Bungie’s former director of product management for Marathon, Chris Sides, recently took to a podcast to complain about the game’s genre name, calling the title ‘extraction shooter’ “so bad,” and saying that he was “dying to create a new genre name” while working at the company.
Speaking on the Shooter Monthly Podcast (thanks, The Game Post), Sides calls the title extraction shooter “the only genre name based on a mechanic.” The mechanic he’s referring to is the extraction from the arenas at the end of a game or match, but you could equally say that you drive in driving games, fight in fighting games, and platform in platforming games, so this comment might not have been fully thought through.
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This is definitely not the first time that people have complained or questioned the use of genre titles to describe games. There’s the ever present question of whether genres should be named after existing games like roguelikes, metroidvanias, and most recently soulslikes. Even with these tight references, there are plenty of people arguing about whether Silksong is a soulslike or a metroidvania.
On the other hand we have what Sides is describing, where a game is broken down into just one of its many features, making the genre name unhelpful. Both Grand Theft Auto and Pokemon Legends: Z-A are open-world games, but they don’t share the same fan base. This dilemma is how we end up with new names like calling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a J’RPG, or how we land on games with word salad descriptors such as Skull and Bones calling itself a naval online action RPG. Unfortunately, it’s an issue we’ll likely never find a solution to.
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