Tag: Etymology

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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Here Come the AAAA Games… But What’s a AAA Game and Why Do We Call Them That?

Where did the AAA designation come from? And what even qualifies as a AAA game?

I investigated both of those questions in a piece for Warp Zoned back in 2013, and a lightly edited and updated version of that article was reprinted here on Video Game Canon after Microsoft tried to announce a AAAA game in August 2020.

But a few recent discoveries have given us a clearer look where the AAA designation came from, and this article was rewritten to incorporate those updates in February 2024.

The console changeover from the PS3/Xbox 360 generation to the PS4/Xbox One generation brought a lot of worry about the spiraling budgets and massive teams required to create AAA games. Many felt it was hurting the industry, and while there was a reduction in games with blockbuster-sized budgets, these types of games continued to push the conversation among developers, publishers, and players. These same fears are being echoed today in light of the massive wave of layoffs that game executives inflicted upon the industry in 2023.

But for all the hand-wringing about how the AAA game was (and still is) detrimental to smaller developers, no one could seem to agree on what exactly a AAA game was or when the AAA designation was even first used.

In attempting to solve this etymological mystery, I found that the AAA designation shares much in common with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s obscenity test from a 1964 case (“I know it when I see it”). But I also found out that no one’s quite sure what the future of AAA games will look like.

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Video Game or Videogame? An Answer to the Most Important Question of Our Time

Don’t think of this as a spelling test, but do you like to play video games? Or do you like to play videogames?

I pondered this question in a piece for Warp Zoned back in 2012, and a lightly edited version of that article has been reprinted here.

Walk over to your media shelf and pick up a copy of Wii Sports or Halo 3 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Odds are at least one of these titles will be in your collection. What do you call the item in your hand? Some people consider these items part of the “interactive entertainment” medium, but most of us just call them something else.

Though they’ve existed for over forty years, no one has ever definitively answered the question… are they video games or videogames?

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Bite-Sized Game History: The True Meaning of 1-Up, Wipeout’s Controversial Ad Campaign, and Luigi’s Debut

A good introduction can work wonders for getting an audience interested in your game. Just look at all the words written about the importance of World 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. (not to mention all the video essays and podcasts and infographics and interpretive dance performances).

Not every game can feature such a crackerjack introduction, and even if it did, most people will often first experience a game through some encouraging words from a friend or some kind of advertisement. This first impression is no less important, and we’ll look at three of them in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

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Bite-Sized Game History: The History of Speed Boosts, Street Fighter ’89, and a Hyundai-Branded NES

Bite-Sized Game History has reached way back to talk about a lot of video game firsts, and I’ve got a few more today.

So let’s get right to it and dig into the history of speed boosts, the working title for Final Fight, and Nintendo’s initial collaboration with Hyundai.

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Bite-Sized Game History: The Origin of Shmup, the First Article About Spacewar, and the Last Gasp of Game Videos

Before GameTrailers made its debut in 2002, it was fairly difficult for publishers to make trailers for upcoming games available over the Internet. Large file sizes and slow download speeds made the entire thing rather impractical (not that we didn’t try).

We’ll be talking about how publishers made game trailers available in the days before widespread broadband adoption in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as uncovering a pair of firsts.

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