There are some things in this world you can’t argue with, and at the top of that list is Devo. They’re basically the coolest band ever, not just because their music sounds good (an important dimension to music, true), but because over 50 years ago they saw with stunning clarity and prescience which direction the world was heading in: straight down and always backwards. Devo could tell as far back as the ‘60s, when co-founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis met at Kent State’s art school, that humanity was circling the drain—that ignorance, fear, hatred, selfishness, and commercialism had coalesced to consign our species to a terminal spiral of de-evolution. And that was before the National Guard killed four of their fellow students while firing on a protest in 1970, a galvanizing tragedy that shocked America and inspired Casale and Lewis—who, by that time, had met a similarly minded local musician named Mark Mothersbaugh—to grapple with some of the darker and heavier implications of their joking sociological theory. With the music and films they made in the early ‘70s, before they were signed to a major label and performing on national TV, Devo were excited to tell us just how docile and unquestioning and goddamned stupid America was becoming—and this was over 50 years ago. Their video art from the time remains cool and weird and startling, their early synth / rock collisions of the era (as collected in the ‘90s in the Hardcore Devo comps) are as transgressive as ever, and then they improbably blew up big time in the later ‘70s, using Warner Bros.’ money to spread that message to the world at large. Between 1978 and 1982 they put out a new record every year that ranged from “very good” to “all-time classic,” put out a few more in the second half of the ‘80s that maybe we don’t talk about, and then retired from view a bit at the end of that decade, reuniting for tours and shows just often enough over the next few decades to give pretty much every future generation of Devo heads its own shot to see them live. And along the way de-evolution only became more and more undeniable, and at this point is the defining hallmark of American life.
De-evolution doesn’t really have anything to do with Mixtape, a new game I played for about a half-hour in Los Angeles earlier this week. Devo does, though; the first gameplay sequence of the demo (and, I assume, the finished game) was soundtracked to the band’s 1982 song “That’s Good.” It’s basically a perfect song for that moment in the game: I’m playing a teenager in the ‘90s who’s obsessed with music, who’s about to leave their hometown for New York City, whose future is bright and endless, and who’s currently endangering that future by skateboarding down a busy street on a steep, winding hill. The synthetic sounds of the future exposing the folly of humanity: that’s Devo, and that’s “That’s Good.” The skating controls are intentionally stripped down, just a kick, push, and jump, with no tricks or scoring; it’s about the experience, the freedom of youth (including the freedom to take stupid risks like skating down the middle of a road), and although I couldn’t quite get the timing right to kick when the hand claps hit on “That’s Good,” the song still drives the scene, as if it’s propelling my character Rockford down that hill more than gravity itself.
Johnny Galvatron, a musician and game designer from Australia whose studio Beethoven & Dinosaur is making Mixtape, absolutely loves Devo. “I would have done the whole fucking game with Devo if I could,” he tells me after my demo. “Not everyone can handle five hours of Devo, but I could.” He describes his band The Galvatrons as a cross between Devo and Van Halen (who also get a reference early in the Mixtape demo), and with Mixtape he’s trying to capture a vibe that reflects both bands—the arty edge of one, the endless party hedonism of the other—as well as the mythical experience of the American teenager at any point in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as defined by movies and TV.
To keep it more universal, Mixtape’s era is a little uncertain. Despite starting with a song from 1982, everything about it screams the mid ‘90s, when “alternative” was the dominant form of rock music. But then Rockford, whose ambition is to become a music supervisor for films, listens to burned CDs, a technology that wasn’t cheaply available to the public until the end of the ‘90s. (I didn’t know anybody who could burn CDs until 2000, and even then it was on a university-owned computer at a college radio station.) “I like to say the whole game is a mixtape,” Galvatron says. “The music is a mixtape. There’s a mixtape of eras. There’s a mixtape of technology. Even the characters are from slightly different eras, where Rockford’s like from 1988 and then [long-haired, grungy slacker] Slater is definitely from 1994.”
With Mixtape Galvatron’s aiming for a generalized form of nostalgia. “I didn’t want it to be like ‘remember the Nintendo 64?’ That’s not the kind of nostalgia you want,” he explains. “You want this nostalgia of just the general glow of youth, which is when you have, and I think it’s just universal, that sense of weirdness and that sense of displacement, not knowing where you stand and where you go forward and when you really don’t have any experiences. So you base your whole personality around what you like and the bands you like and the movies you like. And I think Rockford is… I’ve been Rockford. I’ve known a lot of Rockfords who would, if you tell them the bands you like, that’s it—that’s how you define people.”
