Former Marathon director hates calling them 'extraction shooters,' but Bungie's forging on with the "dumb" term

Words have meanings. That's a mantra that I repeat on an almost daily basis. Simplistic does not mean simple. Obtuse is only for people, for anything else you should say abstruse. Look the word pedant up in the dictionary and you'll see a picture of me. That sort of thing. I know this makes me sound very boring (spoiler: I am quite boring), but it's my job as a writer and editor to know these things. Marathon's former director of product management, Chris Sides, agrees with me, and he's taken aim at the 'extraction shooter' label, appearing on a podcast to say it's "dumb" and "bad" because it's named after a mechanic.

Some of the best FPS games to ever release have been extraction shooters. Think Tarkov, Hunt Showdown (which I maintain has some of the best sound design of any game I've played), and the latest flavor of the month, Arc Raiders. While Marathon dreams of being included in a list as prestigious as this, it's having a torrid time amid disappointing alpha tests and multiple delays.

But Sides has more bones to pick with the genre name - something that he tried to change while he was at Bungie - than anything else. "The genre name is so bad," he told the Shooter Monthly podcast. "I hate the genre name of extraction shooter. When I was working on Marathon, I was working with marketing, dying to be like, 'Can we please create a different genre name,' because extraction shooter is so dumb. It's the only genre where its name is a mechanic."

He suggests comparing Helldivers 2 to Escape from Tarkov. They're clearly very different games, but fall into the same 'extraction shooter' category.

"It's just… it's a problem," Sides tells the podcast. "I cannot stand the name of it. So I think that when you say the extraction genre, it should hit your spot. I think it's really the fact that the genre doesn't even know what it is. You, as a player, how do you know what you're going to get? And I think that's one of the real issues with the genre itself."

Do you have trouble working out how different extraction shooters will play? Or is finding out when you jump into your first match all a part of the fun? Sides' position is understandable, as the genre encompasses a wide range of games. But when Soulslikes cover everything from Star Wars Jedi to Hollow Knight, it feels like broad strokes are commonplace in most genres.

So, if you like Arc Raiders and want to take a chance on Bungie's revival, they could be similar enough to check out. There's just one problem. We don't know the Marathon release date yet. Let's hope Bungie does.