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There is some discussion below about the game Mixtape, and the suspicion that it AI was used to some extent. I haven't played video games in a long time, and what I know about them could fit on the head of a pin, but as a 90s kid I became intrigued by the nostalgia that this game was supposedly aiming at, and how the producers supposedly got it all wrong, so I naturally did a little research to see what the big deal was. One of the comments below points out that in games like Red Dead Redemption a murderous outlaw wouldn't dare also be a racist, and while political sentiments might be the most obvious and ham-fisted examples of this, there's a larger trend of assigning contemporary values to historical eras. In the case of Red Dead Redemption I'd argue that this is more forgivable, as the further back one goes in history the less source material one has. After all, nobody who remembers the 1890s is alive today to tell you what you got wrong, so one can be forgiven for making some assumptions out of necessity.
But there are plenty of people who remember the '90s. If we narrow in on the specific demographic and assume that the game takes place some time in June 1995, there are about 3 million people who would have been graduating high school and are alive today to talk about it. But even there you run into problems, because the people from the Class of 1995 most willing to talk about their high school experience are the ones most likely to idealize it. Most contemporary reminiscences of 1995 are from the kind of hipster journalists who want to make it sound like they were cooler than they actually were, and thus use their current selves as stand-ins for their high school ones. I don't want to suggest that these people are lying about the past, simply that there is a tendency to emphasize that which has stood the test of time and conforms to contemporary tastes. The problem arises when people who were born too late to experience an era become influenced by contemporary ideas about what made that era cool and assume that the coolness that they perceive was typical. And it compounds further when this false nostalgia includes a dash of contemporary coolness for good measure.
The first time I noticed this in my adult life was when Vaporwave took off in the early 2010s. As a meditation on the nature of nostalgia it's not without interest, but as a representation of the aesthetic of 1992 it's absurd. The visuals suited the style fine, as the millennial memory of the era is as influenced as much by worn out VHS tapes as actual experience. But the music had more to do with creating a nostalgic mood than it did with evoking anything that was being played on the radio between 1987 and 1998. The movement's canonical song, "Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing" by Macintosh Plus, was nothing more than a slowed down and chopped up remix of Diana Ross's "It's Your Move". More original works in the genre can be described as synthwave with a heavy dose of smooth jazz. The tunes are enjoyable enough, but the insistence of pairing them with found VHS footage of home videos and toy commercials is puzzling, since the sound is more 80s than 90s.
Given the right context, this isn't a mortal sin. One of the watershed moments in vaporwave's development was the discovery and upload of tape reel of K-Mart muzak from 1988, and the subsequent uploads of cassettes from later years. The visuals often included shots of store interiors or clips taken from commercials. To the extent that vaporwave sought to evoke nostalgia, it was an oddly specific nostalgia for a certain kind of consumer capitalism. And even that's an unusual choice, since the period we're supposed to be nostalgic for sits on the divide between two very different eras—the more traditional, jingle-based make your product look like loads of fun on one side and the more detached, ironic style of turning the commercial into a work of art that can be appreciated on its own terms on the other. Just look at beer commercials; the ads of the early 90s showed men at pools surrounded by beautiful women in bikinis, clearly trying to impart an association of the product with parties and the opposite sex. By the middle of the decade they had frogs in a swamp each croaking out one syllable of the brand name. What this was supposed to say about Budweiser was anyone's guess, but it's one of the most iconic commercials of the era.
This all makes sense when you consider that Macintosh Plus and many of the other top vaporwave practitioners weren't born until the early 90s. Their earliest memories would not have been until the end of the era they were trying to evoke, and their nostalgia was largely for an imagined world based on the detritus of the era that ended up on the internet. It's ultimately a lie, but it's a lie in the same sense that all nostalgia is a lie. Because if vaporwave did give an accurate impression of what life was like in 1992, that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. There wasn't much better about 1992 as compared to today, and quite a bit was worse. More importantly, 1992 doesn't exist as a discrete entity that you can visit. I remember 1992, and at the time there was nothing more exciting about it than there is about 2026. If you were to visit 1992 as a tourist, you would be aware of that fact and unable to experience things as you remember. But if you were to visit 1992 while not conscious that it wasn't the current year, then there would be nothing interesting about it; it would just be normal. And no, I'm not nostalgic for my childhood either. It was great, mind you, but people forget that when you're a kid all you want is to be older. Every minor decision is made by your parents: Who your friends are, what time you go to bed, what you have for dinner, what you can watch on television, how you spend your Saturdays. Yes, I remember retail outlets in the early 90s. I distinctly remember standing for what seemed like hours as my mother looked at every article of clothing in the store, and when the women's department was finally exhausted she moved on to babies because of some relative's kid, and at that point I was begging to go to domestics, or, preferably, home. If I go back to 1992 I do not want to spend it in a K-Mart.
Which brings us to Mixtape. It was almost certainly created by people who are too young to recall the era they're trying to evoke, because anyone old enough would have been well into their 40s by the time of the game's development. Much has been made of the whole "using a pencil to rewind a tape" thing, and while nobody would have done that just to rewind it, there was a use case. If the player mangled your tape, which wasn't an uncommon occurrence, you would usually use a pencil to wind it back up once you got it disentangled from the player. But that's beside the point, because the idea of a mixtape as something that you give as a gift to that special someone has more to do with our contemporary interpretation of 90s culture than to actual 90s culture. I don't want to suggest that the practice never happened. But it certainly wasn't widespread. Mixtapes were mostly something you made for yourself, either because few cars had CD players or because you were taping off the radio.
The thing people don't realize is that music was expensive in the '90s, and less popular acts were hard to find, especially outside of major metro areas. I can tell you that in 1997 the going rate for a CD at Music Oasis was $15, which is $30 in today's money per the CPI, more when you take into consideration that the average teenager in those days was more likely to make under $5/hour than today's teenager is likely to make more than 10. I looked through a lot of CD binders in my time, and most people only had like 15 CDs, and people who were really into music might have had about 20. If you were relying on your own collection for material, the well would have dried up fast, especially considering that most people only bought CDs for the hits. Most mixtapes per se were things that you made for yourself, either by borrowing from friends or taping off the radio. To the extent that most people made mixtapes for other people, they were likely to just record the whole album, or record the good songs from their CDs without regard for the running order.
