The dialogue around the indie hit Mixtape has been exhausting. A stylish coming-of-age story told across various playable vignettes, it seemed like a game destined to be a simple hit for developer Beethoven & Dinosaur and publisher Annapurna Interactive. But it has instead become a lightning rod that has set social media aflame for a solid week since its May 7th release.
The discourse has come from several angles. The most common complaint is perhaps the era accuracy of the characters’ clothing, music taste, and slang (the game is not intended to be accurate to any specific decade) or its supposed wokeness (nobody in the game talks about social justice, other than the injustice of not being able to buy booze). On Twitter, blue ticks had a field day, attributing Mixtape’s critical success to Annapurna Interactive bribing journalists (it doesn’t), claiming the game was made by a cabal of Hollywood nepo-babies (it wasn’t), or even suggesting — for reasons not worth parsing here — that it isn’t a video game at all (it is).
But the game has flummoxed the internet’s video game critics, too. No Escape’s widely shared review gives a detailed breakdown of why the game is historically inaccurate to the year 1999 (it isn’t set in 1999); Polygon’s essay “What year is Mixtape even supposed to take place in anyway?” wondered how these characters know the contemporary quip “cinema!” if it’s set in 1995 (it isn’t).
This, at least, is easily cleared up. The game is intentionally timeless, as confirmed by its director, former rock musician Johnny Galvatron. Its core mood board sensibility goes beyond the soundtrack, into a wider collage of vibes, trends, and ephemera from generations of teen culture and media. Iconic references span at least four decades, from the protagonist sprinting through neighbours’ gardens (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986), moshing in a car (Wayne’s World, 1992), toilet papering a teacher’s house (South Park, 2003), and exploring a troubled friend’s room while they sit cross-legged on a sun-dappled bed (Life Is Strange, 2015).
Then there’s the eponymous mixtape itself, which features songs made between the 1960s and the 2010s, played from both cassette tapes and CDs (whether the characters’ boomboxes and Discmans are contemporary, retro, or analogue revival is in the eye of the beholder). Their clothing — trucker caps, button badges, ripped jeans, and sneakers — could be from the ’70s or the ‘00s; from yesterday, or tomorrow. Teen fashion is, after all, a fast-moving ouroboros of hippie, punk, new wave, grunge, skate, Y2K, and normcore that never stops whirling.
Mixtape’s centrifugal effect on all this stuff mashes it into a soft paste of non-specific nostalgia that’s delicious to some and distasteful to others. Some players have found the lack of specificity jarring because it doesn’t map to their experience, like a plug that won’t fit any socket. For others, that vagueness becomes a skeleton key into the core memories of multiple generations. Because even if the songs in Mixtape aren’t universal, the subject matter is: from awkward first kisses to chafing against authority figures to the bittersweet permanence of leaving childhood behind. The slang and the haircuts might change from generation to generation, but the feelings stay the same.
No memory can be truly universal, of course, but even so, the cultural language of teendom is ubiquitous. Mixtape’s cherry-picked nostalgia shows that even if we haven’t personally been chased down an alleyway by a local cop, accidentally trashed a Blockbuster whilst wasted, or lain on a car bonnet smoking a joint under the stars, we’ve seen these moments play out countless times and internalised this vocabulary. In that sense, Mixtape shows how teen media depictions have become the connective tissue between the nostalgia of the generations – perhaps even more so than the experiences themselves.
Now the game will join the canon it drew from — the newest touchstone to enshrine teenage life, and the decades of media it has spawned. Whether it will stand the test of time remains to be seen; fresh generations will get to decide. But as Johnny Galvatron said recently in an AIAS interview, ‘When we’re teenagers, we’re all very similar. We’re all confused, no matter what the era. It’s the things you become attached to that will make you who you are. So pick nice art.”
