an exploration of the term "bullet heaven"
editor's note (also the author but yknow what i mean): this one was a series of impromptu posts so the format might be weird here on the website. idc.
original post
how is there nothing online about the origin of the term 'bullet heaven' to describe survivor clones. do i have to spend an afternoon binary searching this while fighting the homonymous game
reblog #1
anathema maybe but i'm starting my search on twitter bc it's surprisingly the easiest place to find regular people using words and search that by time. making a sloppy / preliminary timeline:
- 31 march 2021. vampire survivors released on itch
- 17 december 2021. released on steam in early access
- by this point, "bullet heaven" seems exclusively used to refer to the game of the same name, or "bullet hell implies bullet heaven", or the feeling of being amidst heavy danmaku
- earliest use of the term that might or might not refer to a survivor-like is 14 feb, but the tweet it's replying to has been deleted and ofc there's no more archiving tweets. confirmed earliest could likely be 24 feb
- 26 july 2022. the hard times (minus world division) posts we need a name for whatever genre vampire survivors is
- comments on that tweet offer bullet heaven, specifically like "people are calling it X". one of them mentions a podcast
- apparently the game was mentioned in two episodes. i found clips from 29 april and 9 june, but not sure the episodes they're part of. searching the podcast website doesn't wield any results pre 2023. regardless i ain't listening to the whole thing. the transcripts of neither clip contain the phrase "bullet heaven".
- 20 october 2022. full release
- 20 december 2022. resetera thread called so, how do we call vampire survivors' genre?. apparently bullet heaven has already been established, or at least some people feel like it has, which is effectively the same thing
i gotta go to the dentist so i gotta leave the search for now. how i interpret this so far: - the name is not as well established as i think it is - reverse (or inverse) bullet hell is also a possible keyword to look up if i keep chasing this - idk how to use google trends - it's time to move from twitter to google now i have a better starting date (look for things earlier than february 2022) EDIT: they weren't lying google is unusable - i've a feeling i could just join the discord and do a search over there for immediate results -_-
reblog #2
i can't believe i joined a discord server for this
also the expression 'become the bullet hell' in conjunction with vampire survivors seems to be from this ars technica thread, 19 january 2022.
that's it i think i'm done with my search. poking at 'reverse bullet hell' could wield different fruit but i don't care that much π
(i saw a reddit comment claiming "The term Bullet Heaven is misused to reference "reverse bullet hell" ιεΌΎεΉ games" but i dunno if that holds water? the expression doesn't have much use before vampire survivors' release. that expression (google translated to "gyaku danmaku") in quotes only brings up one article, referring to vs itself. it is dated 23 january 2022, but i don't think the average anglophone vampire survivors player is getting their vs info from a japanese website. much to think about if you are so inclined)
(also i did find a legit 'reverse bullet hell' β as in, you play as the boss β called boss rush though. as a fun fact)