Origin of Boomer Shooters #
Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s the norm for first person shooters was Call of Duty style the stereotype was something with 2 weapon limits, guns that needed to reloaded and where you needed to aim down sight to ensure accuracy (a rarity in earlier shooters), very linear campaigns, a boring brown or grey colour palette, modern military setting and an emphasis on “realism” (not actual realism, but a grounded setting, Hollywood realism in other words).
This had initially been seen as an innovation beyond older FPS games like DOOM and Quake, first paved by World War 2 shooters like Medal of Honour, Battlefield 1942 and the first 3 Call of Duty games and then pioneered by Call of Duty 4, it was a time where games had dramatic setpieces developers in the 90s could never have dreamed of, where there was an actual plot instead of a few text crawls in a README file, a manual or an end screen.
These trends became so commonplace that even classic shooter franchises like Duke Nukem ended up copying them with the widely panned Duke Nukem Forever releasing in 2011, that same year Serious Sam (which had previously been a kind of proto-boomer shooter with a retro 90s style despite its 2000s release window) also devolved into these tropes with Serious Sam 3, adding more “modern” features that hadn’t been in the previous games like reloading for more of the guns, sprinting and the ability to aim down sights of your gun as well as a more grey colour palette and realistic run down cityscapes.
But just because these tropes were common doesn’t mean they were well liked by players and they were often ruthlessly mocked by parodies like “Call of Dooty" and “Duty Calls”.
Some developers shared in this frustration and wanted to get rid of a lot of these tropes in their games, and to do so they looked back towards what shooters used to be like, less tied down by realism, more dynamic arsenals, open ended level design, no need for long plot lines tied down by repetitive cutscenes.
ROTT and DOOM #
The game that started this whole craze was Rise of the Triad, a 2013 reboot of 1995’s Rise of the Triad.
The original ROTT was fairly niche at its time but later became a cult classic, it started out being developed by Apogee Software in cooperation with iD Software as a sequel to their (very loosely) World War 2 themed shooter Wolfenstein 3D, the game that popularised first person shooters as an genre, but after iD became fully focused on making their own followup, DOOM, they dropped Wolfenstein 2.
Apogee kept making the game anyway with a team under the name of the “Developers of Incredible Power”, dropping any Wolfenstein related characters and overt Nazi symbolism (the game’s enemies do still very much resemble Nazis).
The problem was they were still tied to the Wolfenstein game engine, which at the time of the game’s release was very impressive but was rapidly becoming outdated (for example, all levels had a single height and light level, there were no floor or ceiling textures, walls were all the exact same 90 degree shape), although the DIP made many improvements to the engine to compensate for this they were still limited.
So to help the gameplay keep standing out they tossed in all sorts of gimmicks, with powerups like “elasto mode” which sends you bouncing off the walls or “shrooms mode” which sends your vision into a multicoloured wavy frenzy, traps like spike columns, flame emitters, boulders, toxic gas rooms, wacky enemies like the lightning guard who will steal your weapons or the officer who will toss a net to trap you in, and crazy weapons like the Drunk Missile which spams rockets in erratic patterns, a Baseball bat which can charge to fire cones of explosive green baseballs.
This meant that even though technologically the game was quite dated compared to DOOM, the game still had its own 2 legs to stand on.
This embrace of indie wackiness and turning things up to 11 was the perfect contrast to the corporate, bland repetitive formula common in FPS games of the 2010s.
The reboot however was a mixed bag, it did capture a lot of the insanity of the original game with great replicas of enemies, weapons and design tropes of the original ROTT, but the game was also plagued by technical problems like bugs and bad performances, some very annoying mechanics like awkward jumping puzzles (the original game didn’t even have a jump button, only jump pads, so these sorts of puzzles were few and far between) and at launch it didn’t even have manual saving, instead relying on a checkpoint system (quicksaving was later added in a patch), it also didn’t really kick off a trend to begin with.
