(3 stars)
If you’ve ever wanted an interactive John Hughes movie, “Mixtape” arrived this week as the perfect answer.
Developed by the small Melbourne-based team Beethoven & Dinosaur, “Mixtape” is a $20, three-hour interactive experience that repackages classic Hughes coming-of-age beats into short bursts of minigames and visual storytelling. Released on PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, it leans hard into late-’80s and ’90s nostalgia, following 17-year-old Stacey Rockford on her last day in 1999 before leaving for a New York university. She’s obsessed with music, a walking encyclopedia of trivia spanning post-punk to Roxy Music. We all know someone like that. I used to be someone like that.
That’s roughly where my connection to this era ends, which is strange considering I graduated the same year as Stacey. But I grew up in Guam, in a majority Brown community, and the John Hughes universe was alien to me. Nobody I knew lived in those houses, so those house parties didn’t exist. Underage drinking enforcement was lax, and I became a barfly by 15. When Stacey and her friends Cassandra and Slater set out to score alcohol for the big beach party, the game gilds the whiskey bottles in gold, as if they’d unearthed the Grail. Almost everyone in this game is White. We didn’t listen to Portishead, we listened to Bob Marley and 2Pac. We did a lot of drugs, more than just grass.
That isn’t to say “Mixtape” doesn’t land. It’s a meditation on the transience of life, on cherishing every moment and every connection. The writing explicitly asks us to leave nothing unsaid — a simple reminder, but a vital one. When the game offered me that, I thought of a high school friend, a boy I grew up with and loved dearly. We drifted apart in our early 20s, and he died before I ever told him how much he meant to me. “Mixtape” views all this through a very specific, White suburban lens, but it deals in enough generalities to summon your own reflection back at you.
This video game is at its best as a video game. Though I never related to the Hughes films, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is an epochal classic for many reasons, including its grand, action-packed finale. That movie always moved like a video game, and “Mixtape” seizes that interpretation to brilliant effect. Of course sprinting across strangers’ backyards feels like a Mario level.
Hughes films were rarely this surreal or cerebral. When Stacey is furious with her friend, the force of her middle finger is enough to detonate oncoming traffic — and as the player, you’re the one blowing up the cars. It’s all scored to a track from the “heavy” side of “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1995 double-album epic (I told you I’m like Stacey in that way). There’s a minigame where you control the wriggling tongues of Stacey and her first kiss by wiggling the joysticks. It felt so viscerally gross I wanted to chuck my controller out the window — which means the game had effectively placed me in Stacey’s shoes. These interactions are minimal, but like a grunge power chord, they’re tuned for maximum emotional impact.
I admired Stacey, and I admired the game’s commitment to its soundtrack. Stacey’s dream is to become a music supervisor, a job that is, at its core, about building a soundtrack. “Mixtape” feels as much like her résumé as it does a raw expression of her passion.
The story closes on a bittersweet note, and it all unfolds predictably if you know these kinds of stories. I felt satisfied. I also felt hemmed in, fenced inside a nostalgia I never had.
Even the word itself — mixtape — means different things to different people. What would a game like this look and sound like for a kid in Brooklyn? I understand a game about Guamanian youth is also too foreign for most, but I’d love to see the teenage lives of my fellow colonized siblings from Puerto Rico. We just had an entire Super Bowl celebrating that culture. Why are video games still filtering youth through old Hollywood? Despite hip-hop’s dominance today, the culture remains woefully underrepresented in games. Why are we still thinking about the Jesus and Mary Chain?
For now, I can only daydream about alternate versions of “Mixtape.” It’s a game I’d recommend to almost anyone, especially those who want to soak in the nostalgia it offers. But it’s also a reminder that the video game medium, for all its economic dominance, will never become a true global phenomenon until it learns to look through other eyes. I hope future projects take the lesson this game itself preaches: Let go of the same old past.
The post It’s like living a John Hughes movie — and shows the limits of nostalgia appeared first on Washington Post.
