The Totally Wrong History of the Future According to Video Games

The best thing about mankind's constant quest to envision our own future is how totally and utterly wrong we constantly are. The Jetsons had suitcases that turned into cars. Back to the Future II had flying skateboards and a town built around a clean pond. Barb Wire thought it was a good idea to let Pamela Anderson hold a firearm. Not to be left out of the nonsense, video game developers spent the better part of the 80's, 90's and 2000's predicting a totally wrong future that would never actually happen. How can we prove that? Because in most cases, we've already passed the eras where these ridiculous visions where supposed to take place. For example...

Remember how good you felt after watching Spider-Man 2? Like the world was a bright and friendly place? Or when the rover Opportunity discovered that water had once been on Mars? That was such a great moment! Humanity was watching “LOST” and preparing for that trip to the Statue of Liberty, which had finally reopened after years of security concerns. Times were good, right?

FNW > TMZ.

Wrong, said Splinter Cell. Shut that Statue of Liberty back down! Because in 2004, the world is in constant turmoil, with assassination after assassination leading to a crisis in which terrorists are hiding a secret nuclear bomb in the United States. Thankfully, Splinter Cell also predicts that night vision goggles will boast infinite batteries and sneaking suits will works perfectly in any environment (read: in the shadows). So while Splinter Cell believed hackers would fight over secret information that could lead to World War III, you can rest easy knowing the biggest threat to humanity in 2004 was Shrek 2.

In all seriousness, 2005 was a terrifying year. Hurricane Katrina nearly decimated one of America’s greatest cities. The Senate and House of Representatives were shocked by corruption scandals. And the deaths of cultural icons such as Rosa Parks and John Paul II left many people feeling lost and scared.

I mean, sure, why not.

So it’s kind of a relief that 2005 didn’t also go the way Konami predicted in Metal Gear Solid. There weren’t any nuclear mechs capable of killing all human life. No cybernetic ninjas to massacre armies. No super soldier clones designed to conquer the world. Even Solid Snake’s mullet was way, way out of style by 2005. And, worst case scenario, even if 2005’s President was a paramilitary sleeper agent as the game implied, George W. Bush kind of left office in 2009 anyway.

Street Fighter 2010 stars Ken, a martial artist who retires from the sport to focus on being a scientist, so right out the gate we're presented with probably the most ridiculous elevator pitch in video game history, and that's saying a lot.That's like if Evander Holyfield hung up his boxing gloves to work for NASA. Or if Stephen Hawking gave up being a theoretical physicist in order to become a Jamaican bobsled racer. Sorry, this is just a really confusing premise and we're having a hard time getting over it.

Strip clubs of the future look nicer than 

New Jersey strip clubs of the present.

Anyway, in Street Fighter 2010 (which was supposed to take place two actual real years ago) people can easily adapt to cybernetic robot appendages and travel to different solar systems via interplanetary pan-dimensional warp portals, none of which stopped them from having to wear sunglasses indoors constantly. You have no idea how much no-sense this makes. Actually, the most unbelievable part of this entire story is that Capcom would ever retire anything Street Fighter related, because that would never happen ever. See: every year when 47 different Street Fighter games are still released.

How did you celebrate New Year's Eve in 2009? Did you get together with some friends, pour a few glasses of Champagne and watch a then-still-mumbling Dick Clark ring in the new decade as an amplified, televised image of New York City squealed in the background?

A totally plausible glimpse of the future as decided by quirky programmers in the 80's.

Well that's cool, because in 1987, Capcom predicted that by the end of 2009 (or 200X, so any year in the early 2000's, really) every single tool, appliance, concept, or general noun in existence would be in a perpetual robotic war at the whim of two senile, old white guys with varying degrees of bad hair. Everything from box fans to Zippo lighters to magnets (how do they work?) would spring to life amidst a cybernetic dystopia riddled with mechanized wildlife and weird doors that you could float through. In reality, 2009 brought us the hit single "Right Round" by rapper Flo Rida, so you can go ahead and flip a coin to decide which version of our world turned out better.

How did you party like it was 1999? Did you spend it getting burned to death by molten rock as Lavos emerged from the depths of the Earth? Remember when you ran away from all those white-hot spines that destroyed all of human civilization except for a few underground holdouts? And you know you were born in the ‘90s if you had to program a robot with all of human knowledge so all progress made over the millennium wasn’t lost in a wave of death.

Yes, this is JUST like that Prince song about 1999.

Oh wait, none of that happened. Instead, the worst thing that happened in 1999 was Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. And while everyone was terrified of Y2K, the worst to come of it was a few confused digital clocks. Maybe Lavos was just distracted by all his Napster downloads and new episodes of The Sopranos. Unless he was more of an Analyze This fan.



Source : ign[dot]com