But the idea of “going back to the roots” was still one that sparked interest, and it got a major boost when a big company decided to dive into it too.
iD Software had by now lost their place in the limelight, with most of the team departing for other studios or leaving the industry, and their games weren’t making much of a splash, Quake 3 was the last to really make waves by popularising a focus on deathmatch multiplayer, from there it was downhill, DOOM 3, a DOOM reboot focusing on slower paced horror elements, was seen as a bit of a poor man’s Half Life 2, and their next game the post apocalyptic shooter RAGE turned out to be incredibly forgettable (trust me, I played it).
iD had been seeking to do something more with DOOM and decided not to give DOOM 3 a sequel, instead DOOM 4 would be another reboot, early prototypes weren’t very inspiring, it looked brown, grey and dull, not far off from RAGE, in other words it looked boring, iD themselves realised this and went back to the drawing board, deciding to embrace the “old school” shooter idea.
There would be expansive levels with a degree of openness, there would be big bombastic weapons and you could carry as many of them as you wanted, there would be powerups, the plot would take a back seat, this was exemplified by a moment that the very beginning of the game where it seems like you’re going to be locked into a cutscene with a character, Samuel Hayden, giving you a lore dump, DOOMGuy instead tosses the computer aside to shut Hayden up and you carry on shooting demons, later he tries to contact DOOMGuy through a panel in an elevator and he smashes the panel to bits, the game wasn’t actually very committed to this as the game is filled with lore dump text files and at several points actually does lock you in rooms to force you into cutscenes, but this fuck you to tired modern game tropes was inspiring.
The game actually ended up feeling more like Quake than DOOM, after all the original DOOM was a game where you couldn’t even jump or look up and down, DOOM 2016 has frantic fast paced gameplay that more appeals to your childhood imagination of what DOOM was like than the actual game, but it still offered a breath of fresh air compared to grey crap.
It intensified this path further by introducing a mechanic called “glory kills” where enemies would flash bright colours on low health, prompting you to go up and melee them for a brutal rapid kill that would cause them to spit out health pickups, keeping the pace of combat fast, this ended up being very popular!
Interestingly this was a case of parallel evolution as AAA studios had already started to move forwards a similar embrace of the fast pace, in 2014 ex-COD devs had moved to EA to make the fast paced Titanfall with its wallruns and double jumps and the same year COD itself did the same with Advanced Warfare, embracing a futuristic setting and superhuman abilities brought on by “Exosuits”, followed up by that formula continuing with 2015’s Black Ops 3 and 2016’s Infinite Warfare, which also saw the release of Titanfall 2, but these innovations didn’t really win back a lot of the disgruntled players, they in fact caused lots of division with many COD fans calling for a return to the grounded style, which later ended up happening.
Off the Ground with Indie #
The next year indie games started to pick up on this trend with 2017 seeing the release of STRAFE, a game that marketed itself as a return to the FPS Golden Age with a 90s radicool parody where the game is just so unbearably wild it makes a kid’s head explode, but late 2018 was the real kicker with DUSK, it its design it invoked DOOM, Quake, and Blood, the creator of the project David Szymanski also cited Half Life and STALKER as inspirations, he deliberately made the game look worse with low poly pixelation to match that 90s nostalgia feel, threw realism in the bin, implemented open explorable maps and classic weapons, it was a real tribute.
And I loved it, I played it through in 2019 a few months after it released and had a lot of fun, although it was an undeniable a tribute to a bygone era it wasn’t just that, it made its own stamp on the FPS genre, particularly with its level design which was very creative especially in later episodes where the rules of reality were bent more and more, the powerups the game tossed into the mix were also interesting and the enemy designs stood out too, as the template for what these retro style shooters should look like it was a solid one, 2019 was also the year the boomer shooter term for this niche seemed to emerge, it was now a codified trend.
Another boost came in 2020, a shit year for planet Earth but surprisingly a decent one for games, it was the year DOOM Eternal came out and doubled down on its combat loop big time, of course the fast paced unrealistic shooting was back but iD also decided to double down on what they started with the glory kill mechanic with a full blown resource management system: On top of the glory kills giving health DOOM’s classic chainsaw was brought back with a totally new mechanic, the chainsaw would be an instant takedown weapon that caused enemies to drop piles of ammo when sawed to death, using the chainsaw consumes fuel which recharges on a timer, later in the game you get a close range flamethrower which causes ignited enemies to spew armour pickups, the number of regular health, ammo and armour pickups was reduced considerably compared to DOOM 2016, forcing you to jump into this resource management system especially on higher difficulties.