The idea that mixtapes were curated items derives from the movie High Fidelity. Except in the film, the characters who are obsessed with mixtapes are music geeks who work in a record store. They aren't representative of the general public, let alone high school kids. To the extent that they existed they were, like mall music, not something that most people thought much about. John Cusack's monologue at the end of the film is notable because it's unusual. But beyond the overstated relevance of mixtapes, the game fails for its overreverence for the 80s.
I took a peek at the soundtrack, and it mostly consists of either stuff from the 80s or indie stuff from the 90s that wasn't popular. This can't be stated strongly enough, but nothing about the 80s was considered cool in the 90s. The entire decade was seen as anathema to any modern sensibilities. The divide in commercials was representative of a larger cultural shift, whereby grunge swept everything else away. By 1995, alternative rock had become mainstream to the point that anything from the previous decade sounded incredibly dated. The idea that high schoolers in 1995 would listen to Devo would have seemed laughable. The idea that they would listen to Joy Division or the Jesus and Mary Chain would have seemed puzzling, because most teenagers wouldn't have even heard of either of those bands. Their stuff was technically available, but in a city like Pittsburgh you would have had to go to a place like Dave's Music Mine on the South Side to find anything like that. A typical National Record Mart in the mall was unlikely to have it, and if they did, you would pay top dollar for it. A discount place like Music Oasis or K-Mart? Forget about it. Even in the 2000s I was having trouble finding classics like The Band's Music from Big Pink in normal CD stores; kids who were into non-mainstream music had to go into the city to find it.
The idea that anyone would discuss their favorite 80s movie is equally absurd. First, nobody really thought of 80s movies as a distinct category. A more accurate description would have been asking about movies shown on cable ad nauseum. And the only 80s movies with any purchase among high school kids at the time would have been kids stuff like the Goonies or ET, or maybe comedies like Ghostbusters. Nobody was discussing something as obviously dated as Aliens. And nobody was certainly seeking out movies from the 80s as an exercise in nostalgia. The same people may tell you now about what they liked in the 80s, but that's with 30 years of perspective. High school kids trying to be cool aren't sitting around talking about what they liked when they were 8. In the early 2000s I certainly wasn't having debates about the best 90s movies.
When all that changes for most people is college. It's only then, once you're out of the coolness rat race, that you get over yourself and start getting nostalgic over your childhood. My own college experience was a bit different, because the 90s didn't feel like they had ended yet culturally, and the 80s were starting to lose their stigma. But nonetheless, that's when most people widen their cultural horizons and realize how cloistered their earlier lives had been, and it's easy for us to look back at our lives and assume that those are the same people we were in high school. And when someone younger consults an LLM, they're bound to get a distilled, distorted version of whatever our collective memory tells us the past was like. And when we don't rely on those distillations, it isn't much better, because we put too much stock in what we ignored, and end up with vaporwave. What can be done about this? Detailed research is one possibility, but even that may be hopeless. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Which games have good characters, really? I mean really good character writing.
The very best narrative games, like Red Dead 2, have a very good sense of place and some good vaguely natural sounding dialogue. They play with the viewer or player’s emotions a little. They can generate pathos. Some games have a few good jokes, a few good cutscenes, a few neat moments.
But the writing and character development of these is still pretty mediocre. The best we can do is either “I’m dying and I’m sad about it” (RDR2, Cyberpunk) or “I’m a sad dad” (Last of Us, God of War). We can also do “I put references to political science 101 in my game” (Disco Elysium). I don’t think I can name a single game with great writing. I can name games with decent, maybe even good writing that I enjoyed, but I’ve enjoyed far too much slop in my time to believe that’s an indicator of actual quality.
Perfect Tides and its sequel.
If you don't at least think the protagonist is well-written, who (from some other media) would you consider a well-written character?
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The original Marathon had great writing.
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You've already made this point several times on The Motte. But what's your benchmark? Can you name a single movie with great writing that you can point at and say, "this is what I want video game writing to be like"? Or a single song with great writing?
I am deliberately not asking about books because video games are a mixed medium. Books are pure written word, and thus cannot be held to the same standard as works where writing is just one part of the whole.
If you’d like to make fun of my bad taste I’m happy to name a bunch of examples any time. But to me I think the Ebert thing, of judging a movie by its intentions, is mostly what I mean. Is there a game for kids as well written as Toy Story 2? I don’t think Mario Galaxy or Lego Batman really compare. Is there an all-ages action adventure that has the self-propelled scale and rhythm of a Star Wars 5 or Raiders of the Lost Ark? Uncharted 2 is closer to an Uwe Boll movie than it is to them. Is there a major VN or ‘episodic story’ game that has the romantic depth and natural dialogue of a Before Sunset, that so captures the feeling of falling in love? ‘Life is Strange’ really isn’t in the same universe, let alone the same league. Is there a Mafia game that comes close, even fractionally, to Goodfellas, let alone The Godfather? And these are just big Hollywood movies.
I'm not sure what your criterion for "good character writing" is, even with those examples, but I've long found Ico to be one of the best-written stories ever, in terms of everything, including dialogue. But it's essentially a fairy tale with the writing complexity of "See Spot Run," where you can probably count the number of lines that come out of each character's mouth in both hands (and if not, then both hands and feet).
As a side note: do not ever read the "Castle in the Mist" novelization. It is truly awful. It's about 400 pages long, and I got like 100 pages in before giving up - by that point, Ico hadn't even gotten into the castle (this happens in the first cutscene of the game, which lasts like 5 minutes or less), with extensive backstory written about Ico's village and its leaders and the larger society in which they existed. All irrelevant details for the actual story of Ico. Ico's "novelization" really should have been a picture book with, again, the complexity of "See Spot Run."
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GTAV is like if Heat was directed by Michael Bay
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Not rafa, but:
Amish Paradise comes to mind.
(Also at least 5-10% of Vysotsky’s repertoire should qualify. «Расстрел горного эха» is a gold standard for writing alone.)
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Silent Hill 2 etches a surprisingly nuanced and complex portrayal of a grieving widower, touching on some of the ugly realities of watching one's spouse slowly succumb to illness that even unvarnished warts-and-all literary fiction avoids confronting. While it's at it, the game includes a secondary character who is avictim of repeated incestuous rape as a child and succeeds in making them seem believable, sympathetic and three-dimensional.
