No Escape

I don’t like Mixtape (Beethoven and Dinosaur, 2026). I am going to be a hater in this review. If that’s not something you’re looking for, I have good news! Quite a few other critics adored this game. IGN’s Simon Cardy gave it a 10/10. Game Informer’s Charles Harte gave it a 9. Over at GamesRadar+, Rollin Bishop gave the game four stars, calling it a “nostalgic, vibes-based experience set to a shockingly solid soundtrack” and “a short, meaningful game that’s relatively light on mechanics.” Giovanni Colantonio over at Polygon made a whole mixtape of his own that’s meant to go along with his review of the game. If you’re looking for positivity about this game, there’s plenty of it! I am not going to give it to you. Sorry, thanks for stopping by!

I have made it clear on-record in the past that I do not fuck with Beethoven and Dinosaur’s output. I thought The Artful Escape sucked on toast. You can read my thoughts on that game here. I wanted to give Mixtape a try because, as much as I recoiled at the game’s desperate-to-invoke-John-Hughes-ass reveal trailer, replete as it was with a Hal Douglas-impersonating narrator, it is always possible for a bunch of creative people to create something interesting in ways that might surprise you. I grumbled and I groaned and I made a bunch of noise about being a big ol’ hater prior to the game’s launch, but genuinely, I did not initially want to put Beethoven and Dinosaur in a box. It is crazy to hope a video game is bad before it comes out.

It turns out that Beethoven and Dinosaur are even more predictable than I held out hope for and they deserved to be put in a box the entire fucking time.

Mixtape is a four-hour-long interactive movie meant to emulate 80s and 90s teen comedies a la The Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, American Pie, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It centers around protagonist Stacey Rockford, a soon-to-be-graduated senior in high school in the fictional Northern California town of Blue Moon Lagoon, and her two friends, Van Slater and Cassandra Morino. Mainly, though, the game is focused on Stacey to the exclusion of basically everyone else. We’ll get to that.

When Mixtape starts, Stacey is less than 24 hours away from getting on a plane to New York City so she can pull up on a famous music supervisor unannounced at a random coffee shop and demand to become her protege. This final day in Blue Moon Lagoon, aka “The Big Suck,” is going to be capped off with a massive party, so Stacey, Slater and Cassandra set out to prepare: pick up a booze stash, pregame at their secret hideout, then get totally fucked up at the big party. Things don’t go as planned, hijinks ensue, and a whole lot of relationships are reframed, recontextualized and reforged as the timer ticks down on the three friends’ last night together. As a teen comedy goes, this one maybe wouldn’t score points on originality, but depending on the execution could be a decently mindless time out at the movies. More on this later as well.

“They told me that the classics never go out of style, but they do, they do. Somehow baby, I never thought that we’d do too”

The distinguishing factor in Mixtape is that it is structured around a mixtape. Stacey has wanted to be a music supervisor for movies since she was in the eighth grade, and so she has made her identity around devising the “perfect” soundtrack to every situation in her life and that of her friends’ and family’s. She has become a music otaku of sorts (my word, not the game’s), obsessed with pairing every moment with the perfect song, exceedingly judgmental of anyone who doesn’t share her passion, and of course highly opinionated on what exactly counts as “good” or “appropriate” music for any given moment.

And so, for this final day of her adolescent life, Stacey has devised a massive tracklist: 22 songs to reminisce, skate, get fucked up and rage to. And that’s not just in her head or her headphones—that’s the whole game. Every chapter, flashback, and Big Moment is punctuated by a needle drop from Stacey’s mixtape. At first, these song transitions were inoffensive, hardly noticeable, and a couple of them even matched the moment pretty well. The problem is that with every transition, Stacey has to tell you about the song and why it’s important. Every song is like this, up until the last goddamn one. At no point are you, the player, trusted to hear the music as matched up to the events in the game and allowed to make your own determination as to whether it actually fits or not.

The reason the game doesn’t give you the space to think about the soundtrack is because everything hinges on it, not just narratively but in the core of Stacey’s personality. At the very beginning of the game, she launches into a monologue about the importance of making a soundtrack, of setting the events of your life in relief against the music you love, “because pretty soon you won’t be listening to music, you’ll be listening to who you were.” She says that this final day’s soundtrack is important, it’s a retrospective, one that required preparation and a schedule to really craft properly. And so we’re already placed on rails here: this is Stacey’s show and any deviation from the programming is unacceptable.

