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Retro-futurism in gaming
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The retro-future genre has recently become a popular topic for video games, but it has a long established history in architecture and design. This article takes a look at the history of retrofuturism in video and role-playing games.
 Courtesy Wikimedia. |
This term "retro-futurism" was coined by a group calling themselves the "Tape-beatles," who began a "Hypermedia Magazine" called "Retrofuturism" in 1987. It references the futuristic vision of past generations ranging from the 1920s through the 1960s. This vision is technology-focused and overly simplified. Indeed, a recent games and movies that feature retro-futurism explore the utter failure of these dreams and how a culture deals with the aftermath.
Architecture is probably the most recognizable difference in retro-futurism. Known as googie or populuxe design. John Lautner, who designed a coffee shop named Googie's with this style, coined the term. Googie features sweeping roofs, geometric shapes, and frequent use of steel, neon, and glass. Space age-style elements like flying saucers and starbursts are also a common theme. Googie design was popular with motels, coffee houses and bowling alleys, which had to step up their advertising so that they could be seen from the roadside.
Retro-futurism is also reflected in technology. Ray guns, jetpacks, floating and underwater cities, people-moving platforms, flying cars, and robot companions are all common features. Their feasibility was vastly overestimated in some cases, while in others they were extremely prescient. Where's My Jetpack?, by Daniel H. Wilson, takes a harsh look at the end results of these technical aspirations and where they fell short.
The movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow takes place in an alternate 1939 where the Hindenberg never crashed, zeppelins rule the skies, and giant robots regularly wreak havoc upon law-abiding citizens. Sky Captain features robot servants, ray guns, and lost dinosaurs, mixing pulp-style adventure with retro-futurism. In Sky Captain, retro-futurism is portrayed as a destructive threat to the world as we know it. Dr. Totenkopf seeks to leave the current world behind and build his own World of Tomorrow.
Stubbs the Zombie, a game for the original Xbox, featured the 1959 utopian city of Punchbowl, Pennsylvania. Stubbs contrasted the optimism of the 50s with the Great Depression, the era when Stubbs lived and died. Stubbs featured robot servants, ray guns, hover cars, and standardized jumpsuits. Unlike the games that would come later, Stubbs took place during the envisioned future promised in the 20s with a 50s sensibility. Stubbs emphasized the class elitism inherent in retro-futurism – there are no poor people in the future – and a plague of zombies embodied the working man's uprising that threatened such vision.
BioShock takes place in 1960. Like Stubbs, the retro-futuristic vision has been realized in Rapture, a utopian underwater city. BioShock focuses on the failure of the promise of retro-futurism. By the time the protagonist arrives, Rapture has transformed into a dystopian nightmare: citizens have gone mad from genetic splicing, Rapture has sprung leaks, and little girls stalk the hallways accompanied by hulking cyborg guardians. BioShock combines retro-futurism with Ayn Rand's objectivism. It is rife with robot servants, ray guns, genetic manipulation, and the promise of a perfect city beneath the waves.
William Gibson coined the term "raygun gothic" to apply googie-style design to science fiction, best embodied by the video game Fallout 3. Fallout 3 takes place 2277, 200 years after a nuclear war. The protagonist emerges from a Vault, the ideals of retro-futurism still intact, only to discover that the dream is dead. Robot servants, ray guns, and genetic manipulation are all manipulated into something more sinister than they were intended.
Because retro-futurism is such a malleable concept, it can be applied to just about any genre in gaming. As a result, it doesn't take much to incorporate retro-futurism into role-playing game campaigns. But perhaps the best choice is the game engine originally planned for Fallout, the Generic Universal Role-Playing System (GURPS). Although the designers of Fallout ultimately did not use GURPS as a rules set, there's enough commonalities between the two that there are fan conversions available. There's also a GURPS setting book set in a retro-future, Tales of the Solar Patrol.
Fallout 3 has a lot in common with the d20 system. Skills are dervied from statistics in a similar fashion, with the exception of Wisdom which is replaced by Perception. Perks are just like Feats. Much of this territory was covered in two versions of Gamma World using the d20 system; Jonathan Tweet's Omega World published in Dungeon Magazine 94 and an official d20 series of books by Sword & Sorcery Studios. In fact, Chris Avellone, creative director at Obsidian Entertainment, used a pen-and-paper D&D-style game to playtest Black Isle's version of Fallout 3's characters and abilities. He ran over 30 sessions with six players. A Fallout tabletop role-playing game was also created by J.E. Sawyer, one of the designers of Black Isle's cancelled Fallout 3.
There were plans to create an official Fallout conversion for the d20 role-playing game system. Glutton Creeper Games signed a contract with Interplay in 2006 to create a licensed d20 Modern setting. One year later, ZeniMax Media/Bethesda Softworks issued a cease and desist letter, claiming that Interplay never had the rights to license the Fallout intellectual property and that it may damage the Fallout brand. Glutton Creeper Games changed the Fallout game to a more generic post-apocalyptic setting titled Exodus.
And so retro-futurism in role-playing games came full circle, from GURPS to d20. Whatever system you choose, remember: retro-futurism is a state of mind. Be it optimistic or cynical, it's all about our predictions for a future that didn't quite turn out the way we planned.
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