The game also heavily incentivised attacking certain weak spots and using certain combinations of weapons and enemies, like using the grenade alt fire of the shotgun on a Cacodemon’s mouth to make them swallow it and become open to a glory kill, on top of all this the game embraced the wacky retro feel even more, making the game’s enemies resemble their counterparts from 90s DOOM far more closely, and even adding a lives system, the kind of thing FPS games hadn’t normally used since Wolfenstein 3D.
This was a divisive series of changes, some didn’t like being forced (or at least heavily pressured) into certain combat techniques but others loved the new system, personally I was a fan and on the whole the game did very well, generating lots of community interest.
The indie scene also saw the release of ULTRAKILL, a game similarly focused on incentivising a specific style of fast play although through a different method, utilising a style meter with points for constant kills and varied combat styles with ranks going from D all the way up to S (with a P for Perfect at the end), the weapons also all had unique variants and alt fires as well as a parry mechanic tossed in for dealing with projectiles, I haven’t played the game myself so I can’t comment on if this all adds up to something fun, but I can see that it adds up to something unique.
My Take #
I was very much primed to like this new genre of FPS games, even though I grew up in that period of the late 2000s and 2010s without having lived through those pioneering 90s years of FPS creation and innovation, I actually ended up playing a lot of these older shooters, since my PC for many of those years, a shoddy laptop, was not exactly space age tech, I ended up looking to older games.
I came across DOOM in a very bizarre way, being a major fan of Batman as a kid while browsing the web for Batman related content I came across a video called “Spike & Barley Play - Skulltag: Batman DOOM”, Batman DOOM being an old 90s mod for DOOM by developer ACE Team, I had a copy of the Xbox 360 port of DOOM 2, which I started playing in 2014 and ended up downloading a bunch of DOOM Source Ports, WADs and mods on PC, managing them all through a helpful all inclusive program called DOOM Explorer, I even learned to make my own DOOM maps on a program called DOOM Builder, they were amateurish shite and most of the files are lost forever as at some point I deleted my DOOM folder which housed all those aforementioned ports, WADs and mods, but I did find buried in my Discord DMs with a friend the WAD of my custom DOOM 2 maps, it was just 2 levels, one of which was actually complete - a tiny entrance area, and the other which was just a single room.
I also ended up briefly working on a total conversion mod based on an arcade classic of mine, Total Carnage, but that fizzled out too after not getting that far off the ground.
Moving on, another thing that happened in 2014 was that I discovered Duke Nukem 3D, again on the Xbox 360, a year later I got my hands on a copy of the game’s Megaton Edition on PC, messing about in the singleplayer levels and playing a bunch of Deathmatch with my sister (my godsister that is, I’m actually an only child).
I also around this time tried out Marathon 2, Marathon was essentially the MAC’s answer to DOOM, made by Bungie (now better known as the developers of Halo), this prompted me to download all 3 Marathon games as they’re now available for free on PC through a source port called Aleph One (only 2 got ported to Xbox back in the day).
There were a bunch of others too like Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Half-Life, System Shock, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Heretic, Hexen, Strife and more obscure games like the Blake Stone games (Aliens of Gold and Planet Strike), Corridor 7 and Operation Body Count, NAM, World War 2 GI and HacX, and that’s just the 90s games, I also played some of the retro-style 2000s FPS games that are also sometimes included in the retro FPS pantheon, particularly Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the Serious Sam games.
So I grew up as much with the “Old School” of shooters as much as the “New School” and I understood their appeal, more open games had a much greater appeal to me far more than games that tended to be scripted or railroaded in nature.
Being a fairly stupid hyperactive kid I didn’t actually finish any of these games (except for Planet Strike and RTCW), in fact I never finished even any of their episodes, the copy of Marathon 2 I had was just a Demo so I only played a level or 2 at most and I never actually bothered to play through the complete copies I had on PC, much of my imagination and enthusiasm for these games as a kid was fostered by YouTube videos: The Psychedelic Eyeball playthrough of Rise of The Triad, the DOOM walkthroughs of BigMacDavis, the Marathon Retrospective from Examined Life of Gaming, the video reviews of CGRundertow, GeneralLotz and Lazy Game Reviews, the obscure FPS games series of Marphy Black and the analysis videos of Decino to name some.
