I have a confession to make: I’m a dedicated fan of anything remotely related to the Seventies: The clothes, the music, the furniture… Yep, it’s one of those rare decades that only gets better with age.
A lot of my inspiration and motivation for making this game has been the Sci-Fi movies of the early Seventies, like The Andromeda Strain, Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Capricorn One.
Retrofitting
One of the core features in the game is time travelling between fixed moments in the present and in the future. At some point an idea started growing in my mind – what if I moved the present from 2011 to 1971? The future time could then be set to now – fourty years later – in 2011. I decided to give it a go, and the more I worked with the idea, the more advantages spawned. Here’s a few:
- The Seventies are fun to look at! People had weird tapestry and bubbly chairs. People were much more experimenting in their choice of colors and materials. The freedom in color in particular allows us to use colors much more actively.
- Removing modern technology means that our hero doesn’t have a cell phone or computer access. This saves us a lot of “why doesn’t he just call for help?”, or “why doesn’t he just get the info on the internet?”-explanations.
- The World has changed a great deal since the Seventies, which allow us to make references which has a different meaning today than in 1971. Nixon was percieved to be a good president, OJ Simpson was extremely popular and you could actually smoke – in a plane!
- A lot of stuff was going on in the Seventies which we can use for the story – The Cold War, The Vietnam War, The Space Program and in particular the conspiracy theories which were popular at the time.
It’s proven to be a great decision, which not only gives a lot of options but also adds a lot of personality to the game.
