Why do we call big enemies at the end of level bosses? Who came

Jap organized crime hierarchy.
If it was codified by Americans, they'd probably be called capos or jefes.

>>4203071
you mean Dons.

Me and my brothers/sister called them "the last monster" when we were kids

>>4203076
Don's the end-game boss.

>>4203062
I always did it because I thought they were the ones leading the enemies, hence the term "Boss".

>>4203071

shouldn't they be called 親分 then?

>>4203085
Nah, they put it in English for the benefit of foreign markets, and also because Yakuza can't into gaijin, so the devs won't be killed for exposing the business.

My siblings and I always called every boss "Endgegner" (final enemy).

>>4203062
What was the first game to use the term boss?

>>4203091
You don't get killed, you become so overwhelmed with shame for talking trash about such a patriotic business group that you jump off a building or run into bullets.

>>4203169
Michael Jackson' Moonwalker

>>4203169
Always wondered this myself. I first saw the term as a kid in the NES TMNT instruction manual. Even then I was confused.

Watch Bruce Lee's movie "Game of Death". Then you'll understand.

>>4203120

I remember saying "big guy," way back.
As for boss, it should be that the boss is tougher and smarter than the minions. You fuck up the minions to get the movement and attacking skills to topple said baos.

A boss is the guy in charge, the person you work for. If you weren't a NEET you would know this and not need to ask stupid questions

>>4203641
>mini-boss
>not mid-boss

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Unsure when it became common for everyone else, but I started calling them bosses after I played River City Ransom.

Black Belt for the SMS had bosses and masters. Bosses appeared during a stage, while a Master was the final opponent in a stage.
Maybe because they were Martial Arts Masters or something.

Some kind of etymology research on commonly used video game terms would be pretty interesting. Like for example oldfags from the 80's who never really followed games past then NES era seem to near-universally use "board" instead of "level" or "stage." When did that change?

>>4204020
Scrollers. Remember that the scrolling effect in the NES was not something in the specification, it was a programming trick (that's why you can see the borders changing if you play on emulators). NES games were supposed to be like Donkey Kong and Popeye. Single screen games. Touch border, another screen.

My uncle called the stages "screens" or like you said, "boards".

>>4203767
Mid-boss makes sense in an arcade-style game where dude shows up halfway through the stage but not in an open-world exploration game like metroid. It's not in the middle of anything.

>>4204050
there's most of the games do scroll tho
are we talking from like 1982-1984 games?
when it was just the famicom and NES wasn't out yet

>>4204131
Yes, Famicom. My mistake.

>>4204050
>>4204134
hey that's how Link's awakening on gameboy does it tho
and Zelda 1 right?

>>4203641
>Through wich HE can attack

>>4204141
they're still trying to ruse you at that point. samus being a girl is supposed to be a big surprise

>>4203071
False. This had nothing to do with Japan, stop weebing the place up.

>>4203062
The first interactive game to feature a boss was dnd, a 1975 role-playing video game for the PLATO system.[4][5] One of the earliest dungeon crawls, dnd implemented many of the core concepts behind Dungeons & Dragons.[5] The objective of the game is to retrieve an "Orb" from the bottommost dungeon.[6] The orb is kept in a treasure room guarded by a high-level enemy named the Gold Dragon. Only by defeating the Dragon can the player claim the orb, complete the game, and be eligible to appear on the high score list.[4]

A 1980 example is the fixed shooter Phoenix, where the player ship must fight a giant mothership in the fifth and final level.[7]

>>4204020
The only person I ever hear call it a board is Mike and I still don't understand the term and why they would have ever chosen it.

Even as a kid who got a NES in '89 it was always level, stage, or world. I never started hearing board until a year or two ago.

>>4204289
On top-down games (Zelda, Bomberman), the map looks like a checkers board. Each screen is a "board".

>>4204240
Irrelevant if they didn't use the term "boss"

>>4204308
I kind of get that, less so for Zelda, but people apply it to Mario too which just seems bizarre.

>>4204308
Each screen is a 'screen' or 'play-field' though, and was referred to by that terminology since the Atari. Board seems like some weird fly-over regional thing

>>4204141
The entire manual refers to Samus using "he/him" because they wanted to keep the ending a surprise.