It took me until 2019 before I actually played through Duke Nukem 3D and its expansions, all the episodes of DOOM, DOOM 2, as well as the first 3 canonical Serious Sam games ( First Encounter, Second Encounter and 3, I didn’t finish Serious Sam 2).
It then took until 2021 for me to finish the first episode of Quake, 2023 to finish Rise of the Triad and its expansion Extreme Rise of The Triad, then this year until I got around to the rest of the Quake episodes and also played through Quake 2 and DOOM 64, currently I’m playing through the last “official” installation of Classic DOOM, Final DOOM.
There were just so many games for me to try that finally getting around to these classics was a long process, but that’s the thing, in recent years I’ve actually found my interest in these games growing as I go back to either finish them or play them for the first time, in general although there is some clunky design going on in places and the once groundbreaking technology is now embarrassingly out of date I generally find these games are great fun and still hold up to the test of time.
Overload #
So given my love for old school FPS and my enthusiasm for the Patient Zero of the boomer shooter trend, Dusk, why don’t I like it? The answer is simple, MASSIVE oversaturation, after the trend took off everyone and their grandmother started making games in this niche, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have fuelled a lot of innovation.
This is best represented by Realms Deep - A kind of E3 for Boomer Shooters, Realms Deep is hosted by (as you might of guessed), 3D Realms, revived since going defunct making Duke Nukem Forever, its aim is to showcase indie games, primarily boomer shooters but with some other genres sprinkled in as well, in a livestreamed showcase once a year, it has been running since 2020.
Unfortunately many of these games struggle to stand out and feel like they were designed to just be “let’s do DOOM”, “let’s do Quake”, “let’s do Duke Nukem” without much in the way of new ideas, often when you get games that seem on the surface to be more unique they’re actually just a mashing together of these different nostalgia waves “let’s do DOOM but a little bit of Quake and some Half-Life”, is this an improvement? Maybe, you’re tossing in more mechanics, but that’s ultimately still just a regurgitation of old games.
And this is a problem that got progressively worse over time, the first show was a 2 day fest with a 5 hour runtime - Day 1 being 2 hours and Day 2 being 3 hours, then in 2021 it became a single day 4 hour show, 2022 expanded it again to 3 days with a 6 hour runtime total ( Day 1 lasting 2 hours, Day 2 lasting 3 hours and Day 3 another hour), lastly in 2023 it was back to a single day show running at 3 and a half hours.
With such an absurdly long runtime for a convention of very similar games it’s extremely hard for games to stand out, and when many of these games are samey retro shooters without much going for them it’s a very hard sell, why would I play the next nostalgia bait of DOOM when I can just go and play DOOM?
But it’s not even like it was just a wave of amateurs burying the quality beneath, even some of the flagship titles being shown off were… Disappointing to say the least.
Take for example Graven, 3DR’s flagship title for the first Realms Deep, developed by Slipgate Ironworks (previously known as Interceptor Entertainment, the developers of the Rise of the Triad remake), Graven seemed to be a stand out title with a dark fantasy setting full of magic and terror, I actually tried its demo and had a decent amount of fun with it but when it released in Early Access in 2021 the reviews were mixed, news was slow and the game was reportedly in a shoddy state, by the time the game fully released in 2024 the fan feedback hadn’t gotten much better, at the time of writing the most recent reviews are 48% positive, compared to the total review count being 63% positive.
Another highlight - Brutal Fate, by the developer of the Brutal DOOM mod SgtMarkIV, simply didn’t go anywhere after being announced and getting its Steam store page, although he posted some sparse updates to his YouTube channel the game seems to have taken a backseat to his work on Brutal DOOM.
Then there was Gloomwood, a game that also stood out with its stealth focus and cool lamplight aesthetic, summed up simply as “Thief with Guns”, when that game reached Early Access in 2022 it had a far more positive reception, but the Demo was said to be only around 2 hours of content, at the time popular reviewer Gmanlives pointed out that at that rate of progress it would take another 8 years to get a reasonable length game out of all this (8 to 10 hours of runtime) and said that what was on the table at the time wasn’t much more than a vertical slice (as of 2024 the game is still in early access), he also pointed out that this was a worrying constant trend, with even well made substantial games failing to release, he namedropped Ultrakill (currently still in Early Access after 4 years), Wrath: Aeon of Ruin (released early this year after 4 years in development) and HROT (released after 3 years), of these I only played the demo of HROT and didn’t enjoy it at all, the weapons felt generic and lacking any punch (both mechanically and in the sound design), enemies weren’t interesting, the levels were dull and blocky and the colour palette consisted almost entirely of the colour brown, I think this was a poor attempt to replicate Quake but to me it just looked ugly (but in fairness that’s just a stylistic preference not a gameplay problem).
