Thinking about this skeet this morning, and how for a brief while I was in the "boomer shooter" scene several years ago, back when it felt like there was this refreshing break away from doing large complex games with Quixel photogrammetry everywhere, scanned faces of top-tier Hollywood actors, and billion-dollar ad campaign budgets. I guess I'm babbling now because I'm kinda shocked at how quickly this whole movement burned itself out.
I've got a Steam shelf dedicated to boomer shooters (or retro FPSes if the other name drives you up the wall), all bought during this frenzy. There are some good games here. The mechanics feel meaty enough that you could sit most anyone down in front of them, and they'd get it, they'd get why there's a satisfying aspect to crunchy Build engine explosions, over-the-top gore, and Dopefish memes.
I've only played through some of them, though, and of those I have played, I haven't finished them, like Amid Evil, which you'd think has it all: otherworldly Quake-esque levels with some eye candy assistance from RTX/DLSS, amusing concepts like a gun that launches planets, obligatory retro FPS jumping puzzles, and even a blessing from Civvie11 himself, and...he's not wrong with there being some satisfying stuff here, but there's some kind of intangible quality to the game that is a subtraction to the experience as a whole, and I think it might be because of why we're even here at all.
I've been around for a while. I was there for Doom. I was there for Wolfenstein 3D. I was there for Ken's Labyrinth. I only got to play these and other similar games of the day because of my older brother who deliberately disobeyed my parents in allowing me to touch these "bad influence" games. It became an argument in the household, with my dad finally caving in and saying I could play Doom as long as I didn't use the chainsaw.
That was the zeitgeist, you see? These weird beige boxes people had on their desks to do spreadsheets were now letting kids gun down Nazis and detonate demons, and there was a pressing question back then of whether this was healthy for kids to engage with.
And I think the gamedevs of the day were fully aware of that; how else can you explain Duke Nukem 3D? This stuff was edgy, man. And that made for a really important statement, right? Society was fresh off plenty of moral panics, most notably the Satanic Panic that pulled in absurd activities like Dungeons & Dragons, and then suddenly some guy from that evil Nine Inch Nails band is making dark industrial music tracks for a game that has pentagrams in it. My parents had arguments over this stuff.
But unless you're in an ultra-religious household that thinks even Harry Potter is crossing a line, it really doesn't matter any more. A lot of kids play violent stuff all the damn time. I know my kid did. I allowed it. Why wouldn't I teach the critical life skill of circle strafing? I'm not gonna be a bad parent who doesn't prepare her child for the real world.
I guess the whole point of this rant is obviously most shooters aren't controversial any more, and might even be "desirable" to expose kids to if you suck as a person. There was that brief madness that went around with huge prize purse Fortnite tourneys and really bad parents buying up gaming rigs to turn their little Timmy into a money machine. Yeah no, I'll let my kid play Quake all day, but esports suck ass and are toxins in any gaming community.
That's the most sinister part of it, I feel, is the pervasive "line go up" mentality that robs everything of any kind of meaning. Game publisher CEOS are hot-swappable with any other industry; it doesn't matter to them. There's no conceptual difference to them whether or not the people under them make World of Warcraft expansions, or colourful coated paperclips, and unfortunately that abstraction is infectious, which is what the original skeet brings up. I think it's why the retro FPS scene burned out so quickly.
It's not a new statement at all to say if you sit down to intentionally create some experiential substance, you've likely already failed. Setting out to make a retro FPS carries the assumption that there's all these known dials and sliders that one only has to adjust to get the desired outcome. Pixel graphics? Outlandish weapons? Ludicrous gibs? Pumpin' soundtrack? Keycards? Some devs go down the list and check off each line item one by one so they're confident that what they make fits in the genre box, and similarly, players who consider themselves to be Genre-Box Enjoyers will pick up those games to confirm to themselves and everyone else that that is a valid identity.
I mean, it's what I did. I thought I could occupy those spaces, and be that gamedev.
Except I couldn't. I felt so out of place in the retro FPS community, which is funny, because I am a dev on the Duke Nukem Forever 2001 Restoration Project.
I lost track of it but there's a video that went over the nature of what constituted avant garde art, how avant garde was consumed by the high-society line-go-up art world that saw multi-million dollar porcelain toilet reproductions as a good investment, and how Sonic foot fetish art on DeviantArt is the only art qualified to carry the mantle of avant garde today.
What would avant garde even look like for a retro FPS now that shooters are largely mundane? If a sizable part of the fun of shooters in the '90s was it turned business machines into "murder simulators" that would horrify your parents, what could carry that energy today? Because it clearly isn't pixellated gore and keycards. Why make a retro shooter today? Why was it so important for these devs to choose making a retro shooter specifically?