Hey Kids, This Video Game Will Show You What The ’90s Were Like For Teenagers

The Internet is full of young’uns who regularly bemoan today’s state of pop affairs. Kids who say things like “The ’90s had Bikini Kill; we have Justin Bieber!” or “Argh, I was born in the wrong DECADE!!” and quietly imagine that every teenager’s ordinary day in the ‘90s was basically like that saturated Smashing Pumpkins video on repeat. Well, I lived through the ‘90s, kids: everyone just wore baggy overalls, prepared playground choreography to Vanilla Ice and Martika songs, and we didn’t even get My So-Called Life on Australian TV. Sigh, the upcoming video game Gone Home isn’t going to help matters.

Created by The Fullbright Company, an indie video game company established by three ex-BioShock developers, the title sees gamers taking the controls of a melancholic teenage schoolgirl in ‘90s-era Portland, Oregon, and solemnly navigating the intricacies of the young adult experience, past lockers pasted with Cobain posters and hand-scrawled fanzines and bedroom closets stacked with mixtapes and X-Files videos. To add even more authenticity to the proceedings, the creators have just announced that they’ve hooked up a pretty great soundtrack featuring the original music of Riot Grrrl pioneers, Bratmobile and Heavens To Betsy.

Judging from the newly released gameplay trailer, the game seems quite promising, taking the low-key mundanity of stuff like Heavy Rain‘s egg-frying scenes and transplanting it to the bedroom of a teenage girl in the era of ‘Brenda Walsh’ and ‘Kelly Kapowski’. I wasn’t exactly a girl in the ‘90s and I vividly remember having a heated conversation on the school bus with some blonde kid, smugly yelling, “You’re crazy, man! The Geto Boys are WAY better than Nirvana!”, so I’m equally as intrigued to live out the retro-typical “’90s teenage experience” as any other kid might be today. The game will be released on PC, Mac and Linux platforms later this year (faded flannel shirt and henna hair dye not included).