So, many of these games struggle to get finished or don’t get finished at all or when they do they turn out to be mediocre or outright shite, now I do have to hold up my hands here and make sure I’m not being a hypocrite because for a few years now I’ve been the project director for Catharsis Reborn, an expansive fan project aimed at using the most panned game in the series, Postal 3, as the basis for an unofficial POSTAL sequel with all new mechanics and returning mechanics from the game in the series everyone actually liked, POSTAL 2, I’ve been a developer on that project since 2016 and it has had a number of failed promises on release dates.
As far back as 2017 there were promises of a Demo releasing that never panned out, when I took the helm back in 2020 I wrote that “we’re confident that completion isn’t as far off as some might believe”. That turned out to be complete bollocks, it’s 2024 and that Demo still isn’t out, we made a ton of progress with mechanics (many of which had to be remade since I took over due to the previous implementations being flimsy at best), we scripted several missions, did lots of texture, map and music work, so on and so forth, but we still didn’t release something playable and I don’t feel the project is in a state I’m happy to release in; Many elements are strong and finished feeling but many others are not, there are gaping holes in the experience that bring it down to a point where I wouldn’t be happy going public, given all that in mind I’m certainly one to talk when it comes to games taking too long to make, but I feel I’m still in a place to criticise sluggish development for one reason: Money.
The number one reason Catharsis Reborn has taken so long to get anywhere is that it’s a free volunteer project, the developers there receive absolutely no reward for working on the game at all except for whatever personal satisfaction they get out of their work, but life at large doesn’t work on that volunteer basis; Food, housing, drink, entertainment, travel and basically everything else happens to cost money and lots of it, that means the currency of passion is lesser than the currency of cash, so the dev team on CR isn’t working on the mod as their main thing, we all have jobs to focus on, a lot of us also have other passion projects that compete for our attention.
The result of that is very slow development and there’s not much I can do to change that, as such a niche project we can’t simply get more staff and since I don’t pay anyone for their work they don’t owe me anything, all I can do is ask and although sometimes I do turn into a nagging grandmother chasing up where this scripting task is going or how this art project is progressing ultimately how much and how often developers choose to contribute is entirely up to them.
That can lead to a lot of frustration as months go by with little or nothing in the way of news, causing agitation in the community, and it’s frustrating for me as well not having a lot to share with people, but because there’s no money involved there’s also an understanding from our fanbase that we don’t owe them anything, they haven’t invested so we don’t owe them a game, instead the transaction is we offer them updates when we feel there’s enough substance to put something out and they offer us their interest, it’s not ideal but it does work on some level.
For me the mod was my number one creative project for many years but since working with Massi on MEGA that has changed a lot, the documentary scripts we write and things like these articles have much more become the centre of my passion.
I also have a bunch of other canned ideas for games lying around, like the one I wrote an article about a while ago, the so-called “Liberation Game”, again there was no money involved, the only currency was passion, and although I have a lot of passion for my works it’s not enough to learn programming, texture art, music, and do everything all by myself, I’m a creative at heart but I have my niche, I’m not a jack of all trades by any means.
But these boomer shooter games are a very different beast, they’re all sold for profit, players pay in and in return they expect a finished, quality game at the end of it all, that’s often not what they’re getting. So while as someone who has worked on game development I do understand that games take time, I know some of the annoying unforeseen problems that can slow development and through spanners into the works of even the best made plans, but at the end of the day when people are paying for these games in large numbers there definitely is an obligation to deliver, an obligation that is often not met.
And this problem has continued to the present day, as I write this another 3DR flagship title has just released, also developed by Slipgate Ironworks, called Phantom Fury, this was a game announced at Realms Deep 2023 alongside a Demo that was panned across the board, now that it’s out the feedback is mixed (at 65 positive reviews and 42 negative at the time of writing), the impression I heard was that the game had gotten better since that Demo by a solid margin but that the game overall was just another example of mashed together nostalgia bait.
