It could be argued that the term ‘Shoot-em-up’ is highly representative of the ‘Country and Western’ mentality of Western gamers. Contrarily, in Japan the genre is still known as shooters it would seem peculiar that a Western magazine specializing in computer games would ultimately dub a Japanese-created arcade game genre. Within Western culture, there came a need to classify all of these sub-genres and to this day, Shmups has been the term of choice.
Despite ZZap!64 claiming credit for the invention of the term, it is believed contractions of ‘shoot-em-up’ first appeared in Western arcades around 1978, the same time that Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) was dominating the arcade market.īy 1985 the Shoot-em-up family tree had spawned many new branches and there was much variation within the genre. The term Shmup was also used in the review of Drop Zone (UK Gold/Arena Graphics, 1985) written by Julian Rignall in the same issue of ZZap!64. Any game involving stacks of blasting and zapping. (p.5)Īs promised, the back of the issue contained a definition of “Shmup”Ī Zzap-coined term to replace the long-winded 'shoot-em-up'.
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You'll find a full explanation for all these on the last page of the mag, so don't panic. Some things which you may think are slurred comments, but are in fact quite deliberate are a few strange new words scattered round the mag, like 'Shmup', 'aardvark' and 'wimp out'. The word was initially mentioned in the editorial section written by Chris Anderson (1985) While contentious, it is widely believed that the first published instance of the word ‘Shmup’ was in Commodore 64 magazine, Zzap!64 Issue 3, July 1985. I will present the chapter in it's entirity, as it was publsihed and then provide some quick reflection on the process at the end. I thought it would be fitting to publish this work as a blog post now that it is a decade old and use this to reflect on the research and how it was conducted.
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