>>4203062

In my 3rd world country we used to refer to completing a video game as...."Game"

"Pfft, I've 'Gamed' this one"
"'Gamed' it a long time ago."

That's without the -ed suffix. Since English isn't our native language. Just 'Game'.
Added the -ed in context just to make proper.

>>4205414
In Brazil, we used "gameou" (gamed) as a verb to indicate a game over. Children didn't know what it meant, but it always meant the game was over. So it became a verb.

We used to say "zeroed", "saved", "turned" when we finished a game.

>>4205418
>we used "gameou" (gamed) as a verb to indicate a game over.
I'm BR and never ever heard such thing. The other terms were pretty common, though, and came from the old pinballs, from also came the term "fliperama" that I fucking hate.

>>4203062
I had a friend as a kid who called bosses "masters". Pissed me off!

>>4203696
Killing the boss would be extremely painful.

>>4205710
The stage bosses in Black Belt (for the SMS) are explicitly called Masters. Maybe he played that?

>>4205469
No Nordeste é comum.

>>4204240
>Gold Dragon
>mothership
reading comprehension, boss

>>4204289
>i dont know anyone who played pacman back in the day
The levels/mazes were actually called boards

>>4206189
No they were called maps. Map 1, map 2, etc.

>>4203081

My group called it "the end guy".

Sounds kinda ridiculous now, but then so does "boss".

>>4203703

In games, it's not the person in charge though, in general. Sometimes it's just an especially big and tough wild animal that happens to block your path and perceive you as prey, conveniently doing so at just the time when the game designer happens to want a big battle to occur. A boss enemy isn't a literal "boss" of anything in every case.

Any of these terms is gonna sound weird in some cases. Any silly term would do, really. It's like how genres got named--"RTS" could literally apply to absolutely any real-time game in which you make any choice whatsoever, but people arbitrarily decided to stick it to those Warcraft-type games, and now that's truly what it means.

The nicer thing would be if gamers wouldn't invent new terms to replace old words that already exist, like how "strafe" means "sidestep" in the gaming world, whereas in the world of people who read books sometimes it means something more like "fire a gun continuously at something off to one side while moving".

Things like "boss" are fair game though. There just wasn't any term for that concept beforehand.

>>4206207
They were called many things by many people. Doesn't change the fact they were originally called boards.

>>4206293
It's like how the FGC has to say whiff. Why can't they just say miss?

Must be special snowflake syndrome or something.

>>4206337
I've heard boxing and MMA fans use "whiff" too. I don't know who came up with it first though.

>>4206293
The genre name that pisses me off most is roguelike. It's so lazy, they couldn't have come up with anything better? It'd be like if we were still in 2017 calling them Doomclones instead of FPSes.

It's the strongest, most significant enemy in each level. It's pretty obvious why that makes it a 'boss'. The boss is the highest up of a set group, the one in charge.

>>4207893
They were called Roguelikes because it instantly describes EXACTLY what this very specific sub-genre is. Any other term, literally any other, wouldn't be as informative.

Doomclones became "FPS" because the genre evolved and expanded, so the term was no longer accurate.

I always hated the term "RPG." Unless it's a puzzle game or something really abstract, what game DOESN'T have you playing a role? Why is "Role Playing Game" reserved for the sort of games it's reserved for?

I also hate people who say RPG game.

>>4208115
Wouldn't "supervisor" or "executive" be the highest up?

>>4205392
Fly-over country here. The only people I've heard use board are from New Jersey, like Matei, and Danny & Brian from NSP/Grumps.

>>4207893
Original roguelikes were literally "rogue with some extra features"

>>4208116
I'd call them Deathcrawlers

Not really sure how much FPSes really evolved other than more fluid movement and up/down aiming. CoD is still just you shooting dudes in first person like Doom was.

>>4204237
>stop weebing the place up.
Not him, but where you do think you are?

>>4205418
>"turned"
Where I live we use almost exclusively a term that translates to either turning the game around or upside down, when beating a game.
Bosses are "the last guy" or more accurately "the last toon".

