In 2013, the New Museum in New York presented an exhibition titled NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (named after an album by Sonic Youth). It curated art from the year of Bill Clinton’s inauguration. Soon after, New Jersey’s Montclair Art Museum featured Come As You Are: Art of the
Nostalgia for the 1990s seems to have become the stock in trade for videogames over the past few years. I’m thinking of the tongue-in-cheek revisit to MS-DOS’s glory days of Vlambeer’s GUN GODZ (2012) and the brutal, tasteful modern reconfiguration of the 90s shooter in this year’s Devil Daggers. Bu
Malware. Blech! We hate malware. And so we should—deleting files, maliciously clogging up our desktops, turning our browsers into never-ending adverts. But it’s so boring and irritating these days. At least back in the 1980s and 1990s you could take a step back and admire both the technical and arti
You don’t really see screensavers all that often anymore. I know that when my computer enters sleep mode, I just have it set to display a black screen. It’s the same thing for all my friends as well as most offices I’ve visited since turning 13-years-old. Maybe it’s a consequence of our modern habit
Ah, the elusive Night Trap Fan. You hear of them often, but actual sightings remain a rarity. The creators of the infamous 1992 FMV (which, in part, sparked the videogame backlash that lead to the ESRB ratings we hold dear today) spoke about their many legions of fans last year when the Kickstarter
Sometimes the internet guffs out material so zany that I remember why I like it. This month it’s a new website titled WINDOWS93 that’s providing this service. It transports you back to the 1990s through a wormhole made of broken memories. Starting up as if it were Windows 95—albeit with the nostalgi
The ’90s was truly the last analog decade. When the new millennium rolled around we all made the switch over to digital as if it were commanded by time itself. It was a gradual process: the first 3G networks appeared in 1998 to pave the way for the ubiquity of all-purpose mobile phones; Apple introd
Hac (pronounced “Hajj”) is a videogame about the worst parts of driving. Washing the mud out of the grill; changing the battery; losing the keys in the space between the door and your seat; packing suitcases and sleeping bags into a trunk that’s way too small. More than anything else, it’s concerned
If the faces of the AOL Instant Messenger conversations of yore were to attain sentience and corporeal forms, the design of the post-apocalyptic world of The Great Emoticon is arguably what that reality would look like. The trailer released by developer Hit That Switch last week looks to be another
I envision a short-hair-era Angelina Jolie gliding in on a hoverboard, clad in Chemical Brothers-orange cargo pants, to deliver this idea to the minds of Harmonix Studios. Their surprise announcement of A City Sleeps is a gnarly throwback to all things ’90s: Treasure-style shooters, a character name
You know the ones. No, not those of Cindy Crawford and the cast of Baywatch, but the ones you’d eventually get to if you kept on flipping, which portrayed wilderness scenes with vaguely new age or pagan imagery. That pretty much describes the look of the surreal exploration game Cylne, currently on
