Talking ’bout my generation

For all his flaws, popular American song-and-dance man Michael Jackson was on the nose when he said, “All of us are products of our childhood”. Whether consciously or not, we are all in thrall to our pasts. Early hip-hop producers sampled funk tracks; late-’90s house-music knob-twiddlers plundered their parents’ disco collections. So it’s only natural that modernday game-makers should look to their childhood loves for inspiration, be that

Broforce’s homage to ’ 80s action cinema, Gone Home’s love letter to analogue tape, or the way Hidetaka Miyazaki’s youthful adoration of Bram Stoker’s Dracula permeates Bloodborne.

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, but it’s still a powerful thing, and a potentially lucrative one; gaming may be a broad church, but we are all of a certain age, sharing pop-cultural touchstones. So when Foam Sword tells us that its hand-painted adventure Knights & Bikes (p44) is inspired by The Goonies, our ears prick up. When Platinum reveals that the next chapter in its ongoing anthology of licensed Bayonetta reskins is Teenage Mutant

Ninja Turtles: Mutants In Manhattan (p54), the entire office starts humming the theme tune from a 25-year-old cartoon. And as soon as we lay eyes on Unbox (p52), we remember N64 splitscreen and blue-sky 3D platformers and start hunting around for three more controllers.

By contrast, Epic Games’ Paragon (p40) is inspired by the achingly contemporary MOBA. Yet what Epic shares with this month’s Hype nostalgists is an honest acknowledgement of its influences, a refreshing stance given other studios’ puzzling attempts to distance MOBA-inspired games from the label itself. There’s honesty, too, in Quantum Break (p34), which after all that fuss about its live-action component, turns out to be a very Remedy game at heart, a shooter from a studio that loves and excels at them. The next generation of young designers will have plenty to call on.