I want to talk about Slater and Cassandra for a second. Initially projected as protagonists, they have instead been relegated to the supporting cast(e) in this story. This is a real shame, because of our three principal characters I think they are far more interesting and deserving of exploration than Stacey. Slater is a metal fan who also has interests in visual arts, screenprinting and composing electronic music. He’s easily stereotyped as a hesher but his sensitivity, maturity and curiosity about the world are ripe materials for character development in a story like this. Similarly, Cassandra’s character is almost begging to be developed further than it is, positioned as she is as the high-achieving daughter of a local police officer who is also of mixed ethnicity and struggling to fit in among the predominately white, conservative, Reagan-loving population of Blue Moon Lagoon. Cassandra is constantly looking for ways to rebel, not just against her overbearing parents but the entire system at large. She’s strong, as evinced by the absolute HEATER home runs she can hit in softball; she’s smart, going to college for pre-law; and she’s the center of the most badass scene in the game when she finally stares down her dad and makes him understand her perspective.

And for all of this possibility, none of it matters unless it’s relevant to Stacey, in terms of how much it either facilitates or gets in the way of her ideal last night in town. It certainly doesn’t influence her song choices for either of her friends, and she never asks them for input on what they would like to hear in any given moment, either.

“My mixtapes bend others to my will”

There’s no way around this: Mixtape uses nostalgia as a bludgeon to beat players to death with. There is a specific Type Of Guy whose presence is overrepresented in games media for whom this game is basically catnip. It is meant to trigger emotions so powerful in that specific Type Of Guy that when they write or talk about it, they frame the bill of goods that Mixtape is selling as the universal growing up and coming-of-age experience, that it is so authentic and classic and true-to-life that surely everyone who has ever lived has experienced, or wanted to experience it.

The soundtrack is almost exclusively psych rock, new wave, or alternative rock. I say “almost” because there is exactly one R&B song on here—”Have You Seen Her” by the Chi-Lites—a needle drop of Alice Coltrane’s “Galaxy in Turiya,” and at one point Stacey mentions that Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” was originally slated to play during a scene, but now all she could muster was “Shine” by David Gray followed by Portishead’s “Roads.” There’s also bewilderingly a fucking synthwave song from 2011 in this game, literally called “Remember When,” as if we couldn’t get more on the nose about how much this game wants you to Be Nostalgic.

Here’s the full list, in credits order:

• JOY DIVISION – “Atmosphere” (British New Wave, 1980)
• DEVO – “That’s Good” (US New Wave, 1982)
• THE CURE – “Plainsong” (British New Wave, 1989)
• THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN – “Just Like Honey” (British Alt Rock, 1985)
• LUSH – “Monochrome” (British Alt Rock, 1991)
• THE CHI-LITES – “Have You Seen Her” (US R&B/Soul, 1971)
• MITCH MURDER – “Remember When” (Swedish Synthwave, 2011)
• MONDO ROCK – “State of the Heart” (Australian Rock, 1980)
• STAN BUSH – “The Touch” (US Pop/Rock, 1986)
• BJ THOMAS – “Most of All” (US Pop, 1970)
• PORTISHEAD – “Roads” (British Trip-Hop, 1994)
• SILVERCHAIR – “Freak” (Australian Grunge, 1997)
• THE SMASHING PUMPKINS – “Love” (US Alt Rock, 1995)
• IGGY POP – “Candy” (US Rock, 1990)
• ALICE COLTRANE – “Galaxy in Turiya” (US Jazz, 1972)
• ROXY MUSIC – “More Than This” (British Pop, 1982)
• SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES – “Spellbound” (British Post-Punk, 1981)
• RAINBOW – “Sensitive to Light” (British Rock, 1978)
• HARPERS BIZARRE – “Witchi Tai To” (US Pop, 1969)
• JOHN PAUL YOUNG – “Yesterday’s Hero” (Australian Pop, 1975)
• DAVID GRAY – “Shine” (British Folk-Rock, 1993)
• STAN BUSH – “Dare” (US Pop/Rock, 1986)

(Outside of these licensed tracks, there are six fictitious songs scattered throughout the game.)

In a vacuum, this soundtrack seems perfectly anodyne, if not also blindingly white and anglophone. If I was feeling particularly shitty I might call this playlist “The Cool Landlord Special,” or “The Millennial Gastropub Owner’s Desired Vibe.” By itself, I’m not gonna shit on anyone for liking Roxy Music, Portishead and Siouxsie and the Banshees. But if we’re talking about the context the game is in, e.g., a teen movie set in 1999, the majority of this shit feels wildly out of wack, with very few exceptions. Add to this context the fact that within the game, in actual spoken dialogue, Stacey tells us that she tapes MTV every single day while she’s at school to stay up on current trends.

