Tag: Doom

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.

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John Romero’s “Doom Guy” is Getting a Documentary and a Dramatic Adaptation

If you’ve ever seen him give an interview, you know that John Romero, one of the co-founders of id Software and the co-creator of both Doom and Quake, is one of the all-time great talkers. No matter what the question is, he’ll give you a story that you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

Romero’s wordsmithing was definitely one of the big reasons why his recently-published memoir, Doom Guy: Life in First Person, was so well-received by readers.

According to Deadline, the famed developer will get another chance to tell his story in an upcoming documentary adaptation of Doom Guy. The project will be directed by Rob McCallum, who is probably best known as the creator of a few other game-themed documentaries, including 2015’s Nintendo Quest.

Speaking about Doom Guy, [McCallum] said: “John Romero’s journey is the missing antidote for all of us misfit toys looking for hope and kindred spirits in the darkness of the world. It’s an unbelievable rock n’ roll, boundary-shattering, thrill ride grounded in humanity, integrity, patience and clever chess moves slathered in innocence, tenacity and pure coolness.”

In addition to the documentary, Golden Possum Productions and Naomi Harvey will produce a dramatic adaptation of Doom Guy as well. We don’t know which actor will step into Romero’s well-coifed mane, nor do we know if this adaptation is planned for cable or theaters or streaming. But hopefully it doesn’t suffer the same fate as the USA Network’s planned adaptation of David Kushner’s Masters of Doom, which fell apart shortly after it was announced in 2019.

“The Resties Required Reading List” Includes the 25 Games You Need to Play to Understand the History of Games

Justin McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Chris Plante, and Russ Frushtick host The Besties, a podcast where they talk about “the best game of the week” every week.

The Besties is part of the sprawling McElroy media empire, but episodes produced solely by the non-McElroy members of the show appear as a spinoff show known as The Resties, and for the last 18 months they’ve been sporadically adding games to “The Resties Required Reading List“.

Not a Best Games list, the “Required Reading List” is a collection of titles that serve as the best introduction to the wider world of video games. Plante likes to refer to it as “a syllabus for Video Games 101” and further described the project like this…

Our goal is to curate and contextualize a “must play” list of 25 games released between 1980 to 2020. These aren’t the best games or even our favorite games. They’re the games that should be experienced by everyone who wants a fundamental appreciation of the medium. They’re the games that will give you a richer connection with every other game you play.

Plante and Frushtick split the “Required Reading List” into eight episodes, each covering a five-year span that lands somewhere between 1980 and 2020. Within these smaller chunks of time they picked two-to-four games that best represent the era and a specific corner of gaming they wanted to highlight. In the end, 28 games made it through these mini-debates before the hosts cut three titles to reach their 25-game goal. Counter-Strike (from the 2000-2004 episode), along with Hearthstone and Spelunky HD (both from the 2010-2014 episode) ultimately ended up on the chopping block.

So which games did make the grade? You’ll find all the foundational classics from the 1980s (Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda), as well as the modern games that are currently moving the needle (Fortnite, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Outer Wilds). In between there’s Doom (1993), Pokemon Red/Blue, Resident Evil 4 (2005), Minecraft, and more than a dozen others.

Wanting to argue with a Best Games list is the most natural reaction in the world, but it’s hard to quibble with any of the choices on “The Resties Required Reading List” as the games you need to play to best understand the history of games. Or, to steal a phrase from one of The Resties, the “Required Reading List” is a way of “thinking about the countless ways games inform our lives, our culture, and future creators”.

You can see all 25 games from “The Resties Required Reading List” after the break.

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David Craddock Will Explore the Many Ports of Doom for Boss Fight Books in “But Does It Run Doom?”

John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack, and Sandy Petersen changed everything when they released Doom in 1993. It wasn’t the first first person shooter (nor was id Software’s earlier game, Wolfenstein 3D), but it defined what the genre would look like for years to come and led to a stampede of “Doom Clones” that continue to be produced to this very day.