Spec Ops: The Line depicts a well-meaning protagonist with admirable goals, whose monomaniacal stubbornness, refusal to take responsibility for his actions (indeed, refusal to even acknowledge the consequences of his actions) and steadily declining mental acuity combine to make him progressively more unlikeable and loathsome. The lead writer described him as a tragic hero whose fatal flaw is his inability to reconcile the disparity between the man he would like to be and the man he really is. Even if you don't buy into the meta aspects of the game's presentation, Walker is a masterclass in writing a character who is believeable and unlikeable, while still retaining the player's sympathy.
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KOTOR was pretty fun — would’ve made a good movie.
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Did you just casually spoil the main story in those first two games? Ever heard of spoiler tags?
I spoiled the premise of a 6 and an 8 year old game, in the sense that both of those ‘reveals’ happen in perhaps the first quarter of the games.
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Hmm.. Almost anything Chris Avellone has touched comes to mind.
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Ever play Myst 3?
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I know that I grew up under a rock by late '90s/early '00s standards (rural Alabama) but I had no idea that Metallica had an album other than the Black Album until 2006. Before then I didn't have access to high speed internet/a decent PC so I pretty much listened to whatever my father did (so, a lot of Eminem and System of a Down), with my contribution to the family's music collection being Kid Rock's Devil Without a Cause and Cocky. My sister bought more CDs but it was late 90s boy bands and then stuff like Pink and Avril Lavigne.
On that note, as a Gulf War baby I don't have much for 90s nostalgia. Okay, I remember Space Jam, but otherwise I remember the late 90s at best, movies like Blue Streak and Chill Factor. If I were to be nostalgic for a time it's more mid-aughts than the 90s, stuff like 2 Fast 2 Furious and Grand Theft Auto Vice City and San Andreas, the height of the Playstation 2 era.
It is best if you think of the Black Album as the last album of Metallica anyway.
Nah, the Black Album was a total sellout. ...And Justice for All would have been good except you can't hear any bass. The last good Metallica album was Master of Puppets /s
I am not sure why the /s ... after the black album Metallica have 1 good song and it is a cover of Thin Lizzy.
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I have to agree with @dailydogma, the game looks like it was made by what used to be called Tumblr SJWs. I always wonder who buys these as the Switch store seems to have a lot of them.
Regarding mixtapes, as someone born at the end of the 80s, they were something the previous generation did. I remember my parents using cassette tapes throughout the 90s, and carrying around those (in hindsight, ridiculous looking) cassette tape binders, but I don't think I ever made one. But then! I remembered that I did actually do essentially the same thing. I was interested in J-Pop and Mandopop as a kid but had no access to either in my rural American town. I probably burned a dozen CDs with Winny- and Kazaa-sourced MP3s. I remember carefully arranging the tracks for maximum impact.
I guess streaming has killed that experience. There's simply too much music available, all the time, anywhere. It's cheap, it's casually consumable.
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As a person who was not an American teenager in the 1990s, this game looks like completely overrated trash. First off, it's not a game, it's a 2 hour cut scene. They should have made it be a corny coming of age movie. The plot is completely boring. The aesthetics are ugly and look trans (1). The characters look like SSRI addicted 2010s university Marxist vegan polyamorists with mystery ancestry, not 1990s European-American teenagers.
Clannad is a better slice-of-life high school „ video game“ by a mile, the United States just cannot compete when it comes to that genre because it's too narcissistic about all of its obnoxious peculiarities: it's terrible music, its terrible politics, its ugly aesthetics, its inferior culture.
That it got straight 10/10s means the review companies are being suffocated by 45 year old American liberals. Does that sound like meritocracy to you? Are they really the best people to review video games?
Eh, its definitely liberal trash coded but its more nostalgiagooning for an idealized high school experience than Modern Audience politicking. The main objection to mixtape I can see is the 10/10 by IGN, which as an institution has become a punching bag for everything wrong with games journalism mainly because IGN was THE first source for digital games information back in the early 2010s so its downfall sticks. As a game and narrative mixtape isn't 'fuck white people' as much as some weird 2020s midlife crisis financially strapped lib arts majors idea of what the idealized 90s he knows of but never really experienced was like. There were mixtapes, friends, awkward but real moments, and thats the stuff of a coming of age movie redux, not a videogame, which is where the major objection really comes from. That the base subject matter is also pretty insipid is just the stevia maraschino cherry on top of the soggy biscuit.
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While I agree that it looks like trash, I would question the label "overrated", seeing as practically all commentary I've seen on it firsthand comes to the same conclusion. I guess "overrated" begs the question "overrated by who". "Gaming journalists"? Uh, okay; are there any real people with that opinion?
Even post-gamergate, the culture that gaming journalists belong to still has fairly disproportionate influence over what games are made and what they are made of, despite that culture being obviously disconnected from the culture and preferences of the actual people who buy and play video games. Mixtape getting a bunch of 10/10s from gaming journalism outlets is probably a sign that we have more games with its aesthetics to look forward to.
Over on X, someone pointed out that they bought perpetual rights to all the songs involved, and this would cost a fortune. Meaning there's a lot of money behind the game. So those 10/10s may simply be purchased (as is traditional).
It's made my Larry Ellison's daughter. There's huge money behind it.
I'm sure they sprung for the "ultra premium ad package" for the major sites.
Technically, it's only published by Larry Ellison's daughter.
Yeah, and nepobabies funding the arts, entertainment and other stuff is the other half of raison d'etre of the capitalism: after you get rich doing profitable business, you can do whatever you want with your money, including giving it all to your kids so that they can fund obscure non-profitable computer games they want to see. The main available alternative of "non-profitable arts are only funded by bureaucratic committees" won't guarantee any better results.
There is so little of "better" arts because the finance bros and other medium-to-super rich [1] have a revealed preference of complaining about modern art on Xitter rather than patronizing the arts they supposedly like. One deci-billionaire or a network of few dozen deca-millionaires could plausibly kickstart a whole artistic movement just with their wallets.
[1] edit. postscriptum. Given the replies this message receive, let me rephrase:
the finance bros and other medium-to-super rich who ostensibly care about bad state of contemporary aesthetics have a revealed preference of complaining about modern art on Xitter rather than patronizing the arts they supposedly like.
Who claims finance bros have any sort of taste for "better" arts?
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I think it's the finance bros and suchlike who are funding a lot the bad contemporary art. Deutsche Bank in particular has made "we fund edgy contemporary art" into part of its corporate identity. Drexel was the founding sponsor of the Turner Prize. Saatchi and Saatchi were not finance bros, but a lot of finance bros showed up at their art parties.
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Tbf What Remains of Edith Finch is really good.
