"Boomers vs Zoomers" is one of the most appealing ideas for big team exhibitions in fighting games and for good reason. The new blood as a collective wants to make it clear that we are in a new era, that the additional resources and QoL the community as a whole recieved collectively serve as the great equalizer that can overcome any amount of experience or background from before picking up the game. The old guard as a collective wants to remind us that reports of their demise have been greatly exaggerated and defeat the allegations that they were "playing against plumbers and firemen". It also, despite more likely than not drawing from the available player pool that is the host region, does not divide us by those regional boundaries.
While the appeal is everlasting, practically executing it is a bit harder to come by by virtue of trying to agree on the dividing line between boomer and zoomer given the whole of the scene. The very first scene I saw this team exhibition be floated for was UNI circa 2018 when UNIST's rise in popularity started in earnest.[1] The dividing line at this time had some qualifiers attached to it: to qualify as "boomer", you had to have earned your stripes netplaying UNIEL during tha Arcsys Cycle-enforced wait for the home release of UNIST. This cutoff was cited until UNICLR got the chance to mature and those who started with that version got the chance to go out and make names for themselves. I'd put the dividing line from the perspective of that moment in time as UNIST's addition to the main Evo lineup, which sent UNI into the stratosphere.
One of the biggest pushes towards having Boomers vs Zoomers being ran in the near future is in MBAACC. Those championing this push highlight classic Melty's vast history; saying they are zoomers no matter how you cut it, as there are some people who have been playing longer than they've been alive. The large injection of new blood filling the spaces occupied by those who moved on from the game and more is part of why MBAACC's new halcyon days are right here, right now, so I wouldn't put the cutoff much further back than the creation of Climax of Night.
All of this got me thinking, with the current makeup of the FGC as a whole, was there some sort of sea change with knock-on effects that resulted in there being a clear dividing line between boomer and zoomer for each of the games with histories long enough that there's a distinction in the first place? The answer was right in front of me:
The Pandemic as a "Canon Event"
The fact that the suspension of offline fighting game events as a result of the onset of COVID-19 resulted in a major sea change for every fighting game one way or another is accepted by many. Having a network of constantly firing netplay tournaments targeted at multiple skill levels became a must for games and their playerbases to grow; whether the games already had rollback at the onset of the pandemic, escaped delay hell as a result of community efforts that arose during this period, or were still waiting for their ticket out as offline events resumed. The advent of these structural changes, combined with a growing number of players aging out of the hobby that I think should be acknowledged by more people, have made me confident enough in making my personal cutoffs for who counts as boomers and who counts as zoomers (as of the time of this writing) based on happenings that occurred in the absence of offline fighting game events rolling into their return.
+R and CF having their rollback mods become official patches for those games are the cleanest demarcation lines of being in a new era for them. It's not just that they were smash hits in attracting newcomers, its what those newcomers did. The onset of rollback for these games catalyzed some of the best "grind eras" I've seen in any fighting game, with real stakes being applied to netplay tournaments for the first time in even genre history. The amount of diversity and parity in offline semifinals and finals cuts was night and day from the status of these games pre-rollback, and the level of play at them continues to grow to this day.
With that in mind, what about the rest of the games I enjoy?
From my vantage point, the proper lauanch of Fightcade 2/Final Burn Neo was a big benefit for the games on it. New additions to the UX included a matchmaking system that allows you to fire off as many ranked and unranked challenge at once along with each game's lobby having a pinned message board for resources and events. VSav, my favorite amongst the games I regularly boot up, is a big winner in this regard.[2] Vampire Arcadia expanded into netplay tournaments with this advent, which in turn inspired others to fill out the rest of the calendar and then parlay those TOing skills they gained online offline.
Today's MBAACC shill army cut its teeth through the routine beginner/intermediate and open netplay brackets that popped up during this time period being supplemented with the first pushes to have globally coordinated series of netplay events such as Elegant Summer Concerto and Melty IndeX. The biggest sign that the best for MBAACC was yet to come appeared in 2022 in the form of a split screen between it and TL at Climax of Night 5. Wheras Lumina failed to defeat the Vlov allegations, Current Code had a best in show top 8 where the highest tier character played was C-Aoko.
The pandemic put a kibosh on a grand major debut for UNICLR, yet players that remained remained motivated to grind the game regardless. Any predictions that the level of talent in the scene hemorrhaged were proven wrong immediately with Climax of Night 4 putting on a heater and the game's momentum being sustained into 2022-23.
The Once and Future Games
The ability to hold a "Boomers vs Zoomers" exhbition for a game in the first place is a testament to their longevity. A lot of ink has been spilled over how older games are more likely to be "forever games"[3] than their modern esports-centric counterparts, which feel like they are set up for planned obsolescence with an expiration date of their newer, even more esports-centric successor. This results in shelf lifes just long enough that they will always be the "zoomer" game. "Do I see myself playing this in five years" is a question I and others ask when looking for new games to pick up; it often becomes the biggest determining factor.
Now another question is raised: what does the future hold? As time continues to march on, and the 2020-21 timeskip slides further into rear view, more shifts in the community makeup will inevitably occur. For the Arcsys back catalog (Rev2 and Persona along with the aforementioned +R and CF), I don't see the dividing line moving further into the future than their respective escapes from delay hell. The entire Climax of Night era is already starting to be looked upon fondly as the halcyon days for French Bread games, and other grassroots initiative "eras" dedicated to respective games (like Vampire Arcadia or Jazzy Circuit) might follow suit.
If there's one takeaway from all of this, it's that if a game is built to last, its community will too. There will always be players.