Shooters: An Industry's Legacy?

It’s hard to watch an old friend go. That’s why we’re lucky that we’re into electronics and nerdy things that plug into walls, right? These are things that never really pick up stakes and leave… the worst that might happen is that some jerk will borrow your nerd gear and never give it back. All of this reassurance, however, sometimes does little to soften the blow when gaming industry trends don’t swing in the favor the types of games that you may have grown to love in the past. Even worse, sometimes those trends effectively kill off a whole genre. This is the story of the shooter.

Oh, shooters. Not first-person shooters, but what some people (who obviously have no problem making up words) call “schmups”. These make up various hallowed series as Gradius, Thunder Force, and R-Type, and are name-dropped by old guys seeking some street cred, or maybe a part of their youth that they lost somewhere in a mall arcade. The games are characterized by auto-scrolling screens, spaceships with unreal amounts of ammunition, and difficulty levels that grant you the ability to somehow crunch a controller in one hand out of pure physical rage.

Despite their waning popularity, shooters to this day manage to characterize (perhaps better than any other genre of game) something that has always made our industry unique: This industry is so relatively limitless that, if a whole genre upon which it was built is ignored for a while, things will still be OK. Has this phenomena been seen before in other forms of mass entertainment? Maybe the closest parallel is the Western in TV and film. There are good Westerns being produced today, but there certainly aren’t as many as when the nation was in love with them. Also, undoubtedly, you’ll find some people that will certainly insist that they don’t “make them like they used to”.

Trying to unravel the reasons as to why the shooter fell out of favor is an interesting pursuit. With the Western, we can more or less attribute their lack of numbers to shifting attitudes within our nation (when was the last time you saw kids in the backyard playing “Cowboys and Indians”?) Most shooters have a fairly universal sci-fi theme, though, so one might have to assume that the culprit is something unique to our industry. Strap yourself in, we’re going to figure this out right now.

Were shooters just too difficult for players? To say that these games built a following over the years is a bit of an understatement. Could it be that shooters began to cater to their hardcore audience in terms of difficulty, leaving newcomers with an experience lacking any enjoyable reward? This might explain the shooter’s fate, since the mere image of a flying, shooting ship, over time, might be automatically be associated with “classic” gaming; Inviting and familiar to the hardcore, but unwelcoming to a more casual (or less experienced) set of gamers.

Were shooters a genre that had simply run out of room to evolve content-wise? After all, how many ways can you shoot something and have it blow up? This is a valid (and familiar) argument, since many lodge the same claim against the first-person shooter genre today. While you can only blow things up so many ways, most shooters that trickled onto our consoles in the past years have at least tried to make a case for themselves, some very successfully. Ikaruga, for example, leveraged an innovative system of “light” and “dark”, allowing the player interesting (and, yes, sometimes devilishly difficult) strategical choices. Had a few more games with mechanics as relatively inventive as Ikaruga achieved moderate popularity, a convincing argument could be made to the masses that shooters suffer no more genre-imposed shackles on designer creativity than any other type of game.

Were shooters an ineffective way to sell new hardware technologies to the public? Many in the industry are just now seeing that photorealism is not always the goal-of-goals when it comes to offering an unforgettable gameplay experience. But, until recently, the relative marketing bloodlust around realism in both graphics and physics has been impossible to ignore. How do you make a photorealistic space serpent? What is an example of proper laser cannon physics? In short, how is a shooter going to sell systems? Unless shooters make an appeal to the mass audience on an artistic level, or on a level of incredibly satisfying gameplay mechanics, achieving any sort of “wow” factor is surely a challenge. Even then, static screenshots online and in printed publications will be a hard sell.

Are shooters poised for a comeback in the next console generation? Stranger things have happened, but it could be that shooters have a more important role to play in our industry than generating massive sales. No matter how many years of experience a gamer has under their belt, they can recognize shooters as a caricature of the video game in its most prominent and successful role: an over-the-top, purely likable form of fantasy and escapism. In that capacity, it’s a bit scary to imagine our industry entirely without the shooter. I guess that’s why they still show Unforgiven on cable every other weekend, too.