Ion Fury is the latest in a long and enjoyable line of boomer shooters I’ve ticked off lately. The two of us were bound to intersect – me, a 36-year-old with a professional sideline in harping on about the ‘90s for gaming sites; Ion Fury, an uncomplicated corridor shooter running on Duke Nukem 3D’s old game engine. I played, I laughed, I rolled sprites of bombs at little cyborg heads on robot spider legs. And then I got to thinking.
Why do we call them ‘boomer shooters’, anyway? They hark explicitly back to the past, definitely, but did you really have to be there at ground zero when id Software and 3D Realms were putting the first wave of 3D shooters out in order to enjoy games like Dusk, Graven, or Amid Evil? And given that anything ‘boomer’ is a denigration, however affectionate, do these titles really deserve such lightweight, novelty status?
You can hear me saying ‘no’ to myself as you read those rhetorical/not-rhetorical questions, but then I would say that. I remember Euro 96, and when Freddos were 10p, or something. Probably the more interesting question is why the term is used by developers, publishers, and commentators alike. And I think it’s about long tail economics.
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