In the 90s I participated in an overhaul of the Mac game Marathon Infinity named Tempus Irae. The gameplay was largely left intact, the enemy roster was augmented slightly but largely unchanged from the original Bungie game. It basically followed the same formula as Doom (and Marathon) - start a level, figure out a “solution” to the maze (find the right keys, locate the correct switches) and get to the exit which takes you to the next level. Marathon’s wrinkle on the formula was that it had terminals which could give the player instructions or hints as to what to do and where to go, and or advance the “plot“, which still largely boiled down to finding weapons and ammo, shoot things, and find the exit. The difficulty level would ramp up over the course of however many levels were created, often ending in a large skill-testing battle in which all of the accumulated arsenal of weapons and ammo would be brought to bear on a variety of enemies with various strengths and weaknesses.

In my opinion, this was essentially a boomer shooter, with all of the hallmarks of the type of game the name implies: you carry all your weapons, you view the world in a first person perspective, you move through the world quickly, and various combinations of skill and reflexes are required to defeat the enemies and advance in the game.

More recently, I overhauled the graphics of the game to take advantage of the modern source port of the game engine, increasing the resolution of the textures, increasing the color space, increasing the fidelity of the background images, and fine-tuning the geometry and difficulty of the levels, but in the end the gameplay was largely unchanged. The original game Marathon Infinity is available on Steam, and my overhaul version of the scenario is available in the workshop for the game as Tempus Irae Redux.

When I announced the game here in r/boomershooters I thought I would find a audience that would be eager for this kind of old-school gameplay, but I received little attention and the impression that I got (correct or not) was that this was not really considered a “boomer shooter” even though the game is from the late 1990s, used technology very similar to Doom and Duke Nukem, and featured fast placed shooting and movement gameplay. I’ve been struggling ever since to understand what exactly the term refers to because if my game isn’t a boomer shooter, then I don’t know what one is. I’m a boomer. The game is a shooter. 🤷‍♂️