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I don't know if it would have cost a fortune, at least not compared to what they already paid. I don't think they bought all the rights, just that they paid a little extra to use the songs in the game indefinitely and not for five years or whatever. I doubt the agreement even would allow them to use the songs in another game.
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Source
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One important lesson in storytelling is that it's a story and being compelling and interesting is typically more important than actual accuracy. Accuracy can help ground the setting, but it's not the only detail and sometimes it can even backfire if audiences have a misconception about the past (which they often do) like for instance basically everything you know about the Vikings outfits is made up. Likewise much of the cultural understanding about pirates came from Treasure Island, not real world pirates. Audiences can actually get upset about a story not being realistic because the author was too accurate and didn't fit their misunderstanding. This happened with the TV show Rome where their colorful outfits were seen as unrealistic by many viewers despite apparently being the most historically accurate part of it.
Same thing can happen with language as our vocabulary changes over time. You aren't going to hear "He was a silly, awful, and gay man who regularly engages in intercourse" to mean "He was a harmless, inspiring and happy man who regularly partakes in social conversations" in a period piece because that sounds stupid nowadays and would take the audience out of immersion even if they could figure out what was actually being said and didn't take it as an insulting remark being made.
The problem with Mixtape isn't that they made a historical mistake (although it does hurt more that the mistake is actually obvious to the nostalgia audience they're pandering to) because if the story or gameplay was meaningfully compelling then it would just be a funny little thing that people joked about and it'd get patched out. The problem with Mixtape is that it's dogshit. The characters are unlikeable douches with no character growth and the storytelling is just nostalgiabait garbage. The whole thing with rewinding wrong is just indicative of how little care and passion actually seems to have been put into this "passion piece" where they didn't even bother to get the main thing in any detail.
Kind of a waste of words from all sides, tbh; the problem with Mixtape isn't that it lies about the past, the problem with Mixtape is that it's a shit videogame.
The only reason anyone took notice was because it got 10/10s from the usual suspects, and because gamers simply can't handle when someone is wrong about a videogame and/or when websites make shit up for clicks or to give attention to a game that involves their friends and family or social causes they like, it became the drama du jour for people with too much time and not enough employment.
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My favorite example of this is older movies where they put hoofbeat foley over scenes where people are riding horses through a sandy desert. Hooves don't make that sound on sand, but people got uncomfortable watching scenes where the audio cue wasn't there.
TV Tropes has a list of examples. The creators of Gladiator originally intended to depict the gladiators doing celebrity endorsements for products, but worried that audiences would find this silly and anachronistic, even it's historically accurate and well-documented.
No they didn't. Most gladiators were slaves. Gladiators did appear on products, but, specific named gladiators are unlikely, and they didn't get money from them.
Of course this reference is just something someone says on the Internet, but so is the original one.
I think there's wires crossed a bit since AFAIK Charioteers were the Roman Athletes that essentially managed to best ape the modern celebrity landscape.
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Wait what? Say more about this?
I don't know about product endorsements, but in Latin class in highschool, I recall translating some text from actual Roman times that described some specific gladiator as causing women to swoon or get weak in the knees or somesuch (probably some different idiom that I'm not remembering now), and our teacher explaining that top gladiators were legitimate celebrities. I never followed up on it to confirm with independent research, but product endorsements would seem in line with that.
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Yeah. I was scratching my head reading this too.
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Regarding vaporwave, I think you are missing that it is not supposed to be nostalgia for the general 90s/00s but nostalgia for the computing of the era. This was when computing was still primarily by and for 50 year old suits working in drop-ceiling cubicles at IBM or some insurance company, plus their occasional tone-deaf attempts at reaching out to wider markets. Ads for Bryce, Lotus 1-2-3 and "I'm a PC", not Budweiser. Visions of the future for stodgy professional adults already half buried with the past. Smooth jazz and elevator music is a lot closer to the soundscape of those types of lives than, I don't know, Kylie Minogue.
Movies... my experience of that era was in Germany, but older movies were definitely a separate category that was widely enjoyed and discussed, in part due to the nature of cable TV. When one of the major channels ran an old James Bond, this was an event (sometimes even announced by an ad campaign in public transport or the like), and half the kids in my class could be expected to have watched it with their parents or at least taped it on VCR to watch later.
I largely missed the MC era (though I once took a carpool ride with two chain-smoking punk students who played their techno mixtape for the whole 5 hours), but people definitely shared burned CDs and later preloaded MP3 players with those they were trying to hit on?
I’m sure a big draw towards vaporware is nostalgia for the old Internet.
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Lolwhut?
That might describe the early to mid 80s but in the early 90s nearly every one of the people in my upper elementary school class had a computer at home and gaming was usually one of the main uses. By the mid to late 90s every desk job was computerized and IBM and insurance companies were known mostly for being particularly stuffy.
The BLS has an interesting piece on household computer ownership in the 1990s broken down by education level and race. The overall rate went from 15% in 1990 to 35% in 1997, but households headed by a college graduate went from 23% to 56%. It didn't take long for it to become a majority though - that was around the year 2000.
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I don't think this was usual. My father got a computer in 1997 or so and it was a big deal as a professional to have a PC.
I could see having a PC or Mac being a big deal in 1987 but to get one in the family only in 1997 would have been either intentional ludditism (typically by old people), a rare Amiga holdout or a major outlier here (likely due to never recovering from getting laid off during the early 90s recession). The question in 1997 was whether you already had dialup internet or were only planning on getting it soonish. If someone had suggested then that "computers were just for 50 year old suits in IBM and insurance companies", they would have been laughed at by the normies.
1997 is around when we got our first computer. We were kinda poor. Plenty of other families I knew from school didn't have one either. They didn't truly become a normal household appliance until the early 00s.
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Just to add my own piece to this, my family never got a home computer till 2001 for my birthday. I remember cause 9/11 happened two weeks later. I think you're the one thats atypical. Although I did grow up in a poor rural area. Maybe you grew up in a big city and thats why you think everyone had a computer in the 90s?
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to be fair, 4bpp wrote
Is there any other explanation needed? DW.com reported in 2025 how Germany has difficulties get past the fax machine. And in 1990s Germany wasn't even that much an outlier. Here is OECD paper "Access to and Use of Information Technologies at Home" from 1997. According to Table 5.1, percentage of households equipped with personal computer was <30% in all countries presented in the table, except for Denmark (32%). France, Spain and Japan were barely above 10% in 1995. In the same year, Swedish average computer ownership was 27.6%, and only the very upper education cohort (2+ years of university or more) broke above 50%. For a Swede with any other educational background, it was more common not to have a computer at home than have one.
