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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Boomers were young in the 60s and 70s, Half-Life is not even a part of Gen X gaming... is the title engagement bait?
"Boomer shooter" is a genre of video game. As far as I know, the term is unrelated to "Baby boomer," the name of the generation.
Edit: Okay apparently it is related. Some debate exists over the etymology. I imagined it was from "boomstick" (a gun), but some people are are claiming it's from the dusk development team and a reference to a meme I'd never heard of about calling people boomers who aren't, or maybe it's from earlier and nobody can trace the etymology at all.
'Baby boomer' and then in 2024 the sequel: 'Baby Boomer 2: 35 Years Too Soon' coined this genre. Thank you kimulator, I wanna have sex with your dead grandmother 👍
Kimulator?
Boomer is just old slang for person who is older than the speaker or someone who is out of touch
I've never heard boomer used this way
"ok boomer"
Right -- but this is in reference to baby boomers. It's used to indicate the person is going to die in a couple decades and so their opinion doesn't matter. If it's used on someone other than a boomer it's probably an exaggeration or intentional misidentification meant to make the phrase even more provocative.
Hate to have to overexplain, but yeah, ok boomer is absolutely derived from baby boomer.
I hear you, but as you just said it can be adapted to be used as an exaggeration, generally to indicate the person is out of touch in opinion.
A similar pattern with our speech is how terms for mental disability (eg idiot or some of the modern terms recently deemed a bit more hateful) were adapted in our language to become insults.
The main difference is that I just don't see young people referring to each other as boomers very often. but i could be out of touch.
Yeah I'm an older millennial and HL came out when I was in high school.
The idea of my baby boomer father playing any shooter on planet earth is so absurd, I've decided this name is purely for trolling purposes, and I stop reading at any mention of it.
My baby boomer father only plays RTS, and he is still playing the original DOTA to this day.
I am not going to get into the discussion around the "boomer shooter" name, but surely HL1 would be considered part of the Gen X experience.
The youngest millennials were in their early teens in 1998. The last members of Gen X were finishing up secondary school in 1998.
I say this as a relatively early to mid generation millennial born in the late 80s.
The whole generational cohort approach can be very limiting. IMO late cohort Gen X and early-mid cohort Millenials have a lot in common.
Only the slowest of the last of gen xers were still in school in 1998 :P
Gen X got the console wars, the best arcade years, golden era of DOS games. Late 90s and 00s are millennials territory.
Born in 78/79/80 life.
WW2?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boomer_shooter
Duke Nukem makes sense. Half-Life does not. Half-Life stars a nerdy scientist who just wants to live, and the game is carried by its story.
No video game newer than Pong makes any sense with the word Boomer in front.
I think the title is just alluding to the genre change provided by the mod and referencing how the game has a lot of explosions.
Pong, reimagined as a boomer shooter!