Mixtape - hits, tricks and teenage kicks

There’s a party tonight, and all the cliques are invited: rich kids, athletes, horse girls, skaters and, somewhere among them, Stacey Rockford, an aspiring music supervisor, and her best friends, Cassandra Morino and Van Slater. The problem, as both plot and party demand, is that they have no booze – although, mercifully, there are leads. In literature as in life, the quest for alcohol often masks a more painful reality, and these three friends know, even if they cannot say it, that they are about to be broken apart. 

Cass is headed to study in Los Angeles, and Van will drive her there from northern California. Stacey is bound for New York, a coastline and a universe away. The trio are caught at a moment of confused melancholy: thrilled by the lives waiting for them, already grieving the one they must leave behind. At some point, the sorrow and finality of parting will cut through the hormones. It is a moment from which some people never fully recover.

Mixtape is a coming-of-age story, one that explores this rich emotional terrain through a series of nostalgic vignettes, each set to one of 28 shrewdly chosen alt-rock tracks, from Joy Division to Portishead. Some of these scenes unfold on the day of the party, as the characters drift through the rituals of teenage abandon. Others are flashbacks, triggered by mementoes in Stacey’s bedroom. 

In one sequence, you pilot a shopping trolley through the streets, your friends clinging on as police cars give chase. Later, you leap in great arching jumps through a field of poppies, as electricity pylons buzz on the horizon. 

The game is directed by Johnny Galvatron, the Australian rock musician who later moved into game development with The Artful Escape, a psychedelic adventure about a teenage folk musician trying to outrun his uncle’s musical legacy. Mixtape is similarly music-centred, but in ways that reflect the personalities and obsessions of its characters. In the glorious absence of smartphones, taste is how its characters sort the world, test one another, and decide what sort of people they want to be. Stacey spends much of the game asking whether things are, or are not, “metal”. Should she cut her hair, she asks Van at one point. “People say cutting your hair is not metal,” he reflects. “But you know what’s not metal? Caring about people’s hair.”

Beyond its expertly curated licensed tracks, Mixtape has a texture all its own: bright synths and tight snares, golden-hour Polaroids, ugly-beautiful photobooth shoots. It understands the life of a certain kind of teenager: skate-adjacent, elitist about music, and possessed by an unshakeable belief in their own taste. This was a time when outsider cool still had to be cultivated over hours in record shops, magazines, message boards and bedrooms, before taste arrived in the slick package of an algorithmic recommendation. The game’s looseness reflects its thesis: that memory is a kind of mixtape, and that the most important teenage friendships are glued together by private jokes and songs that endure even after the people are gone.

Illustration courtesy Annapurna