Mixtape Dials In to Universal Nostalgia
I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody

There are some things in this world you can’t argue with, and at the top of that list is Devo. They’re basically the coolest band ever, not just because their music sounds good (an important dimension to music, true), but because over 50 years ago they saw with stunning clarity and prescience which direction the world was heading in: straight down and always backwards. Devo could tell as far back as the ‘60s, when co-founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis met at Kent State’s art school, that humanity was circling the drain—that ignorance, fear, hatred, selfishness, and commercialism had coalesced to consign our species to a terminal spiral of de-evolution. And that was before the National Guard killed four of their fellow students while firing on a protest in 1970, a galvanizing tragedy that shocked America and inspired Casale and Lewis—who, by that time, had met a similarly minded local musician named Mark Mothersbaugh—to grapple with some of the darker and heavier implications of their joking sociological theory. With the music and films they made in the early ‘70s, before they were signed to a major label and performing on national TV, Devo were excited to tell us just how docile and unquestioning and goddamned stupid America was becoming—and this was over 50 years ago. Their video art from the time remains cool and weird and startling, their early synth / rock collisions of the era (as collected in the ‘90s in the Hardcore Devo comps) are as transgressive as ever, and then they improbably blew up big time in the later ‘70s, using Warner Bros.’ money to spread that message to the world at large. Between 1978 and 1982 they put out a new record every year that ranged from “very good” to “all-time classic,” put out a few more in the second half of the ‘80s that maybe we don’t talk about, and then retired from view a bit at the end of that decade, reuniting for tours and shows just often enough over the next few decades to give pretty much every future generation of Devo heads its own shot to see them live. And along the way de-evolution only became more and more undeniable, and at this point is the defining hallmark of American life.
De-evolution doesn’t really have anything to do with Mixtape, a new game I played for about a half-hour in Los Angeles earlier this week. Devo does, though; the first gameplay sequence of the demo (and, I assume, the finished game) was soundtracked to the band’s 1982 song “That’s Good.” It’s basically a perfect song for that moment in the game: I’m playing a teenager in the ‘90s who’s obsessed with music, who’s about to leave their hometown for New York City, whose future is bright and endless, and who’s currently endangering that future by skateboarding down a busy street on a steep, winding hill. The synthetic sounds of the future exposing the folly of humanity: that’s Devo, and that’s “That’s Good.” The skating controls are intentionally stripped down, just a kick, push, and jump, with no tricks or scoring; it’s about the experience, the freedom of youth (including the freedom to take stupid risks like skating down the middle of a road), and although I couldn’t quite get the timing right to kick when the hand claps hit on “That’s Good,” the song still drives the scene, as if it’s propelling my character Rockford down that hill more than gravity itself.
Johnny Galvatron, a musician and game designer from Australia whose studio Beethoven & Dinosaur is making Mixtape, absolutely loves Devo. “I would have done the whole fucking game with Devo if I could,” he tells me after my demo. “Not everyone can handle five hours of Devo, but I could.” He describes his band The Galvatrons as a cross between Devo and Van Halen (who also get a reference early in the Mixtape demo), and with Mixtape he’s trying to capture a vibe that reflects both bands—the arty edge of one, the endless party hedonism of the other—as well as the mythical experience of the American teenager at any point in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as defined by movies and TV.
To keep it more universal, Mixtape’s era is a little uncertain. Despite starting with a song from 1982, everything about it screams the mid ‘90s, when “alternative” was the dominant form of rock music. But then Rockford, whose ambition is to become a music supervisor for films, listens to burned CDs, a technology that wasn’t cheaply available to the public until the end of the ‘90s. (I didn’t know anybody who could burn CDs until 2000, and even then it was on a university-owned computer at a college radio station.) “I like to say the whole game is a mixtape,” Galvatron says. “The music is a mixtape. There’s a mixtape of eras. There’s a mixtape of technology. Even the characters are from slightly different eras, where Rockford’s like from 1988 and then [long-haired, grungy slacker] Slater is definitely from 1994.”