Sounds like that kids in your upper elementary school class had quite young and educated parental background? (Or perhaps you didn't notice the kids without computers? My parents were below-median income, when I grew old enough to realize that, I became very hesitant to invite classmates over to visit because I had much less cool stuff to show, there wasn't cool things to do, and the apartment was small.)
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When I searched "90s PC ad", this and this were the first two non-Apple hits (both dorky cyberspace digital nature CG), followed by this (office stuff). Are you sure it was not your experience that was atypical?
The TV ads were stuffy garbage but it's not like consumers cared about those. Those ads were aimed at companies (and particularly managers) due to a 486 still costing a small fortune in 1992 and showing typical "manager pie chart" on the screen. There's a reason Apple made this campaign to poke fun at the corporate PC ad aesthetic.
And yes, I'm very sure my experience was typical for the era. If anything, I personally was lagging behind my peers with us only getting a computer in 1990 (money was somewhat tight with my mom being a single mother with three kids). When I started high school in the mid 90s, I distinctly recall all the teachers going out of their way to say "For gods sake, please write your home essays on a computer instead of by hand" (which stuck in my mind because our bitchy upper elementary school Finnish teacher liked to claim "You'll need to write everything with cursive in high school" which turned out to be the exact opposite of the truth). Computing was ubiquituous but the TV ads and similar "official" media representation lagged behind the situation on the ground. In 1994 when I had finally saved enough money to buy a decent computer of my own (a 486sx with a whopping 4 MB of ram - far from what would have been high end at the time), a school acquaitance practically begged me to play dialup Doom multiplayer with him and he was the very opposite of any sort of computer nerd (I had to walk him through the modem setup on the phone).
The problem with basically all the -wave "genres" (except new wave which looked to the future instead of to a fake past) is that they get the timeline wildly incorrect and mix and match made up fake "memories", assumptions from a bunch of hand drawn magazine cover art and only bits and pieces of what was the historical reality of the purported eras.
These are only problems if you consider these neowave genres to be historical preservation museums, which they aren't (the original music still exists for that). They're mashup/remix genres; the problems you describe are actually features.
I would agree with that except the fans of said genres themselves make the claim that they're "retro" to those decades when that is very obviously not the case. One such claim is right here in this thread. More commonly this happens with synthwave where people always claim it's "back to the 80s" when the actual 80s were nothing like that either in vibe, compositions, arrangements or sounds (the only thing "80s" about synthwave is the drum sounds and the visuals which harken to a very specific subset of 80s cover art).
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Tangentially related, I once read someone arguing that artistic nostalgia moves in twenty-year cycles, as writers, directors etc. grow up and make artworks either set in or heavily reminiscent of the time period in which they grew up. This phenomenon is best illustrated by the music video for "Buddy Holly" by Weezer, directed by Spike Jonze, which uses trick photography to make it look like the band is performing in an episode of Happy Days. That is, it's a video from the 1990s which is a nostalgic throwback to a sitcom from the 1970s, which sitcom was itself a nostalgic throwback to the 1950s in which it is set.
True to form, various films and TV shows from the 2000s had a nostalgic 80s setting (e.g. Donnie Darko, set in October 1988: writer-director Richard Kelly explained that he decided to base the setting on his own childhood rather than setting his coming-of-age story in the present day and getting the teenage slang and cultural references wrong). The British synth-pop duo La Roux made a name for themselves in the late 2000s with a sound that knowingly called back to the synth-pop of Eurhythmics and Depeche Mode.
But I feel like we've been stuck in a bit of an 80s nostalgia rut for a long time. A full decade after Donnie Darko, Drive starring Ryan Gosling received praise for its soundtrack full of modern electronic songs knowingly calling back to 80s synth-pop, and graphic design choices aping Risky Business. Four years later, Stranger Things came out on Netflix, with its exaggerated and heightened portrayal of the 1980s of Steven Spielberg. In 2020, The Weeknd attracted critical adulation for mixing up his pop-R&B sound with an album incorporating retro 80s synth tones and drum machines. And that's not even touching on video games, wherein you could spend a lifetime playing nothing but the retraux 8-bit shovelware clogging up Steam mimicking the look and sound of NES and SNES games, and never run out of titles. One reason you can tell that the 80s nostalgia trend has outstayed its welcome is because it's being practised by artists who have no nostalgic attachment to the 1980s of their own childhood because they hadn't been born yet: The Weeknd was born in 1990.
In 2026, there is absolutely nothing new or surprising about movies, TV shows or music knowingly incorporating the aesthetics of the 1980s: it amounted to flogging a dead horse a full decade ago. But creators seem strangely reluctant to progress to the next phase, wherein 90s nostalgia reigns supreme for a generation, or at least for a decade. (The only medium proving an exception to this trend is video games, in which 8-bit RPGs and platformers have belatedly given way to so-called "boomer shooters" and survival horror titles mimicking the graphics of the original Silent Hill on the PS1.)
And I suspect this is illustrative of a certain kind of cultural stagnation. For most of the twentieth century, a combination of cultural shifts and technological developments meant that the music of one decade sounded completely different from that of a decade prior. A pop song from 1955 sounds nothing like one from 1945, likewise for 1965, 1975 and so on. But by the 90s, the pace of change had slowed to the point that the era no longer felt especially distinct from the one following. A pop song from 1985 sounds completely different from a pop song from 1995, but a pop song from 2005 doesn't sound that different from a pop song from 1995. The 1980s are hence the last decade with a distinct aesthetic which you can knowingly mimic in a way that feels different from the present day: since then we've been trapped in the Eternal 90s/00s. Announcing that your album is a consciously nostalgic throwback to the sound of the 1990s hence comes off as oxymoronic, like announcing that it's a consciously nostalgic throwback to 2026.
This hypothesis also explains why, as mentioned above, video games are the only medium doing the 90s nostalgia thing, and why I think it's unlikely we'll see a trend of 00s nostalgia in video games any time soon. The 1990s were the last decade in which graphics looked meaningfully distinct from those of the decade following. I'm not claiming that the AAA graphics of 2026 look identical to those of 2004, but it's been a case of slow incremental marginal improvement, wholly unlike the quantum-leap sensation of going from Half-Life to Half-Life 2. I think the days of being awed when a new video game achieves a heretofore-thought-impossible level of graphical fidelity are decisively over.