So with this in mind, for shits and giggles I looked up both the Billboard Hot 100 list for 1999 and the TRL (Total Request Live) charts for June, July and August of that year. What was popular in 1999?

According to the first quarter of Billboard’s Top 100 for the year:

• 1. CHER – “Believe”
• 2. TLC – “No Scrubs”
• 3. MONICA – “Angel of Mine”
• 4. WHITNEY HOUSTON feat. Faith Evans and Kelly Price – “Heartbreak Hotel”
• 5. BRITNEY SPEARS – “…Baby One More Time”
• 6. SIXPENCE NONE THE RICHER – “Kiss Me”
• 7. CHRISTINA AGUILERA – “Genie in a Bottle”
• 8. SUGAR RAY – “Every Morning”
• 9. DEBORAH COX – “Nobody’s Supposed to Be Here”
• 10. RICKY MARTIN – “Livin’ la Vida Loca”
• 11. 702 – “Where My Girls At?”
• 12. JENNIFER LOPEZ – “If You Had My Love”
• 13. GOO GOO DOLLS – “Slide”
• 14. BRANDY – “Have You Ever?”
• 15. BACKSTREET BOYS – “I Want It That Way”
• 16. R. KELLY feat. Celine Dion – “I’m Your Angel”
• 17. SMASH MOUTH – “All Star”
• 18. SARAH MCLACHLAN – “Angel” Sarah McLachlan
• 19. SANTANA feat. Rob Thomas – “Smooth”
• 20. TLC – “Unpretty”
• 21. DESTINY’S CHILD – “Bills, Bills, Bills”
• 22. EAGLE-EYE CHERRY – “Save Tonight”
• 23. PEARL JAM – “Last Kiss”
• 24. MAXWELL – “Fortunate”
• 25. BACKSTREET BOYS – “All I Have to Give”

And here’s June, July and August, 1999’s TRL top 10s:

• 15. EMINEM – The Slim Shady LP – *Runner-Up #5: “Guilty Conscience” f/Dr. Dre
• 14. V/A – Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me – *Runner-Up #4: Madonna – “Beautiful Stranger”
• 13. BLINK-182 – Enema of the State – *Runner-Up #3: “What’s My Age Again?”
• 12. GERI HALLWELL – Schizophonic – *Runner-Up #2: “Look At Me”
• 11. TLC- Fanmail – *Runner-Up #1: “No Scrubs”
• 10. RICKY MARTIN – S/T – “Livin’ La Vida Loca”
• 9. ORGY – Candyass – “Stitches”
• 8. JENNIFER LOPEZ- On the 6 – “If You Had My Love”
• 7. JOEY MCINTYRE – Stay the Same – “I Love You Came Too Late”
• 6. WILL SMITH – Willennium – “Wild Wild West” f/Dru Hill & Kool Moe Dee
• 5. KID ROCK – Devil Without a Cause – “Bawitdaba”
• 4. LIMP BIZKIT – Significant Other – “Nookie”
• 3. BRITNEY SPEARS – …Baby One More Time – “Sometimes”
• 2. *NSYNC – S/T – “I Drive Myself Crazy”
• 1. BACKSTREET BOYS – Millennium – “I Want It That Way”

• 15. THE OFFSPRING – Americana – *Runner-Up #5: “The Kids Aren’t Alright”
• 14. JENNIFER LOPEZ – On the 6 – *Runner-Up #4: “If You Had My Love”
• 13. *NSYNC – S/T – *Runner-Up #3: “I Drive Myself Crazy”
• 12. TLC – Fanmail – *Runner-Up #2: “Unpretty”
• 11. SMASH MOUTH – Astro Lounge – *Runner-Up #1: “All Star”
• 10. KID ROCK – Devil Without a Cause – “Bawitdaba”
• 9. EMINEM – The Slim Shady LP – “Guilty Conscience” f/Dr. Dre
• 8. ORGY – Candyass – “Stitches”
• 7. CHRISTINA AGUILERA – S/T – “Genie In A Bottle”
• 6. JOEY MCINTYRE – Stay the Same – “I Love You Came Too Late”
• 5. BLINK-182 – Enema of the State – “What’s My Age Again?”
• 4. 98° – 98° and Rising – “I Do (Cherish You)”
• 3. BRITNEY SPEARS – …Baby One More Time – “Sometimes”
• 2. LIMP BIZKIT – Significant Other – “Nookie”
• 1. BACKSTREET BOYS – Millennium – “I Want It That Way”

