Why the Entertainment Industry Can't Let Go of the 90s

Anyone paying attention to pop culture for the last two decades has noticed it doesn’t move anymore; it treads water. And worst of all, it memorializes.

But not in the poetic sense. Current Year entertainment doesn’t enshrine cultural touchstones like a Homeric poem. It’s more like a corporate memo dug out of a filing cabinet marked “Boomer Monetization Playbook: 1987.”

Don’t kid yourself. What we’re seeing now is not an organic nostalgia movement. It’s targeted extraction, and the target is Generation Y.

Let’s unpack the rationale at work here.

1990s nostalgia already happened. It kicked off about a decade ago, like clockwork. That’s when the first wave of Gen Ys hit their mid-30s: just old enough to have kids and money, just young enough to still be emotionally tethered to their childhood.

So the entertainment-industrial complex dusted off the Pokémon, the Power Rangers, the pixel fonts, and the neon gradients. They hit us with retro T-shirts, remastered SNES games, and painfully self-aware sitcom revivals.

Image: Peacock

But in a marked depature from past corporate milking fads, the Madison Avenue pitch men didn’t jettison the 90s retro campaign after its sell-by date. Instead of moving on to a manufactured aughts nostalgia craze, they broke the pattern and are now going back to the 90s—again.

We’re now years past the shelf life for a 1990s nostalgia cycle, and yet the machine is still pumping out 90s-flavored product like it’s 2014.

Image: Annapurna Interactive

This should be the part where they transition to Millennials’ coming-of-age memories from the early 2000s: the era of iPods, nuMetal, and Myspace. But instead of ushering in Y2K chic or an aughtscore revival, the system is circling back for seconds from the Clinton Years. They’re reheating a nostalgia movement that already assumed room temperature.

And just reading that list should tell you why they won’t.

But for the folks in the cheap seats the answer, as always, is Cultural Ground Zero.

Related: Cultural Ground Zero

But let’s take a step back for a little context.

The model for the modern nostalgia grift was perfected on the Baby Boomers. As they reached middle age in the late 1980s and 90s, we got The Big Chill, Forrest Gump, and a hundred Motown CD compilations. Everything from Happy Days reruns to Woodstock ‘94 was designed to cash in on their idealized memory of the 1960s.

It worked. Boomers had money. Boomers had clout. And more importantly, Boomers had a shared culture.

That last part is key. You can’t sell nostalgia for a time no one remembers fondly—or worse, a time that had no real character to begin with.

So when Gen Y aged up and hit their prime spending years, the powers that be tried the same trick. They gave us 2D throwback games, brought back Crystal Pepsi, and released the Sega Genesis Mini. It worked, for a while.

But then they realized something terrifying.

There is nothing to mine after 1997.

Screen cap: Squaresoft

As I’ve written before, 1997 marks the point in Western pop culture when diminishing returns set in with a vengeance. It was the last year of original, popular entertainment that still felt connected to a living tradition.

Does that mean all cultural product before 1997 was good? No, but for the most part, it was still alive.

Does that mean all cultural product after 1997 is bad? No, but when it’s good, it’s usually by accident.

Image: Kodansha

After that, the rot set in. Movies became hollow propaganda vehicles. Music fell into a self-referential loop. Comics became a joke.

By the early aughts, most mainstream entertainment wasn’t crafted—it was workshopped by a committee of Pop Cult high priests.

That’s why there is no 2000s nostalgia movement.

It’s not that it’s too early.

It’s not that there’s no consumer base.

On the contrary, it’s because jogging people’s memories of the aughts conjures up mostly bad memories. And the people in charge don’t want you to remember.

Photo: West Point

Don’t take my word for it. Look at what’s being released right now—this year.

1. Blippo+ (Panic Games)

An FMV throwback that imitates the look and feel of channel surfing in the mid-90s, right down to the CRT fuzz and choppy audio. It’s not a game in the traditional sense; it’s a vibe sim; less retro-gaming than fetishized interface archaeology.