>>4205710
My little cousins call bosses Kings and it irks me, even if it's just as silly.
I really wanted to correct them, until I summoned the Slime King in Terraria by mistake and they sperged about how he's a real king and the other guys are fake kings.

>>4205414
You talking about Spanish?
Jugar translates better as played.

>>4203120
In Finnish we would call them "loppuvastus" (end/final opponent) or "loppupomo" (end/final boss). The end bosses of smaller sections of the game would be called "välipomo" (middle boss). I can't recall if this was from some magazine or just kids making up our own terms. I'd say these exact terms were quite commonplace all over though and not just a local occurrence.

>>4203062
Earliest games I remember using boss as a term were the arcade versions of Renegade and Quartet in 1986. I'm pretty sure they weren't the first though

>>4203062
Because in the instructions they were refered to as bosses. The creators called them that. As a game dev, what should they be called.

http://www.mariomayhem.com/downloads/mario_instruction_booklets/Super_Mario_Land_-_Manual_-_GB.pdf

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>>4211889
Quartet

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>>4211904
Renegade

>>4206337
I feel like whiff carries a stronger implication of "you fucked up" or "near-miss". Like you wouldn't say that they whiffed it if it missed by a large margin.

>>4207893
They're roguelikes because they're like Rogue. "doom clone" would probably still be relevant if the only first person shooters that came out for twenty years all played exactly like Doom. It happened to be a genre that very rigidly has the same mechanics and gameplay style, so anything that departs significantly stops being one.

"roguelite" is a good term that gets the point across without changing the meaning of the original word.

>>4208261
That video explains it nicely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx7BWayWu08

>>4205770
He's a big guy.

>>4205414
>>4205418
In Norway we used "rounded/lapped" for beating a game. Everyone said it, including game magazines, but I'm not sure exactly where it came from. My guess would be it originally meant "completing each of the different levels so that the game puts you back at the beginning and increases the difficulty", which could be considered completing one lap of the game. I dunno. It stuck around after this style of gameplay fell out of fashion.

Kids in the mid 2000s used the English word "game" as a verb for the act of playing video games, but I don't know if this term is still common. Always sounded cheesy to me.

>>4203169
metal gear. literally the boss is a big boss

>>4204020
Nothing pisses me off more than faggots who call lives "men"

"Oh he's on his third man"
Lives. When you get killed you fucking die. You have lives. Use the right word.

>>4206280
Our household term was "the guy at the end," which is even worse. This was only if the guy at the end wasn't always consistently the same guy, mind you. There was no point saying "the guy at the end" for a Sonic game, because that guy would obviously be Robotnik.

>>4206293
>It's like how genres got named--"RTS" could literally apply to absolutely any real-time game in which you make any choice whatsoever, but people arbitrarily decided to stick it to those Warcraft-type games, and now that's truly what it means.
RTS got named in comparison to traditional turn based strategy games, which looked similar to Warcraft (overhead or isometric perspective) but used a turn based system instead of the real time of Warcraft et al

>>4208231
Watch the King of Kong to see a bunch of people use words weird

Also that fucking disgusting faggot playing Marble Madness with his feet and dirty weightlifting glove, get your fucking gross dirty socks off that arcade cabinet you sperg

>>4215190
I don't know how that came about. I wouldn't really call them faggots though since as faggoty as it sounds now that may be just ancient terminology they have always used since arcade days.

>>4203169
xevious

>>4215190
So you're cool with instant reincarnation on the battlefield but not with having an army. Sounds like you're a fucking genius. lol

>>4203062
>Who came up with this terminology?

The first use of a company officially referring to an enemy as the 'boss' was Galaga.

>>4215586
Mario is one guy. There isn't an army of him.

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>>4203062
>Why do we call big enemies at the end of level bosses?
I come from a sick group of friends....Any game that has killable npc, we would call "customers". Some of the dialog while we were playing GTA.....Just laughing and cackling about killing customers. We didn't play to win, we played to see who could go the longest. In "Goldeneye 007" it was "Don't Kill the customers!". I still call NPCs customers. It came from a joke about a potential doom mod making fun of our retail employment days lol....

Some bosses are last guys, and some last guys are not bosses. Some bosses are not last guys at all.


