In video games, where did the term "Boss" come from?

October 7, 2010 5:58 PM

In video games, where did the term "Boss" come from? It seems as though the term has been around forever, but where did it originate?
posted by Philipschall to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

Boss
posted by schyler523 at 6:01 PM on October 7, 2010

I think the OP is asking why final challenges in video games are described as "bosses", rather than what one is. The wikipedia article does not address etymology.
posted by zamboni at 6:06 PM on October 7, 2010

The Big Boss.

Though I have no actual cite, it's the first time I recall ever seeing "Boss" used in relation to fighting your way through soldiers to get to the ultimate bad guy.
posted by madajb at 6:28 PM on October 7, 2010

I thought it would be no problem to find a mid-eighties citation for a videogame usage of "boss" but, in fact, I found some (for lack of a better term) counter-citations.

This site contains a bunch of British videogame magazine scans from 1981 - 1995. I couldn't find a single use of the word "boss" in the handful of pages I sampled. But, more tellingly, several of the reviews are notable for the lack of the use of the word boss. Consider this 1987 review of Double Dragon ("You'll come across some super baddies who make a theatrical entrance...") or this 1991 review of Outzone ("... a big guardian is found at the end of each level"). From this limited sample, it would appear to me that the term "boss" hadn't yet penetrated British videogame journalism in 1991.
posted by mhum at 6:53 PM on October 7, 2010

On the other hand, this site contains links to scans from a wider variety magazines, including American ones. In the Number 1 issue of Nintendo Power from 1988, we find several citations for "boss" (e.g.: on page 55 a question about Castlevania: "No matter how many times I try, I can't seem to beat the five boss characters. Can you give me some pointers?")

The quest for antedating continues.
posted by mhum at 7:06 PM on October 7, 2010

It seems to me that I referred to Bowser in Super Mario Bros on my old 8-bit Nintendo as the "boss". It was the first video game I ever played and I don't think I heard the term anywhere else first. It seems like the natural term. All of the normal bad guys attack you at the behest of the super powered bad guy at the end. He is the guy in charge, the normal bad guys work for him. He is the boss.

I don't know that there is necessarily a cite-able source for it. It might be that it was the obvious term and we all just made an unspoken agreement to call the guy at the end "the boss".
posted by VTX at 7:10 PM on October 7, 2010

The Wikipedia article is short on etymology, but there's plenty of speculation in the talk page:

Joystik Magazine, December 1983 p. 6 [2] . Quote: "Take a wild shot in Galaga-- you might fire (at) the Boss", "GET BACK AT THE BOSS", "the Boss Galaga (the one you have to shoot twice)". This predates the previous "earliest known usage" we had by three years. --Alecmconroy (talk) 18:45, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

There was a .pdf link backing up these quotes, but it's dead now -- Google cache and Archive.org come up empty, and I can't find any other copies.

As for the concept of a boss, that apparently goes back a little further. From an anonymous poster (scroll to the last entry in this conversation):

If anyone is interested, here is how the Boss was created.

There were other Dungeons and Dragons type games on Plato. A player started on the outside of the dungeon and went in was attacked by monsters. If you got out of the dungeon, you kept the gold you had accumulated. Your player was saved from one day to the next, from one week to the next. If you died, then you lost everything. The dungeons had a finite size, and people would play the game for hours (which suprised us) and sooner or later would go into every corner of the dungeon. The character got stronger by gathering magic swords, etc. At some point, the character would be so strong that he could kill everything, at which point the player would lose interest in the game and quit.

We noticed that people created characters and spent time naming them and getting "attached" to them, and kind of treated them like a person. So, we asked something like, "Suppose that the character is real. Why would a real person keep going into the same dungeon over and over again?" And, then the answer was simple: To bring out something really spectacular.

