth of Boomer Shooter. According to the YouTuber, he didn’t coin the phrase, and thinks that he first saw it on Discord sometime before his Terminator playthrough.

Did he? We’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s go back. There’s a few other places the phrase appeared, and we need to talk about why they’re not exactly what we’re looking for.

If you were playing co-op shooters a decade ago, then you know that the Boomer was a fan-favorite enemy type from Left 4 Dead and its sequel. The zombie games allowed players to create their own maps and mods known as Mutations, and one of the Mutations for Left 4 Dead 2 was known as Boomer Shooter. This custom gameplay mode would get a boost from Valve as the inspiration behind their own Boomer-based Mutation in 2012.

You might disagree, but I feel like we need to discount everything related to Left 4 Dead because of the Boomer enemy type. People using Boomer Shooter back then absolutely weren’t comparing the character to ones from games like Doom or Quake.

I also want to point out that a gun enthusiast forum existed at BoomerShooter.com from 2010 to 2019. The community there seems to have been wholly dedicated to actual boomers who liked to shoot actual guns. An occasional discussion about Call of Duty is the only video game talk you’ll find. The forum technically still exists today, as a separate gun enthusiast forum known as 1911Fanatics, which opened in April 2018 and absorbed BoomerShooter.com’s archives at some point after 2019.

With these detours out of the way, let’s try another path.

Boomer Shooter first appeared on Twitter in relation to first person shooters from the 1990s on March 12th (1, 2) and March 13th of 2019. Like in Civvie’s video, all three posts treat Boomer Shooter as an established genre and take it as a given that everyone knows what kinds of games the label is referring to. A few weeks later, the nascent subgenre got a boost from Dave Oshry, the founder of New Blood Interactive (and the publisher of Dusk), when he closed out PAX East 2019 with this celebratory tweet:

A few months passed, and when another group of people were wondering where Boomer Shooter came from, David Szymanski, the developer of Dusk, swooped in with a tweet that said Boomer Shooter was used in development circles as a riff on the 30-Year-Old Boomer meme (a playful ribbing of millennials who identify more with the sensibilities of their parents).

I actually found a treasure trove of goofy images on Know Your Meme that documented the rising connection between the 30-Year-Old Boomer meme and older first person shooters like Doom, with a lot of them going back to 2018 (and predating this initial flurry of Twitter activity). Know Your Meme users submitted Aborted Boomer on July 19th, That 30 Year Old Doomer on August 28th, and Boom Guy on September 10th. That last one came from Doom Mower, a mod that gave Doomguy a lawnmower and refashioned him as a typical suburban dad (and which was based on a YouTube video from Sitking that was uploaded on July 23rd).

While New Blood kept the Boomer Shooter fires alive with a few social media posts throughout 2019, the publisher liked to use Retro FPS when describing their games to the press. Circling back to Civvie’s hunch, the first mention of Boomer Shooter on his own Discord server doesn’t occur until after the Terminator video is posted. Likewise, Boomer Shooter also isn’t mentioned on New Blood’s Discord server until January of 2019. Though it should be noted that the 30-Year-Old Boomer meme was a popular topic on both servers during the last four months of 2018.

Of course, it’s also possible the Boomer Shooter genre was coined in one of the thousands of other servers that populate Discord. If you know of an earlier mention of Boomer Shooter, please get in touch!

The 30-Year-Old Boomer connection also got a boost from an anonymous user on 4chan, who referred to Halo as a 30yr old Boomer shooter in July 2018. Searching 4chan’s archives is more art than science, but the first usage of Boomer Shooter I could find on the message board that didn’t reference the meme doesn’t happen until well after Boomer Shooter is commonplace on Discord. That said, there might be other mentions of Boomer Shooter on 4chan that I just haven’t come across yet.

Expanding out to the rest of the Internet, Boomer Shooter kicked around forums like Reddit and Doomworld for a year or so before being added to Urban Dictionary in August of 2020. It was also the topic of a video titled The Boomer Shooter Revival by YouTuber gillythekid in May 2020.

Boomer Shooter was finally used in an official capacity in a game’s marketing by Running With Scissors, who described Postal: Brain Damaged as a Boomer Shooter after it made its debut during the first Realms Deep stream in September 2020.

Within days, articles and videos using Boomer Shooter as a descriptor for this new subgenre began appearing across the Internet, including explainers at NoobFeed and from YouTuber Kirk Collects, a Serious Sam 4 review at Attack of the Fanboy, and a Dusk review by YouTuber MayorHairBear.

So that’s where we are. Civvie swears that he didn’t make up Boomer Shooter, but I cannot find an earlier use anywhere. I’m going to keep looking, and I’ll update this article if I find anything, but the answer might forever elude us, as the first usage of Boomer Shooter might just exist on a message board or YouTube video that was long ago scrubbed from the Internet.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.