Shoot-'em-ups

[Matt_H]

Everyone seems to be calling these kinds of games "shmups" now, a further truncation of an already-truncated genre name.

Does anyone know when/where the linguistic trend of "shmup" started? It seems very recent but also very pervasive, almost completely displacing the old term. Maybe I'm just being grumpy and old but I vastly prefer "shoot-'em-up".

[Retro-Nerd]

Shmups, the shortend term of Shoot'em ups, is much longer around than you think. Over 20 years. The shmups site is online since 1997. I've heard it before that, but don't know where exactly.


http://www.shmups.com/index.html

[Matt_H]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

Shmups, the shortend term of Shoot'em ups, is much longer around than you think. Over 20 years. The shmups site is online since 1997. I've heard it before that, but don't know where exactly.


http://www.shmups.com/index.html

Thanks for that reference. I did find some other evidence of the term in use long ago, but it seems like it's gone from rare to everywhere in a very short time. Even Shmups (the site) refers to the subject of its coverage as "shoot-em-up games". I wonder if internet culture began conflating the name of the site with its subject matter? Sort of like a genericized trademark...

[Retro-Nerd]

Check page 114, in this July 1985 issue of Zzzap!64. So it wasn't an internet "invention".


https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/re...ue-3-july-1985

[Matt_H]

Right. I’m not suggesting that the internet invented it, just that all of a sudden it went from being a rare term to the dominant one. Trying to pinpoint how that happened. e.g., I had never encountered it at all until 3 or 4 years ago. Has it been more prominent in Europe all along? I don’t ever recall seeing it in the US gaming press of the 90s through mid 2000s.

Perhaps I just live under a rock.

[Retro-Nerd]

No, i don't think many people ever heard it (except die hard genre fans i guess).

In Germany we called them "Ballerspiele".

[Tigerskunk]

I have known the term "SHMUPS" since the early 2000s.

[jayminer]

I've known it for a long time, when I started to get really into "shmups" in the early 00:s I found more people on forums using it than the longer variant.

[Konrad]

I alrady know this term for a VERY long time, definitely since around 2000.
Although just in written form, not when talking about games. Then it was "Shoot-em-ups" or "Ballerspiele" .

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

I vastly prefer "shoot-'em-up".

Preach, brother! Yes, I know that the world has moved on but I still doggedly use "shoot'em up" whenever possible.


I don't really mind these kind of semantic mutations in general, but some of them just irritate me to no end, for no particular reason. "Shmups" (ugh) is definitely one of them.

[roondar]

I remember hearing the term 'shmup' routinely when I still read Zzap!64 and Commodore Format. But no idea how or when it became dominant. I tend to use shoot-em-up myself.

[acidbottle]

I would never say out loud "SHMUP", would sound like I had just downed a pint of whisky. It is of course shoot-em-up.

For lazy typers and printed media, yea shmup is oki, but looks too weird for me. Never read Zzap so never got used to it being that way.

[dreadnought]

This guy gets it: "Sophstar - new vertical shoot'em up with a 90s arcade game vibe"

[gimbal]

Yeah well, if people are free to say "RPG" instead of "role playing game", then what's wrong with shmup. Who made the rule that it should be a by the books abbreviation eh?

I think I'll have a go at Streets of Rage 4 again, a bmup that I like a lot.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Who made the rule that it should be a by the books abbreviation eh?

Nobody. Just some people saying they're not very fond of this word, is all.

[gimbal]

Well I thought that I setup my "bmup" joke quite well, but no take me seriously...

[Matt_H]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Yeah well, if people are free to say "RPG" instead of "role playing game", then what's wrong with shmup. Who made the rule that it should be a by the books abbreviation eh?

I’m not trying to police the language, just trying to understand it. Something happened in the past few years—an article, a magazine, a particular game’s marketing or community, a YouTube personality, whatever—something caught on that caused the popularity of “shmup” to skyrocket over “shoot-‘em-up.” I’m curious as to what that was.

It’s interesting that you mention RPGs, because something similar has happened there, too. The term RPG has been around forever, predating the widespread adoption of home computers, probably. And then there’s the subgenre JRPG, for games in the linear, story-driven, Japanese style. The JRPG term has been around since at least the mid 90s but the press still generally referred to them as plain RPGs. Now, everything seems to be specifically a JRPG or a CRPG. The parent term, plain ol’ RPG, seems to be falling into disuse for computer/video games, in my non-scientific observations.

And if we were naming shoot-‘em-ups in the same fashion as RPGs, we’d call them SEUs.
We had SEUCK, but I guess the name didn’t really stick...

I think I'll have a go at Streets of Rage 4 again, a bmup that I like a lot.

Bmups? Please, no!
(Ok, maybe I am trying to police the language a little bit )

[Matt_H]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Well I thought that I setup my "bmup" joke quite well, but no take me seriously...

I appreciated your joke.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Well I thought that I setup my "bmup" joke quite well, but no take me seriously...

I feel we need to go further. All this 'mup' stuff just takes time to type. So, I suggest we call it s for shoot em ups and b for beat em ups. It just makes sense

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Well I thought that I setup my "bmup" joke quite well, but no take me seriously...

Sorry. The internet made me jaded, I guess

Originally Posted by Matt_H

It’s interesting that you mention RPGs, because something similar has happened there, too. The term RPG has been around forever, predating the widespread adoption of home computers, probably. And then there’s the subgenre JRPG, for games in the linear, story-driven, Japanese style. The JRPG term has been around since at least the mid 90s but the press still generally referred to them as plain RPGs. Now, everything seems to be specifically a JRPG or a CRPG. The parent term, plain ol’ RPG, seems to be falling into disuse for computer/video games, in my non-scientific observations.

I'm not sure about the press, at least pre-internet version (eg, Edge's FF7 review does not use "jRPG" but has plenty of "Japanese RPG-style" stuff) but in the forums world the JRPG/CRPG divide has been used since I can remember. The "real" ones are referred now as "tabletop" I think.



I think with terms which hail from pre-Facebook.Twitter/etc era the adoption was more due to gradual process than a singular event.