• 15. ORGY – Candyass – “Stitches”
• 14. BLINK-182 – Enema of the State (1999) – *Runner-Up #4: “What’s My Age Again?”
• 13. RICKY MARTIN – S/T – *Runner-Up #3: “She’s All I Ever Had”
• 12. SILVERCHAIR – Neon Ballroom – *Runner-Up #2: “Ana’s Song (Open Fire)”
• 11. TOM GREEN – *Runner-Up #1: “Lonely Swedish (The Bum Bum Song)”
• 10. BACKSTREET BOYS – Millennium – “I Want It That Way”
• 9. BRITNEY SPEARS – …Baby One More Time – “(You Drive Me) Crazy”
• 8. BRITNEY SPEARS – …Baby One More Time – “Sometimes”
• 7. LFO – S/T – “Summer Girls”
• 6. KID ROCK – Devil Without a Cause – “Cowboy”
• 5. TLC – Fanmail – “Unpretty”
• 4. V/A – Music of the Heart – *NSYNC & Gloria Estefan – “Music Of My Heart”
• 3. CHRISTINA AGUILERA – S/T – “Genie In A Bottle”
• 2. 98° – 98° and Rising – “I Do (Cherish You)”
• 1. LIMP BIZKIT – Significant Other – “Nookie”

That sure is a lot of boy bands, girlie pop, R&B, pop-punk, nu-metal, and the last vestiges of grunge. And these are only the most surface-level indicators of what people were listening to in 1999. You could’ve looked to Rolling Stone, to The Source, to Spin Magazine—hell, both Pitchfork AND Exclaim were in operation by 1999, and they both had websites! It is not completely 100% out of the question that Stacey Rockford could have the taste she has to the exclusion of all else; it’s just also really unlikely that absolutely nothing else could have seeped in. No KRS-One drop as Stacey, Cass and Slater bomb a hill in a shopping cart escaping a house party as the cops raid it? No Sleater-Kinney or Bikini Kill during Cass’s peak moments of frustration? No discovery that Slater loves Godspeed You! Black Emperor? No yelled “WELL I GUESS THIS IS GROWING UP” from the literal Number 5-most-requested band on MTV’s Total Request Live in July 1999, blink-182?

I wanna be clear: I’m not trying to be an armchair developer here. I’m not saying certain songs should have been featured over others. I certainly don’t know what it took to get the rights to the 22 songs that do appear on this game’s soundtrack, and I don’t even wanna pretend to guess at what it might take to keep this game around for more than a few years, given the fickle nature of song licenses and games. But we are tying this game to a time and a place; we are trying to evoke a very specific sense of nostalgia. Again, there’s literally a synthwave song from 2011 by Mitch Murder called “Remember When” on here, we don’t gotta fuck around about this: this is not nostalgia for 1999, it is nostalgia for a childhood nobody has ever actually had. It is a simulacrum of a simulation of suburban adolescence. It is in keeping with Johnny Galvatron’s creative output up to this point, such as the first EP he put out with his band, The Galvatrons, in 2008, “When We Were Kids.” Literally the first thing the director of Mixtape put out in his creative career was a look back… at what, exactly?

without even really knowing it, you yourself have spent your entire life silently training to be ready to conjure up story after story of past wistful yearning as well. maybe you won’t need them, but: remember that you can drop these tearful treasured memories like a bomb on others the second anyone doubts for a single second that you are, or at least were, passionate. you could even bring them up if you ever run for public office and your authenticity is ever called into question. this path is a crucial part of you – it’s your birthright. you’ve continually demonstrated that you’re a good, normal, media-consuming individual from birth – no one can question that. it’s important to think about that. don’t let others dilute your mindset.

and yet your rapidly growing confidence somehow doesn’t push away the also rapidly growing dread you feel that these stories have started sounding indistinguishable from each other in their millionth retelling. you wonder, in the back of your mind, if all the trips you’ve taken to the memory office inside your head haven’t left your inner world increasingly stripped of any kind of imagination. sometimes you worry that you have no real distance. can you ever grow past these stories? do others want you to grow past these stories? hasn’t the strange ritual of sharing them simply begun to make less sense every time you do it? isn’t it all just scattered jigsaw pieces of aimless cultural waste, invoked by you in an increasingly disjointed manner? are we all just performing this elaborate, impassioned ceremony in an attempt to prove to ourselves, or to others… are these memories actually real at all?

