Luke Plunkett nails my mixed feelings about Mixtape: https://aftermath.site/mixtape-review-game-90s/.
So first of all, a ton of people love Mixtape, and God bless them and the game makers. It's hard to make any game, and Mixtape has lovely moments.
But I feel it could have been stronger and truer. And I think it's worth looking at how. There's no point in dragging a trash fire. But when something gets so many things right, it's worth looking at what it doesn't get right, and learning from that.
Mixtape feels a bit... vague to me? And a bit ... off?
The characters are lovingly drawn, and the story feels like it's coming out of someone's personal experience. So that's great. There's a lot of lovely bespoke gameplay -- the skateboarding, Kaiju mode, running and flying...
But... where are we?
American Graffiti felt real and strange and true and iconic because it was a keenly observed love letter to George Lucas's senior year in 1962 Modesto. Dazed & Confused, same, but Richard Linklater's love-and-hate letter to 1976 in East Texas.
You can tell Dazed and Confused is true because of the subplot of the seniors attacking the freshmen with wooden paddles, violent, unjust assaults that are somehow approved by the whole town. No writer would make that up -- it's too incredible not to be true.
(Oh, and Metropolitan, but about rich WASPy prep school kids in Manhattan in the 1980s. I went to Dalton, which was Jewish, not WASPy, but I was in plays with those kids, and went to college with them, and can confirm the accuracy of the portrait.)
Fiction, if you're not careful, can be too symmetrical. Too smooth. Everything all ties together, with no loose ends. Everything adds up to something.
Reality has an awkward shape. Reality is assymmetrical. Reality has rough edges. Lots of things happen in reality that make no apparent sense and add up to nothing. It's only in memory, and fiction, that things add up.
("A portrait," said John Singer Sargent, "is a picture where something is wrong with the mouth.")
In a fairy story, or a puzzle game, we're not looking for reality. We want symmetry and sense. But in a naturalistic story, the creator has to walk a fine line between nothing adding up (and then it's not a story) and things adding up too much.
It sounds like a paradox, but specificity is what makes a work of fiction feel universal. A keenly observed, specific portrait feels more human and true than an average.
By "true" and "specific" I don't mean "literally true." Lord of the Rings is specific, and so feels universal, but not because elves and orcs really exist. It has a carefully curated assymmetry. There is evil in the world, but the evil isn't a single entity. There's Sauron and then there's Saruman, who wants to be Sauron. And then there's Smaug, who is just hungry for gold. And then there's Shelob, who is just hungry.
So, Mixtape. I didn't grow up in the '90s, so I'll take Luke's word for it. But I feel like there is an odd blurriness to Mixtape. I don't know where I am. I don't know what year it is in the 1990s. I don't know where in NoCal I am. Cassandra is going off to an unnamed college that looks a bit like ... UCLA, maybe? And I don't hear California cadences in the dialogue.
(I spent tenth grade in Palo Alto, California, and I've got a brother who lives up in the dry hills East of Sacramento. I lived in LA for fifteen years, in the shadow of the 10/405 interchange, and my first wife grew up at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley, near Red Bluff. I've heard a lot of Californian.)
Mixtape was made by Australians. Luke Plunkett thinks it shows, and I feel the same. Is this California from personal observation? Or from Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Or is it really Australia, but through a California photo filter? This is maybe just my imagination, but if I try to hear what the characters are saying with an Australian accent, the dialogue starts to ring truer. Underneath the sk8ter grunge, it's got that wry, deprecatory, articulate looseness that is so Ozzie, and so not the California I know.
Why would a team of Australians make a game about California? Did someone tell them that no one would want to play a game about Australians growing up in the 1990s?
"Okay," you say, "But you, Alex, wrote a game set in Britain, where you never lived, and another one set in an unnamed state in the Deep South that somehow has bayous AND mountains AND caverns."
Yep. We made We Happy Few not out of any direct, personal observation of Britain in the 1960s, but out of all the British media we scarfed up over the years: Monty Python, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Brave New World, The Beatles, Gilbert & Sullivan, Blow Up, Austin Powers etc. etc. It was always intended to be a fairy tale. By some miracle, British folk felt we got something right.
Sometimes a foreigner sees something clearly that a local doesn't notice. Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas finds some of the oddness in Texas that only a German might call out. Blow Up is a snapshot of Swinging London by an Italian, and Austin Powers is a pastiche of Bond movies (and Blow Up!) written by and starring a Canadian.
When we turned to make South of Midnight, there was a real concern that we were a largely French Canadian team making a game set in the Deep South. But the creative director, David Sears, grew up in the Deep South, and the game was his vision and his memories. And Lisa grew up in Texas and Louisiana. Bunny Flood is a lot of the moms of the girls Lisa went to school with. We went on multiple research trips down there to get the feel of the land. And we hired writers and consultants to give us some insights -- some specificityand asymmetry. We worked with Jeremy Love (Bayou) on the monsters. We had a folklorist come and tell the team folktales. We read a lot of Southern Gothic literature. But there, too, we weren't trying to make an accurate slice-of-life about growing up in the Deep South. We were telling a fairy story.
I'm glad Mixtape is having its moment. It gets so many things right.
But ... what if they'd set it in Oz! Couldn't it have been so much more specific? Sharp, painful, true and hilarious?
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