I always thought the canonical example was Grease, in which everything except the cars was a giveaway that the film was made in the 1970s and not the 1950s in which it was set.
Grease (both its original stage production and film adaptation) and Happy Days are both prominent examples of the wave of fifties nostalgia that swept the US during the 1970s. I chose the "Buddy Holly" music video to illustrate that the effect is cyclical: 90s looking back fondly on media from the 70s which was itself looking back fondly on the 50s.
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If we're talking about nostalgia in music, hip-hop has been nostalgic about the 90s since about 1999.
While it's niche enough for not everyone to know you don't need to do much digging to see it. Part of this is just the rediscovery and popularization of strange underground 90s stuff like Texas chopped & screwed tapes or Memphis underground, part of it is redoing the most popular G-funk and boom bap styles from L.A and New York.
Mid 90s saw the term old school start to pick up in usage to refer to anything from the 1980s right the way up to the early 90s.
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I feel like it's mostly a cohort size effect. In the 90s and 00s, bankable nostalgia was mostly about the 50s and 60s, because boomers were the ones indulging in it. Now, millenials are a growing demographic indulging in nostalgia, and the era that boomers, gen-x and millenials could all compromise on was the 80s, boomers were taking power over from their own parents, gen x was in its teen years and some millenials were kids.
As boomers die, I feel the late 90s and early 00s are going to have their time in the limelight. I'm less sure about the 10s. Like the 70s it felt like a transitional decade few people are going to be nostalgic for.
Both "60's nostalgia" and "80's nostalgia" involve a lot of nostalgia for works released in years beginning 197. Both the Rolling Stones and disco peaked in the calendar 1970's, for example.
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I am somewhat convinced that an under-discussed part of this is that post-internet, it’s hard to have nostalgic feelings for media as it’s always right there. I could go down my teenage media rabbit holes rather easily. I can binge Saved by the Bell and Nirvana today in 2026. It’s available on YouTube, streaming services and streaming radio. How can I get nostalgic enough to want to see something that captures the vibe of those things, when I can just watch the shows and listen to the music and not miss it.
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I read somewhere that Stranger Things could only have been set in the 1980s, because the 'kids on bikes having an adventure' only works if the kids are allowed outside. The decline does seem to have happened a bit later than that, but the principle is correct.
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I went to three high schools in two different states during the 90s, and "Whip It" was something I'd hear in the parking lot every week. The only thing that had as much staying power was Limp Bizkit.
Christ that really brings back some memories. That was either widespread or you and I might have been roughly in the same state locale.
Rural mid Atlantic?
Nope. Coastal city boy here who was more inland.
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Hmm, while I am probably too young to have made mixtapes on cassette tapes, it is absolutely the case that people made lots of mixtapes for each other on CDs in the mp3 and CD-burning heyday. Perhaps this is to your point that music was incredibly expensive prior to being forced down by mp3 pirating (we can call it what it was while also acknowledging that the labels and artists deserved it). But I am pretty willing to take media's word that music nerds made each other mixtapes back in the day. What is kind of funny is that I do not really think people make playlists for each other today; it seems like it has gotten too cheap! (Though maybe I am too old now. What does happen is my wife texts me 20 different songs instead of making a playlist like I beg her to!)
On The Jesus and Mary Chain, I think it is quite possible to have been exposed to them via college radio (I still discover obscure things via college radio) or even a relatively alternative, err, alternative station. JMC has a few very melodic songs that could easily have been championed by DJs or older siblings.
In my experience of the 90's "I made you a mixtape/burned CD" would have been kind of wierd and overly personal. "I made one for all of us to listen to in the car", OTOH, was normal and exciting.
And FWIW, I remember my goth friends in the late 90's early 2000's talking about Joy Division, which I think I have still never listened to in any capacity.
If you're talking about '99 onward it was an entirely different situation as Napster made a whole world of music available that hadn't been accessible before, and the internet made music discovery a lot easier. I had heard of Joy Division in the '90s, but only because as a music nerd I had a bunch of record review guides (which are sitting on a bookshelf behind me as I type this). I had no particular interest in them, but trying to find well-reviewd records from major bands was a chore because you were at the mercy of what the record store had in stock. Floor space was limited, and they had to stock CDs and cassettes, so they were only going to carry what they could sell, which meant mostly new releases and compilations. It seems odd to think about now, but as someone who was a huge Beatles fan I don't recall any record store having all their studio albums in stock at the same time, even after the surge in interest generated by the Anthology documentary. The Anthology compilations, which are collections of unreleased material that nobody cares about any more, were always well-stocked, on the other hand. What people liked was largely defined by what was available, and unless there was some big cultural change, catalog releases that didn't sell well to begin with weren't likely to be available outside of special order, which was usually limited to independent shops in urban areas that high school kids didn't shop at.
Yeah, I went through adolescence right during that transition. There was a kind of an awkward midpoint where downloaded songs were very common, but only a few people I knew had a proper CD burner, so having all that newly accessible music in a portable format (or for anything other than computer speakers) was somewhat more special. This was especially relevant as we started getting cars.
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Surely you've heard "Love Will Tear Us Apart".
I've heard it once, and it's simply a terrible song when performed by a single-note-range vocalist. This version is miles better than the original.
For that heresy, I will tie you to a chair and force you to listen to the eight-minute extended remix of Vienna, you heathen!
Well if original Joy Division isn't good enough for you, how about when they became New Order?
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After giving it 30s, I can confidently say I have never heard that song in my life.
I'm genuinely surprised.
Kids these days, eh?
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Growing up in the 90s, I recall some of my friends sharing tapes with recordings of songs from the radio and CDs with each other. But what I don't recognize is people calling them "mixtapes." That was something you might share specifically with your boy-/girlfriend as a way to convey your affection, and the exact specific order mattered. Tapes you shared with friends were just tapes that had songs on them, because merely having the song available for play - even with the delay it takes to rewind/fast forward the tape to the specific track - was something very valuable.
