Or, to be more precise, the retro-future. Ooh, get me.

The eighties were a weird time. I lived in what could politely be described as an industrial town on the verge of ruin. Looking back, it’s odd to note that as I grew up, instead of watching a town grow and flourish I watched it’s slide into the grip of high unemployment and all the trappings of society that follow on. Now, I’m sure I’m not unique in this regard – but rather than go off on one of my unfortunate Anti-Thatcher rants (it’s a bit like tourettes, I just can’t help it at times) I want to talk about something entirely different. I used to gorge myself on books, lots and lots of books – and some of my favourite reads were glances into the near future. Well, what some random author would consider to be the near future anyway.

From the visions of flying cars to your plastic pal who’s fun to be with, the year 2000 was supposed to be filled with glossy high tech gadgetry, robot maids and computers that did just about everything including wiping your backside. Maybe it was the childhood me wanting to see some hope for the future or perhaps it was just the fact that a lot of these books were filled with incredibly pretty pictures. Of course, we got to the year 2000 and I had a shit new year in a town sliding down the shitter ever more so. Not a flying car in sight. Gutting.

Thanks to friend of Mersey Remakes, Dan Marshall, I found myself glancing over at what I can quite happily say is “my new favourite blog”, Paleo-Future. Whilst I still love flicking through stuff like The Usborne Book Of The Future and Future Cities, the monolithic style of the late 70′s will always pale in comparison to my long held 50′s sci-fi fetish. The perfect example, coming courtesy of Paleo Future, comes in the shape of this book – Exploring Space.

Take a minute or two out of your life if you will and share my dream for a moment. You see, in the eighties we had ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64′s and the like. I knew then that there was no way I’d ever get a game that lived up to what I wanted to see and what I wanted to see was games that could bring this world to life. The brightly coloured rockets, the deep reds and the searing flames of lift off. The closest we came at the time was Dan Dare, and well, that had a lot of green. It doesn’t count. Sure, later we had Rocket Ranger but beyond the cover art, it didn’t really quite live up to the vision I had.

And now, it’s 2009. We’ve got more processing power to chuck around than you care to shake a stick at. We can create entire underwater cities, nuclear wastelands, even Chernobyl if it’s our want and I still haven’t got my game of the future. And it feels like such a waste. The worlds we’re wandering around are growing ever more detailed, ever more complex and cluttered. Even the tiniest detail on a paving stone can get hours of loving treatment to make it look “just right” and don’t get me started on “realistic flame physics”. Bah. Surely, now, more than at any time previous we’re able to sculpt and craft escapist worlds that bear little more than a passing resemblance to the reality we know. Surely now, game developers, designers and publishers – now is the time that we can make my game from the future appear?

Mirrors Edge gleaming dystopian future is certainly a step in the right direction, even if you spend rather too long running through corridors you feel like you’ve ran through a million times before instead of exploring the city. Bioshock’s Rapture was a wonderous place to lose yourself in regardless of any shortcomings the game may have had. And… and… oh, I’m stuck. It’s either orcs and fucking elves running around hilltops, the adolescent wank fantasies of someone who never quite got Alien out of his system or reality (or an approximation thereof). Is this the best we can do? Seriously?

I want flying cars. I want yellow rockets with red spoilers. I want the future I was promised as a kid to wander around. I want to feel like TinTin in Destination Moon. I want conveyor belts and pavements that arc around the skyline. No chainsaws, no crowbars, no weapons of mass evisceration – no, just a bubbley laser pistol will do – one that fires brightly coloured laser beams at six eyed green monsters. I want a jetpack goddamnit. Heck, I’ll even take a silver space helmet at this point.

I’m tired of the dirt, the grey, the shit brown and piss yellow hue of edgy gaming. I’m tired of dark spacecraft with things that go bump in the night or jump out of closets at you. I’m tired of seeing a city I can visit if I really want to rendered to silly amounts of detail. It’s no fun. It’s boring. If you can create a million and one Lord Of The Rings-esque fantasy environments, one of you lot out there can spare a thought for me, right? I can’t be the only one who wants a game that looks like this.

So come on game designers. Look to the future that never was and give me my flying car.