I watched Gman’s review of the game and it was filled with constant comparisons, this bit is just like Half-Life, this bit is just like Half-Life 2, this bit is like Halo, this bit is like the leaked Duke Nukem Forever 2001 build, and it was exhausting, not because of his presentation because he was absolutely right, all of those moments were blatant copycats of those games, but it was so frustrating seeing these titles that after 4 or 5 years of this trend continue to just regurgitate the contents of games made 20 or 30 years ago.
Even big fans of the trend have recently noticed the drop in quality, with Civvie 11 recently taking Slipgate Ironworks to task for putting out games that are subpar at best and absolute garbage at worst, he called Phantom Fury “a tedious, nostalgia-baiting, tonally confused, stitched-together thing mismanaged into oblivion”.
So a lot of these games in the genre get by just through evoking memories more than any genuine authenticity, recycling the old tropes without much reason. A classic example is pixel graphics, in the 90s pixel graphics was used because that was the technology on hand at the time, later indie games adopted it because it allowed developers to make games at a scale feasible to them, rather than trying to match AAA with nowhere near AAA resources.
But why do boomer shooters use it now? Because that’s what retro shooters did and they want to feel retro, sometimes this looks fine for the most part, say for example Ion Fury which actually is made in the same Build Engine that powered old 90s FPS games like Duke 3D, but take a look at Phantom Fury or the recent System Shock remake by Night Dive Studios, these games clearly have better visuals than the “old school” but a bunch of pixelation is slapped on top to match that “retro” feel and it looks shit; System Shock has really detailed models, lighting and animations, but the texturing was purposefully made worse to appeal to a surface level imagination of what retro games were like and it sticks out like a sore thumb, you can tell because earlier versions of the game didn’t have this, with textures that looked much smoother, in fact the developers even had to explain in the first point on their FAQ that the pixelation was intentional and not a bug.
And sadly 3D Realms itself, the company at the helm of promoting and publishing the boomer shooter trend, is actually a prime example of this surface level nostalgia bait and regurgitation, the revived 3D Realms that has existed since 2014 isn’t the same 3D Realms that developed old school shooters like Duke Nukem in the 90s.
The 90s 3DR was just a brand name for Apogee Software Ltd, a company formed by Scott Miller, until they sold off the Apogee name in 2008 to a friend of Miller’s, Terry Nagy, who formed a new company under the Apogee name called Apogee Software LLC, 3D Realms then went bankrupt the next year.
The 3DR name and many of its properties were then bought out by a Danish investment company called “SDN Invest”, which formed the 3D Realms we know today, this investment company is the same one that partly owns Slipgate Ironworks which helps explain why Slipgate’s games are the flagships of the new 3DR.
In 2021 Nagy’s reformed Apogee became known as Apogee Entertainment and Scott Miller joined it, releasing a blog post pointing out that the new 3DR has no connection to the original company beyond owning its IPs.
Really, both companies are a shadow of the former Apogee/3DR, as Apogee Entertainment is now just a publishing company with no games of its own.
None of this is to say that games can’t or shouldn’t be derivative, most media nowadays is on some level going to be derivative, when any media format has existed this long it’s inevitable that there will be ideas you take from others or that others came up with before you did, but generally when you make works that are derivative you’re supposed to take those ideas and build on them to create something at least partly new, that feels new, that’s what Dusk did and what Ultrakill seems to do, but many of these up and coming Boomer Shooters have failed to do that and instead get by with nostalgia bait.
This ironically has left the Boomer Shooter trend in a very similar place to the Modern Military Shooter trend it was an answer to, or the World War 2 Shooter trend the Modern Military scene answered before that, we’ve reached the point where a once exciting and innovating scene has begun simply recycling, the old dog can’t learn new tricks.
It’s a real shame because a lot of the developers behind these projects clearly are talented, but their talents are being wasted on generic filler that just won’t be remembered in the same way the classics they’re trying to evoke were, we’re still talking about DOOM 30 years on, even more obscure titles like Marathon or Rise of The Triad still have some shine to them, is anyone going to remember Phantom Fury, Wrath or Graven in the same way? I highly doubt it.