2. POGS: Power of Golden Slammer (Steam)

Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a physics-based digital recreation of POGS, complete with collectible cardboard discs, rare holographic slammers, and the middle school lunchroom aesthetic of 1995.

Say whatever else you will, POGS is 90s nostalgia in its most distilled form.

They couldn’t help themselves but use crude N64 style polygons, though.

3. Mixtape (Annapurna Interactive)

Billed as a “coming-of-age narrative steeped in 90s culture,” Mixtape doesn’t even pretend to hide its strategy. It’s a playable Gen Y memory reel scored by the Cure and Silverchair, replete with VHS filters and the kinds of party scenes that existed only in ads that aired during Daria commercial breaks.

Author JD Cowan said it best …

Screen cap: @wastelandjd on X

These projects aren’t anomalies. They’re signals.

The industry knows it can’t sell you the future. It can’t sell you the present. So it’s selling your childhood back to you. Again.

You doubt it? Let’s try a thought experiment.

If the entertainment complex were following the clock, we should now be knee-deep in aughts nostalgia.

So where is it?

Where are the wistful PS2 simulators? Where are the Nickelback comeback tour? Where are the lovingly rendered recreations of YouTube AMVs?

We’ve seen none of it. So again, why?

Because no one wants to remember the early 2000s—the tip of the cultural nihilism iceberg that’s still crushing us all.

And unlike the 1990s, which still had cultural artifacts created by human beings, the aughts were when Hollywood, TV studios, and AAA publishers revved up the recycling machine. We were being plied by media curated by algorithms and Death Cult dictates.

Gen Y doesn’t remember that era fondly. Millennials knee-jerk memory hole anything that happened before last week. And Zoomers are allergic to it.

Which leaves the mass media megacorps with only one answer: They hit rewind on the last decade that mattered.

From the perspective of the people making decisions in Hollywood, it’s all quite logical.

Pretend you’re a Hollywood skinsuit designer or a AAA bug man. You need to extract more dollars from a generation that isn’t reproducing itself and has no upward mobility. You can’t sell them on the future, because your vision of the future is “the present, but on a subscription basis.”

So you repackage the past. Again.

But you can’t go too far back, because Gen Y doesn’t care about the 70s.

So what do you do?

You loop the tape.

You dust off that Friends font again. You tell your dev team to add more scan lines. You green light a Netflix series about kids in 1996 riding around on BMX bikes and solving mysteries.

You go back for the dregs of the decade you already stripmined.

Because that’s all that’s left.

If you’re wondering where this ends, the answer is: It doesn’t. Not until legacy media collapses.

So expect another round of Jurassic Park requels, Saturday morning cartoon mashups, and ironic ads.

What we’re living through is not a living culture, but an entertainment feedback loop—a tape machine that can only remix its last coherent signal.

It can’t innovate. It can only rewind.

And if it rewinds far enough, maybe the cultural necromancers holding seances in New York and L.A. think they’ll stumble onto what they lost in 1997.

But they won’t.

Because that world isn’t coming back.

And until someone starts telling new stories that show people real truth and beauty, we’ll be trapped in the wreckage of Cultural Ground Zero.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s this:

Some people are waking up. They’re not just noticing the repetition; they’re repulsed by it. They realize that culture can’t just be a digital window giving a false view of a better time.

And some newpub authors, indie game devs, and maverick animators are making more than mere retro product. They’re taking real risks. Maybe they’re flawed, but here’s the key: They’re looking forward.

In case it still needs to be said, we don’t need another round of 90s nostalgia. We need stories worth remembering twenty years from now.

The only way to end Cultural Ground Zero is to move past it. Not in time, but in spirit.

We don’t move forward by going back to the 90s, but by doing what the 90s pretended to do while actually setting a cultural time bomb: Tearing down dead forms and making art that’s weird, fun, and human.

The future is waiting.

But only if you delete the flying toaster screen saver.

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