Even after writing all that out, it’s still hard to believe… Doom is 30 years old.

David Craddock, the author behind Stairway to Badass: The Making and Remaking of Doom 2016 and Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters, recently moderated a discussion between Romero and Carmack that has been embedded above. The two developers touched on a lot of interesting topics as part of the anniversary celebration, and at the end, Craddock revealed that he’s cooking up another Doom-adjacent project for release in the not-too-distant future.

The author will work with Boss Fight Books to publish But Does It Run Doom?, an exploration of the many ports (both official and unofficial) that have been based on the seminal shooter. Here’s what he had to say about the new book, including a promise that it’ll also delve into some of the very weird machines Doom has appeared on…

These guys have graciously allowed me to insert a quick plug for a project I have coming out and it’s in the vein of what we’ve been talking about.

I’m partnering with Boss Fight Books to release a book called But Does It Run Doom? I’ll be writing about some of the conventional ports such as the Super Nintendo [and] PlayStation, but also some of the more out-of-leftfield ports such as on pregnancy tests, on the sheep in Minecraft…

So look for that on @BossFightBooks on Twitter [and] BossFightBooks.com. [They’ll] have information coming out.

This is somewhat of a departure for Book Fight Books, but hopefully that means they’ll have more to say about But Does It Run Doom? soon.

“Doom At 30” is a “Guide to Thirty Years of Ultra-Violence” from Marc Normandin and Trevor Strunk

Between David Kushner’s Masters of Doom, Dan Pinchbeck’s Doom: SCARYDARKFAST, and John Romero’s Doom Guy, a lot of words have been written about the development of Doom and its impact on the rest of the games industry. But you’ll definitely want to make room on your digital shelves for at least one more upcoming book about id Software’s masterpiece.

Doom At 30: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Three Decades of Ultra-Violence is the brainchild of Marc Normandin (Retro XP) and Trevor Strunk (No Cartridge), who have joined forces as No XP Publishing and gathered together more than a dozen writers to explore the franchise from every possible angle:

DOOM at 30: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Three Decades of Ultra-Violence will be a digital book, zine, whatever you want to call it, that takes a deep and complete look at the 30 years of the franchise. It will include reviews and discussions of every DOOM game — including the ones once thought lost to time, as well as modern add-on episodes like John Romero’s Sigil — the DOOM movies, and an array of features diving in from all angles. The tech, the WADs, the mods, the violence, the terror, its place in various genre canons, and, of course, DOOM 3 opinions. Many, many DOOM 3 opinions. DOOM at 30 might be unofficial and unauthorized, but we want it to be the definitive look back at the franchise’s first 30 years all the same, which is why there’s even more than what’s listed above planned.

The duo is currently seeking funding to publish Doom At 30 through Kickstarter. In addition to the various reward tiers, they’ve also shared who’ll be joining them on this project, and the list includes more than a few names that should be familiar to fans of video game history: Demetrius Bell, Madeline ‘Mads’ Blondeau, Kerry Brunskill, LaToya Ferguson, Elijah Gonzalez, Brendan Hesse, Sorrel Kerr-Jung, Cameron Kunzelman, Liz Ryerson, Colin Spacetwinks, Jackson Tyler, and Carli Velocci.

If you want to get am idea of what Doom At 30 will offer, Normandin recently published several bonus articles that look at how John Carmack and John Romero built their groundbreaking 3D tech and the expanded universe of mods that have arrived in Doom‘s wake.

He talked briefly about id Software’s early experiments in the first person shooter genre (including Hovertank 3D, Catacombs 3D, and Wolfenstein 3D) at RetroXP. And over at Astrolabe, he examined some of the fan-made mods that have emerged over the last 30 years, including Romero’s unofficial fifth episode, Sigil.

The Kickstarter campaign for Doom At 30 will end on Wednesday, September 20.

UPDATE (9/21/23): Doom At 30 was unable to reach its funding goal, but Normandin wrote on Bluesky that he’ll “think up something else to make it happen down the road”.