That doesn’t mean it’s all bad, some great things have come out of this retro revival trend, for example the many lovingly made ports of classic shooters by Night Dive, and there are some games from this trend that really do look great, like Fallen Aces, a kind of spiritual successor to the DOOM mod Action DOOM 2 that expands on that games formula tenfold with expansive maps, in depth combat mechanics, a stealth system and a unique feeling comic book noir setting, although that game has been plagued with the same dragged development time as many others in the trend have ( with the Demo first releasing in 2021 and the first episode of the full game releasing in June 2024) it’s a genuinely unique, inspiring and polished game that shows the trend at its best, even though it’s a bit more of a “boomer brawler” we could say than a “boomer shooter”.
Or Night Dive’s System Shock reboot, much as I don’t like its pixel filter I think it’s a very faithful modernisation of the original game.
But essentially, the problem plaguing this trend is that the indie scene has basically failed to avoid the same problem all of gaming has been facing for the last decade or 2, the loss of pioneering spirit.
A Creative Drought #
That’s not to say we haven’t moved forward at all, games look a lot better than they did in 2004 that’s for sure, and mechanics have gotten more complex too, but that period from the early 90s to the early 2000s was a totally different ballpark, just look at where Wolfenstein 3D was at in 1992 and compare it to Return to Castle Wolfenstein from 2001, in less than a decade the technology and gameplay made such a seismic leap you’d really struggle to believe all this was accomplished in just those 10 years.
From Wolf 3D to DOOM there was a massive jump, DOOM to Quake another one, even though Quake 2 was more of a hop you could still see the evolution, especially in the fact that you could backtrack and move between levels rather than only being able to go forwards from one to the next.
Of course it wasn’t just iDs innovations that were driving things forward, there was the parallel evolution of Bungie’s offerings which did on Mac what iD were doing on PC, their Wolfenstein was Pathways into Darkness and their DOOM was Marathon, then they along with Valve took the helm as Halo and Half-Life made waves with more sophisticated efforts at storytelling and gameplay structures pretty much the same as what we know today, we could also include System Shock and System Shock 2 in this pantheon as well, with the first game’s modular difficulty system and varied upgrade system and the sequel’s emphasis on RPG elements.
And that’s just singleplayer games, at the same time you had Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress all pioneering what multiplayer looked like, the level of trendsetting was unprecedented. I wasn’t alive for that decade so I can’t be nostalgic for it, but I certainly do appreciate just how much it gave us technologically and in media evolution, that level of progress just isn’t happening in games today.
It’s an issue that only seems to get worse over time, take a look at Grand Theft Auto, in the first 12 years since its release (1997 to 2009) 4 mainline titles were released and many spinoffs and expansions 14 entries total, in the 15 years since then there was a grand total of one game, GTA 5, and no spinoffs, with expansions confined to 5’s Online mode, part of that is because the scale and costs of development have increased, but part of it does seem to be stemming from a willingness to sit back and make money without changing up the formulas too much.
Let’s be clear, there was still filler back in that 90s generation even from the heavyweights of gaming, look at Wolfenstein 3D’s expansion Spear of Destiny, which was nothing more than a map pack, then the Spear of Destiny Mission Packs which did the same thing again with some sound and texture changes (which turned the weapons blue for some reason).
Then there’s DOOM 2 which was a map pack with a grand total of 1 extra weapon, a rehash of an existing weapon with some stat buffs (I really do love the Super Shotgun, but come on, a beefed up Shotgun is all it was) and a few new enemies, several of which were also just rehashes of existing ones, that was followed by Final DOOM which was just 2 map packs for DOOM 2 with some new textures and music tracks tossed in, sure it was 64 more levels to play around with but they were hardly reinventing the wheel with that one.
And the same goes for the sequels to Marathon: Durandal and Infinity, they had new stories, new textures, new levels and a few new weapons, but again it was another case of progress by inches, not by miles.
These were games that settled for rehashing existing tech and mechanics, but they were stopgaps between new entries that were genuine technological and mechanical leaps, that made them a lot more palatable, now all we seem to have are the stopgaps, this generation doesn’t have a John Carmack of its own, not yet at least.