—Liz Ryerson, Let’s Play Life, “The Memory Office”

I am 34 years old, not too terribly far away from 35 at this point. I was born in Southern California, went to elementary school and made my first group of friends in a suburb of San Diego called Murrieta, then moved to a Los Angeles exurb called Apple Valley (technically in the middle of the High Desert of San Bernardino County) when I was about to hit middle school. When I was 13, my family decided to pull up California roots and set them down in Edmond, Oklahoma, about 30 minutes away from Oklahoma City. That’s more or less where I’ve lived, made friends, and developed all my most recent memories for the last 21 years. My memories of childhood and adolescence contain enough that I recognize in a game like Mixtape that the nostalgia factor does indeed kick in for me, despite the material reality of that period still being different enough to matter. And yet it is not enough for me to respond to that feeling of nostalgia, to give into its call. It is worth examining why an Australian rocker whose music career started in 2007 has decided to make games set in Colorado and California in the 90s, with soundtracks almost exclusively based in the 60s, 70s and 80s British and American rock eras. It is worth examining why so many video games are set in the Pacific Northwest, why so many game narratives take on the shape of an edgy 80s or 90s teen comedy or steep themselves in the signifiers of suburbia so heavily. What would it mean for a game like this to be set in Queens in 1993, or Mexico City in 2015, or Mumbai in 2000, or Melbourne in 2008?

Teenagers are assholes. I was an asshole as a teenager, I’m pretty sure my parents were asshole teenagers, and everyone you or I know were most likely also assholes as teenagers. More than any bit of nostalgia-bait in Mixtape I know this to be a true universal about the world: you are an asshole before you become an adult (at which point it’s an open question as to whether you will continue to be an asshole). Stacey Rockford is an asshole. She’s an asshole to her parents, to her friends, to people in authority trying to keep her from doing what she wants to do, and of course, to random other teenagers like Jenny Fucking Goodspeed, whose only crime was not liking the music in Close Encounters III and being a little bit shallow otherwise. I cannot begrudge Stacey for being an asshole, because I get it. Her friends: also assholes, by the way! But I do think the way you’re an asshole matters a little bit. And in that regard, Stacey kinda sucks beyond the background asshole radiation of your average teen.

The conflict at the heart of Mixtape is that Stacey is going to New York when she’s supposed to be accompanying Slater and Cass on a roadtrip down the California coastline to deliver Cass to college. As we play, we learn that this roadtrip wasn’t a spontaneous thing; the group had been planning it for months, if not years, and if anything, Stacey’s decision to jet to the east coast on a whim is the spontaneous action happening here. Cass is eaten the fuck up about it, because—as we see through various flashbacks and dreamlike sequences where the two of them are floating off the roof of Cass’s house, holding hands—there kinda sorta might be a little mutual unexpressed attraction between her and Stacey. Even Slater is a bit sad, having known Stacey the longest and cherishing some of the more mundane memories he has of their friendship the most. But to Stacey it doesn’t seem to get across that what she positions as “following her dreams” has affected her friends so deeply, beyond just being irritated at her departure. She dismisses any barbs Cass throws her way. And she acts utterly shocked when Cass eventually blows up at her about it. But instead of taking this moment to take stock of her decisions, Stacey simply gets mad that her mixtape is ruined.

When the two of them do inevitably make up, it is Cass who lightens up about Stacey’s decision, not the other way around.

Stacey invariably gets the happy ending. The conflict is resolved around her.

What are we supposed to do with this?

Mixtape misunderstands what it is to love music and want to share it with people. It correctly intuits that music intertwines itself with memories, and can become triggers to return to times and places you hold most dear. But what it fails to understand or articulate is that liking music is not a solitary act, nor is it something that can be imposed on people. Stacey has this idea that her mixtapes can “bend people to her will,” understanding that selecting the right song for the right moment in a movie (or a game) can heavily influence the emotional state of the viewer, listener or player. But she fails to realize that in her daily life, other people are real. Cass has to scream this fact at her, to remind her that she and Slater are not sidekicks. What music would Slater play in a given moment? Or Cass? Or Stacey’s sister? Or Jenny Fucking Goodspeed? Or Camille Cole? We never ask the question. Nobody ever makes a mixtape for Stacey. We never get to hear anyone else in the game express their love of music. And that feels like the biggest misstep of all.