Bite-Sized Game History: The Strange Saga of Doom 3DO’s Scrapped FMV Scenes

Thanks to its flexible system requirements, id Software’s Doom has become a popular piece of software to use to test the processing power of some rather unorthodox devices. A group of dedicated modders have managed to install the classic shooter on a wide range of hardware over the years, including an ATM, a home pregnancy test, a piano, and a whole lot more. But before all that, not every console platform could contain the awesome power contained within the game’s Martian corridors.

Believe it or not, one consolemaker even tried to inject a little live-action into the franchise long before The Rock starred in 2006’s Doom…

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John Romero Will Tell His Life Story in 2023 in “Doom Guy: Life in First Person”

John Romero’s about to make you… listen to his life story.

One of gaming’s most flamboyant personalities emerged in the early 1990s as one of the first “rock star” game developers after co-creating Doom with John Carmack and id Software. He’ll explore those early adventures in a new autobiography, which will be published in 2023 by Abrams Books.

Doom Guy: Life in First Person will trace the course of Romero’s entire life, starting with his childhood in Colorado through his partnership with Carmark to his days after id Software:

Doom Guy: Life in First Person is the long-awaited autobiography of John Romero, gaming’s original rock star and the cocreator of Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein—some of the most recognizable and important titles in video game history. Credited with the invention of the first-person shooter, a genre that continues to dominate the market today, he is gaming royalty.

Told in remarkable detail, a byproduct of his hyperthymesia, Romero recounts his storied career—from his early days submitting Apple II code to computer magazines and sneaking computers out of the back door of his day job to do programming projects at night in his garage to a high-profile falling out with his id Software cofounder John Carmack, as well as his continued role in the gaming industry today as the managing director of Romero Games.

His story is truly one of a self-made man, founding multiple companies after a childhood filled with violence and abuse drove him to video game design, where he could create new worlds and places to escape to. An alcoholic father, a racist grandfather who did not approve of Romero’s parents’ mixed-race coupling, and a grandmother who once ran a brothel in Mexico combine for an illuminating story of his youth—a story that has never before been revealed.

After years in the gaming spotlight, Romero is now telling his story—THE WHOLE STORY—in his own words.

John Romero has always had a way with words, so it’ll be interesting to see how his autobiography expands upon David Kushner’s excellent Masters of Doom

Doom Guy: Life in First Person will be available on January 10, 2023.

UPDATE (7/20/23): After a short delay, Doom Guy: A Life in First Person is now available on stores shelves. John Romero has marked the occasion by sharing an excerpt of his book with The Verge, all about the first time he played John Carmack and Tom Hall’s unauthorized PC conversion of Super Mario Bros. 3.

Bite-Sized Game History: Looking Back at the GameCube, IGN Through the Years, and Doom Takes Over Twitter

With more than 50 years of history to pick from, a milestone birthday for some game or console happens nearly every day. But 2021 is a particularly big year for the fine folks at Nintendo. The consolemaker extinguished 25 candles for the Nintendo 64 over the Summer and blew out 20 for the GameCube just last month.

We’ll talk a bit about both of those anniversaries in this edition of Bite-Size Game History, as well as a new way to play Doom (which will officially turn 28 in a few short weeks).

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Bite-Sized Game History: Nintendo Power Survives Dragon Warrior, Doom’s Shareware Secrets, and Dirty Harry’s Bizarre Announcement

When you’re working with video games, you have to learn to be adaptable. In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we look at adapting in the face of a flop, adapting when you have a blockbuster fall in your lap, and adapting to the reality of creating game adaptations.

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The Untold Stories Behind Doom’s Cheat Codes, Splatoon’s Canceled Predecessor, and Creating an E3 Press Conference

Start your weekend off right by diving into a trio of videos highlighting some of the lesser-known stories behind the creation of Doom, Splatoon, and Ubisoft’s annual E3 extravaganza.

Start your weekend off right by diving into a trio of videos highlighting some of the lesser-known stories behind the creation of Doom, Splatoon, and Ubisoft’s annual E3 extravaganza.

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