Rockford’s all-consuming love of music can come off a little heavy-handed at first, but that’s a pretty realistic depiction of what it’s like to be a teenager. What you love literally will consume all your free time and dominate your thinking and personality. Rockford’s mixtape strategy, the way they talk about the songs on mixes they’ve made or been given, and the steady references to bands can feel a little uncomfortable if you recognize your younger self too much in them. But that lack of self-awareness, that almost painfully earnest and passionate fixation on what most strongly connects with you—whether that’s art and culture, or religion, or sports, or whatever it may be—might be the single most defining aspect of late youth. It’s part of the process of figuring out who we are and who we want to become, and that’s ultimately what Beethoven & Dinosaur seems to be aiming for with Mixtape. It’s about music, yes, but only because music is what these characters use to define themselves.
Mixtape wants you to experience the many facets of these characters’ lives, even if that means the game won’t have any constant, consistent style of play. The demo is a series of interactive vignettes, using play in a variety of unexpected ways. During that demo I skated pure and simple to Devo, learned about Rockford’s past and friendships by exploring their room, and had a second downhill jaunt that was far more urgent and stressful as Rockford and Slater tried to escape cops busting a party by wheeling their passed out friend Cassandra through the streets in a runaway shopping cart. Like the skating in the intro, I could trigger a little extra motion—in this case making the cart spin in a circle as it flew past cop cars—but it didn’t seem to have any actual impact on the scene. Earlier, as Rockford looked to play a mixtape some boy had made them, I spun the right joystick in a circle, as if I was manually rewinding a cassette with a pencil jammed inside the tape reel. When I was done, Rockford hit play, telling the story of how they made out with that boy as an Alice Coltrane song plays (Rockford calls it an “interlude” from their perfect “last day at home” mixtape, which seems to be the game’s main narrative throughline); as Coltrane played, the camera zoomed into the two teenagers’ mouths, and I used the controller’s joysticks to slop and slide their tongues all over each other. Mixtape is the very first videogame where you French kiss to Alice Coltrane in graphic detail, and that alone should earn it some kind of award.
Mixtape aims for universal nostalgia, but it’s also hard-locked to the end days of the 20th century. Between a setting that encompasses my own teenage years, a soundtrack full of bands I loved in high school, and the all-powerful earnestness of Rockford’s youthful love of music, Mixtape can kind of feel a little too targeted at me. Obviously Galvatron isn’t trying to directly pander to me personally—or even, broadly, my generation—but I can’t lie: I did feel that way during Mixtape’s most earnest and most nostalgic moments, like it was trying too hard to appeal to people with my background and experiences. That makes me think that Mixtape will be most beloved and most important to younger people who play it, those who are still teenagers or younger, who haven’t already hit on the thing that will most define them as they start their adult life. It might be filled with older music and a 30-year-old ambiance, but Mixtape might work best for people who didn’t experience that era first-hand. Its eternal 1990s can hit too close to home if you actually came of age in the ‘90s.
Ultimately a game like Mixtape shouldn’t be too concerned with the oldtimers, though. Galvatron might be filling it up with reflections of his own interests and youthful indiscretions, and filtering that through the kind of teenage wastelands popular in Hollywood, but the sort of nostalgia it’s aiming for should be seen as more of a preemptive one. It’s like the video to the Smashing Pumpkins’ song “1979,” which came out in 1996 and recreated a night of carefree teenage rebellion; yes, it was set in the ‘70s, but its spirit was eternal and aspirational, no doubt inspiring countless kids in the ‘90s to create their own memories by engaging in similar teenaged shenanigans. (I honestly kind of expect to learn that the Smashing Pumpkins song on the game’s soundtrack, which hasn’t been fully revealed yet, is “1979,” solidifying its influence on Mixtape.) I’m sure many middle schoolers will feel their lives start to shift as Mixtape introduces them to music and ideas they had never experienced before, and every single instant of that will be infinitely more important than how their parents who actually grew up in the ‘90s feel about the game. And, as Devo says, that’s good.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.