I don't remember anyone in the 90s making tapes for their boyfriend or girlfriend, just people occasionally making tapes for friends, but the order never mattering. If you had a CD with three really good songs on it you wanted to include you'd just put them one after the other and then go to the next CD. Like you said, just having a copy of the song was the point, because music was expensive. "Mixtape" is a term from hip hop that got appropriated for the phenomenon after people stopped buying cassettes. Even in High Fidelity, they're called compilation tapes, but most people didn't call them anything. When we first got a car with a tape deck in it circa 1995 my mom borrowed a bunch of my uncle's CDs and made a tape that she proceeded to play in the car ad nauseum for the next several years. We always called it "The Tape". I remember getting sick of it and finding another tape that my other uncle had made her from stuff dubbed of of albums in the '80s, and we called it "The Other Tape".
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Yeah I didn't grow up with cassettes but my parents had a large collection. My mom in particular had a bunch of mixtapes that people had given her in the 80s and 90s
I remember the dual sided cassette tapes being brought out from storage for Christmas holiday songs when I was very young. And needing to rewind them too. Hard to believe time goes by so fast.
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I was a kid in the 80s and I remember thinking about 80s movies as a distinct category in the 90s. I'd imprinted on the specifically 80s thing where movies had a central scifi or supernatural premise, took it reasonably seriously and had plenty of practical special effects. Aliens and Blade Runner were ten years old but they still had huge cultural cachet, as did the Star Wars movies with the newest one being from 1983. I remember wondering what happened to 80s moviemaking and why new movies in the 90s didn't feel the same anymore. I still feel like there were clear inflection points in movies around 1980 (maybe because Star Wars introduced the scifi blockbuster concept) and then again around 1990 (maybe CGI effects changed the aesthetics and cheap direct-to-video stuff started eating the market of the expensive tentpole films?)
I recall literally discussing about our favorite 80s action movies with my friends as a teenager in the mid 90s. The transition to 90s wasn’t super abrupt but Terminator 2 clearly started to look and feel different compared movies made in the mid 80s.
90's action was definitely different from 80's action. Think Nicolas Cage or Jean Claude Van Damme as an Action Hero compared to Stallone or Schwarzenegger.
While 80's action was Big Muscles, Big Guns, Big Boobs, 90's was a lot more stylised. Political correctness had barely begun to seep in thankfully.
And political correctness was almost universally seen as a bad thing by younger people as something out of touch moral guardians were trying to impose to remove everything fun.
How did we lose these moral antibodies? Best I can think of is that they adapted to the busybodies from the right, which were more church/establishment coded, than the left-flavored ones we have now.
We didn't lose them. 2010s wokeness won against considerable opposition, including opposition from other forms of leftism. (2016 Bernie was the less-woke candidate). The question is "Why did 2010s wokeness overcome the antibodies when 1990s PC couldn't?"
There are a few obvious stories (and I have no idea what the relevant contributions are):
Policy Starvation.
Politics runs on hope. "Hope" was the theme that won Obama the White House. People organize politically because they hope to secure better outcomes; having so organized, if those better outcomes are not secured, obviously the previous political organization didn't work and you need to try something else. Blues expected things to improve significantly when Obama replaced Bush in 2008. Six years later in 2014, it was pretty obvious that the current set of Progressive policies weren't delivering sufficient progress, and so Blues collectively pushed for more radical policies.
Feminism and race were two of the most prominent drivers of Social Justice as an ascendant ideology, and both seem like strong examples of policy starvation. There was a really good article I would dearly like to relocate that talked about the detente established around the turn of the century between blacks and whites, wherein Whites would help improve conditions for Blacks, and Blacks would stop calling Whites racist. Well, what do you do when, after a decade or more of this, conditions for Blacks haven't measurably improved? Likewise for women: previous waves of feminism rewrote the social contract between the sexes on a purely consent-based framework, and yet lots and lots of women still feel like they're being violated. The only category for violation their model recognizes is of consent, and so they model the problem as a rape epidemic, and frame their new policies to match.
In both cases, Social Justice went the way it did because people found that their current policies couldn't sustain hope in a better future, and so turned to more radical alternatives. I guess I'd say that this bolsters rather than replaces the stories you listed.
Of these, it seems to me that Social Media is the closest to being a genuinely novel development rather than an incremental evolution of what came before. Smartphones and related technology radically reshaped the media ecosystem in a very short period of time, and in a way that heavily favored upstarts and rabble-rousers and heavily disadvantaged the establishment.
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1990s PC didn’t really ‘lose’. It experienced a backlash from just after the LA riots (which, occurring in a big, wealthy, progressive city that was the home of the entertainment industry, turned off many white liberals from the most radical proposals of that age), the OJ trial, and the extremely high levels of violent crime in the early 1990s (this is an underappreciated reason; white liberals were far more likely to be mugged in NYC in 1992 than they were in 2014) that lasted through to around 2001.
After that 9/11 froze the nascent culture war into a weird stasis that lasted for a few years where you had a surge in Bush II era symbolic patriotism, Dixie chicks cancellation and so on. Then the housing crisis, Obama election and great recession took a lot of oxygen out of the culture war for a while and it took until 2012/13/14 for things to heat up again. The actual original backlash was in the 70s to early 80s at the end of the civil rights era when courts blocked things like quota-based affirmative action (in 1977 I think).
I think this is a reasonable comment. My mis-spent youth as a student politician gave me a front-row seat for the flippening around 2000 (I think the 1999 "Battle of Seattle" WTO protests was the turning point) when over the space of about two years being an activist on PC issues suddenly became cringe and all the cool kids were protesting about green or economic issues. You can definitely make the case that the people pushing 1990's PC were never beaten, they just got bored. If that is true, it follows that when there was another flippening in the early 2010's (I see the failure of Occupy as the turning point) and social justice activism became cool again they were just able to pick up from where they left off.
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A thought I had over a decade ago is that my generation (elder millennial) grew up with the notion "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" being fed to us so consistently and ubiquitously that the notion that it could come while burning the American flag and destroying the cross never even accidentally crossed our minds. Thing is, of course, we were also force fed the idea of challenging power structures and rebelling against the hegemon, which would necessarily involve challenging such notions that we grew up swimming in, and it used to confuse me why so many people seemed not only to refuse to take this obvious step but to be downright hostile to it.
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When the remake of Friday the 13th came out years back, a few friends and I wanted to go watch it in theaters. The movie wasn’t that great but there were multiple points where the audience went wild at the violence and nudity in it and it made us laugh, because it all felt like we were giving the finger to all the new releases down the hall which were too “puritanical” of the politically correct flavor, when the atmosphere still felt that “being offensive” and edgy wasn’t occasionally permissible. I remember all of us kept talking about that after we got out. It was a refreshing feeling we all had.