So, then we said, "Hey, what if the player had to 'bring out an orb'?" And then we said, "Yeah, but if the orb is worth anything, then something really neat has to defend it." So, we put the orb into a "treasure room" and decided to stack a bunch of smaller monsters on top of a really big monster in the treasure room directly in front of "the orb". The character had to defeat 30 smaller monsters before confronting the "Golden Dragon"--a monster with probably 1,000,000 hit points. If he defeated the Golden Dragon, then he got the orb. He would then have to fight his way out of the dungeon.

In retrospect, what we did was create a video game that was a story. It had a beginning (the character initially enters the dungeon and builds up strenght), a middle (the character explores the dungeon), a climax (he finds the orb and battles the monsters, before confronting the Golden Dragon), a denoument (the character, weakened by the battle, staggers back through the dungeon, avoiding monsters and finally to safety), and an end (the charcter after leaving the dungeon with the orb is enshrined in a hall of fame). We did this in 1974-1975.

Plato -- or "Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations" -- was a mainframe computing environment whose users often exchanged games illicitly to run on the side. Being from the 70s, this would predate all but the earliest video games -- and really, the Pong/Pacman/Asteroids generation was barely sophisticated enough to support stories, let alone something as complex as a final boss. Considering the unofficial/underground nature of the "video game industry" of the time, this is probably the best origin story you'll get.

Of course, the idea of a hero confronting progressively stronger foes until a climactic battle with the primary villain is about as old as fiction itself. Maybe Gilgamesh... though I'm sure there were plenty of long-forgotten "hero's journey" epics that were traded back and forth long before that. ;)
posted by Rhaomi at 7:21 PM on October 7, 2010

Beat-em-ups in the vein of Double Dragon, in which the bosses tend to be the literal bosses of the enemy minions/organization certainly helped popularise the term.
posted by seikleja at 7:38 PM on October 7, 2010

I was calling end-of-level stuff "the Boss" when I was 11 and it was just a big spaceship. Gosh I loved playing Raptor.

I think the idea was "have there be a scary impossible thing at the end" -> "why is he scary and at the end, if he could win he should come right out and smash us" -> "he's the boss, he only comes out when his underlings fail, like the Emperor in Empire Strikes Back" -> "dude, we're geniuses."
posted by SMPA at 7:58 PM on October 7, 2010

I linked to the boss wikipedia page because of the history section that mentions DnD, something that Rhaomi's post also references.
posted by schyler523 at 8:01 PM on October 7, 2010

In 1974 funky Billy Chin and little Sammy Chung said," here comes the big boss, lets get it on." So the idea and phrase were out there pretty early.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 8:14 PM on October 7, 2010

I don't know and I've been playing video games for ages. The first game I recall the word actually appearing in is City of Heroes. Obviously I've used it before that but never in-game. I know that's crazy late though.
posted by chairface at 10:15 PM on October 7, 2010

Go watch bruce lee in Game of Death. Has to work his way through increasingly difficult opponents until he reaches "the boss" I think that's around 74/75
posted by filmgeek at 1:20 AM on October 8, 2010

Seconding seikleja. I don't recall it in reference to video games before the late 80s, and I would venture that the term was popularized, if not invented/memed, by Nintendo console players.
posted by rhizome at 2:48 AM on October 8, 2010

Following on Rhaomi's find in the Wikipedia talk page, I looked up Galaga in the British videogame magazine scan site and found this from a 1985 issue of Computer+Video Games: "There are three types of aliens in Galaga: blue, red, and Boss Galagas." and "If you hit the Boss who captured your fighter...". Note the capitalization of "Boss", similar to the defunct 1983 citation from the Wikipedia. It seems to me that in the specific case of Galaga, the name of "Boss" was the official name of the character. Not sure exactly what this implies.
posted by mhum at 2:21 PM on October 8, 2010

There was a .pdf link backing up these quotes, but it's dead now -- Google cache and Archive.org come up empty, and I can't find any other copies.

Here you go: http://www.digitpress.com/library/magazines/joystik/joystik.htm, this is the Dec 83 issue, note that page 6 is actually the eighth page of the PDF.
posted by robertc at 3:05 PM on October 8, 2010