I call the enemies at the end of some sort of linear platformer "last guy". Bowser is the "Last guy" in Super Mario on NES. He is also the boss of all the enemies? I guess most games have an emphasis on the final enemy also being an employer/supervisor of the piss-ants that you killed 9,001 of on the way in. Metal man was the "last guy". He was not really in charge of all the things that I killed to get to him.

>>4212071
>He's a big guy.
For you.

>>4215629
That's what They want you to think. And, although your LPs may not have learned you this, every game isn't Mario.

Luther destroys the Gond, bitches:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlImgP5FXjs

>>4215218
Referring to your lives as the name of the character you're playing as was very common in manuals. Mario manuals called lives "Marios", Mega Man manual called them "Mega Men", etc.

>>4203081
me too or just "the monster" and i know a lot of people doing the same

>>4203062
Played a lot of sonic 2 growing up and in the cartoon robotnik is clearly the boss of a couple robots -- that's the best I can do

>>4216165
Only in kiddified Nintendo manuals where you weren't allowed to say "kill" or "death."

>>4203071
The fuck American would ever call them capos? No one says that. and the fuck is a jefe?

>>4216630
It's a mafia joke you idiot. Somebody doesn't have connections.

>>4216620
I never understood the logic of this. Almost every kid had a goldfish or hamster that died. Kids see death all the time. You can't even ride down the road without seeing roadkill. To pretend it doesn't exist or they can't understand it is just stupid.

ENDGEGNER

My family called bosses the Main guy
Or maybe that was just 4 year old me, and my family humored me.

Extra lives were called free men too. They didn't have 1-up written on top of the mushroom back then

>>4203071
you mean "senator"

>>4204050
Wrong you fool. There is a hardware register specifically for scrolling. It's not a 'trick', it's specifically supported by the hardware.

>>4216620
The SMB1 manual says "kill" all the time, yet it still calls lives "Marios".

Every movie and every cartoon I can remember watching, they always called the bad guy leader "boss"

>>4208184
Executives and supervisors are still underlings.

>>4204020
We could also finally lay the "PSX or PSone" debate to rest.

>>4206280
can confirm that "end guy" was common terminology

but even back in the day, "boss" was the standard

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>>4203062
The term evolved from Space Invaders Mothership. It's one of the earliest special 'leader' type enemies in games.
When others followed, the term 'mothership' did not apply readily to them as it had for those in space shooters so the term 'boss' came into use. Then 'end of level boss' as the tradition of them marking the end of a stage became codified.

Then game 'mid-boss' or 'miniboss' for significant foes that did not end stages. Then, later, the 'boss rush' for stages that did not feature foes weaker than the player.

Also of note, the term 'boss' was in use during the high era as a general term of endearment. 'Boss van, dude!'
Some theorise this might also have contributed. 'look at that boss enemy!'
I think the former theory is most likely,

>>4206337
people use "whiff" in sports all the time

>>4208116
"Doomclones" became "FPS" when Quake came out, because that was the game that codified the formula as something that could be copy/pasted forever without having to be associated with ONE game.

>>4215881
what in the fuck

>>4216620
not true

see: >>4218725

>>4208120
RPG has a pretty clear definition. You don't play a role in almost all videogames (including the ones we call RPGs).

>>4223328
The video game "boss" term originates from Japan, so it has nothing to do with burger slang.

>>4206293
>It's like how genres got named--"RTS" could literally apply to absolutely any real-time game in which you make any choice whatsoever, but people arbitrarily decided to stick it to those Warcraft-type games, and now that's truly what it means.
Anon, you sound really really silly now.
Its like you forgot that WARGAMES predate modern times, and you even got classic examples such as troop movement on maps(real wars) and chess.
Now, the genre could be named RTW Real Time Wargames, but Strategy sounds nicer, when Chess is called a Strategy game(not wargame).

>>4213398
Bitch plz, it you where to write it, it would be game-e, which isn't "to game"(å spille), but "to do game"(å spillet et spill) in terms of Norwegian.
Pronoucing stuff with a extra/long e is a hell of a grammar drug.

>>4223343
Which sports? Which came first, the use of it in the FGC or real sports?