I felt that way with "Joker" in 2019
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To be fair to Mixtape, I understand that the protagonist is a huge music nerd, and the game is about her last day in her hometown before driving across the country to give her mixtape to some music producer to try to get a job. As someone who had even less interest in music in the 90s than I do now, I don't know how much that would make her knowledge of obscure and 80s bands more justifiable, though. The point that no teenager in the 90s had nostalgia for the 80s strikes me as very very true, though.
With respect to the rewinding a tape via pencil scene, one important aspect of it is that she specifically spins the wrong hole to rewind the tape. One doesn't need to have first-hand experience to know this: basic understanding of physics should tell anyone that you have to spin the reel that has less tape around it, and spin it such it "pulls" the exposed part of the tape towards that side. In the game, she sticks the pencil into the one that has more tape, somehow "pushing" the tape into the other reel instead of out of the cassette, as would actually happen. Perhaps it's a bug that will be patched, but it's fascinating to me that this obvious physical error got through. Reminds me of the Wonder Woman film where she blatantly doesn't protect her feet while rushing some foxholes during WW1.
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This is insane. Where the 2020s medium-left person's values sit is an incredibly unusual spot across the breadth of human history which has been facilitated by a ton of technology, cultural meshing and deliberate massaging towards that spot. This is like saying that there should be a Prius in Red Dead Redemption 2 since nobody in the first-hand historical record explicitly said 'there were no economical cars in this era'
Actually, it would be awesome if there was a Prius in RDR2…
I have just the game for you!
Whoa. You aren’t lying. I am… definitely going to try this!
Don't get your hopes up. That project has been in limbo for a long time now
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Be careful not to prove too much here. If all nostalgia is just based on one's subjectively biased viewpoint and is never grounded in anything objective, then that would imply that nothing ever gets objectively worse for anyone. But that can't be true. Sometimes the past actually was just better.
There's something about vaporwave that's deeply resonant for me. I was a small child in the 90s, but I do still have a number of distinct memories of those years.
I do think that vaporwave captures something essential about the dreamlike quality of those years (as I experienced them). You might naturally respond with, well, all of your experiences are a bit more dreamlike when you're a small child. And you'd be right. Although, if we want to analyze things in terms of "objective material conditions", the 80s and 90s presented a very brief and very unique window when consumer computing technology was becoming widely available, but technology (and the world at large) hadn't yet been thoroughly demystified by the infinite free information we have available on wikipedia/youtube/LLMs/etc. The computer was like a portal to another dimension, filled with bright promises of the future; there could be anything in there. If the kids on the playground told you that you could unlock Mew in Pokemon RBY, and you didn't have internet at home, you really had no way of knowing if they were telling the truth or not except for just exploring the game yourself. Part of what vaporwave is trying to evoke is the early mystique and promises of consumer technology, and the failure of those utopian promises to materialize.
As you were intimating, part of what vaporwave is trying to accomplish is to get you to construct your own nostalgic relationship to the past, rather than simply accurately presenting the 90s as they actually were. Listening to Floral Shoppe alone in your room? Kind of whatever. Listening to Floral Shoppe while walking around the dead mall 20 minutes down the street from the house where you grew up, where you used to spend so much time with your parents when you were little, virtually the only person in the whole building in the waning hours of a Saturday evening in August, a once vibrant shopping center full of families and children, now almost abandoned, every shop boarded up except for the GNC which is the final holdout? One of the most ethereal and otherworldly experiences I've ever had.
Anemoia: “nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known”
I used to think this concept was incoherent, and yet listening to Holst's "Jupiter" makes me feel patriotic for a planet I've never set foot on and never will (because one physically cannot "set foot" on it).
Because one of the themes from Jupiter is used as the tune for the British patriotic hymn I Vow to Thee, my Country, it makes me feel patriotic for Britain and not Jupiter. But Holst didn't intend that use and his daughter (who was also a composer) said that the well-known secondary use ruined the original meaning of Jupiter.
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Also known as: what listening to city pop will trigger in you.
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I basically only listen to polular music from the very late 70s to 1990 or so. The catch: I only started doing so in my early 30s. I didn't really listen to music seriously until in my late teens at which point I started with metal and then classic rock and prog from the late 60s / early 70s. If the "we get stuck to what was popular when we were teens / young adults" actually applied, I'd be listening to completely different music than what actually I listen to.
Anything made after 1990 is tainted by either what they now call r'n'b (aka ”urban contemporary”), rap / hiphop or grunge influences or is generic shitty pop or EDM slop and I’ve always detested all of those. I can take any number of pop hits (as in actual ”pop” genre, not just pop rock) from the 80s like Madonna, Michael Jackson, A-Ha, Duran Duran, Phil Collins etc and they still sound massively better than any pop music made since. I’ll even take what would now be considered ”B-list artists” like Bananarama any day over any modern popular music.
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There may be a tendency, in such reviews (and I know less about games I suspect than you even claim to know) is that we are captured/limited by our own experiences of the era. I received (and gave away) many mixtapes in the early nineties. You'd write clever titles on the sticker and click out the tab so it couldn't be accidentally erased. I received some really good ones that introduced me to music to which I wouldn't normally have been exposed. You used a pencil also if the tape was particularly stiff or tightly wound, for whatever reason. It wasn't cool. It was just something you did. I can't comment on how 90s teens would have acted as I was mid to late twenties in the 90s. I generally agree with your larger point that film and media people don't get eras right when it's trivially easy to triangulate actual human perspectives of people who lived through them. Don't get me started on how the South is represented (or southern accents).
I actually would like to get you started on how the South is represented. I'm pretty unfamiliar with the culture down there, so I imagine it would be interesting to hear your thoughts.
I'll try to make an effort post at some point, thanks for the interest.
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I'm not George, but the accent thing drives me nuts. I've lived all over the south, but the one that infused my speech patterns during the language forming part of my childhood was the Kentucky/Tennessee/West Virginia Appalachian accent.
It's distinct from the lowland accent that you hear in Eastern Virginia, which is itself somewhat distinct from what you hear in Georgia (and Atlanta has its own thing going on). Louisiana has two distinct accents (the northern one sounds more like Alabama). Western Kentucky and Tennessee sound different than the Eastern half.
Despite all that, the only one you ever really see portrayed in the media is an abominable blend of Georgia and West Kentucky. It doesn't make sense. It's like blending a Boston accent and a Brooklyn accent into one voice for a character who was born and raised in West Covina.
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