Mixtape, from the small Melbourne studio Beethoven & Dinosaur, arrives this Thursday. Three Northern California high schoolers, one final night before everything changes, a curated playlist that turns the evening into a series of dreamlike, playable memories. Annapurna Interactive is publishing it. The premise is small, the conceit is unusually honest, and I am not going to be subtle about how grateful I am for it.
A mixtape, the actual physical kind, was a way to hold a specific moment of being a particular person who loved particular things and wanted someone to remember it. The game is not subtle about the parallel either, and that's a feature.
The mixtape was always about loss
Cassettes had ninety minutes of real estate on them, give or take, and you spent that real estate carefully. You sat on the floor of your bedroom and waited for a song to come on the radio so you could press record, or you cued up a CD and timed the gap between tracks. The result was a specific list, in a specific order, that you couldn't quite recover by accident the way you can recover a Spotify playlist. It was a thing you made; it had your handwriting on it. The act of giving it to someone was a way of saying here is a small piece of who I am tonight, please remember me this way.
Streaming playlists do many things, and I love them. They are not this. They are a different kind of useful, and they are not a different kind of mixtape. The cassette was always partly about the impossibility of holding the moment still. You knew it would degrade. You knew the friend would lose track of it, or move, or stop talking to you. You made it anyway.
The reason the metaphor lands when you apply it to a video game is that games, too, have always belonged to a particular moment of you. You are not the same person who finished Final Fantasy VI on a SNES that summer. The CRT is gone. The friends are different or scattered. The room you played it in has been a different room belonging to a different person for fifteen years. You can boot up the ROM tonight; the file will play back. You will not.
Some games are entirely the people you played them with
Halo 2 splitscreen on a CRT in a basement is a canonical example. If you were the right age in 2004 and shared a couch with three people you loved and a fourth person you barely knew, that game is partly a record of those people for you, and you will never get that file back. Rock Band at parties was the same way. Mario Party on a Thanksgiving where everyone yelled at the screen. Borderlands over a long-distance call with a friend who eventually moved across the world. Animal Crossing: New Horizons in 2020, when there was nothing else to do and the island was the place you went to see anyone.
The shape of the memory is not the shape of the game. Halo 2 on a fresh save tonight is just Halo 2. The version that mattered was the one with your roommate's snorting laugh on top of it, the bag of chips on the carpet, the fact that the basement smelled like dryer sheets, the fact that none of you had to be anywhere the next morning and you knew it. The game is the cassette. The song is what played on top.
The record of all this is appallingly thin
Steam will tell you, helpfully, that you have 412 hours in Stardew Valley. It will not tell you that 80 of those hours were on a flight to see your sister, or that 200 of them were the first six months of a job you hated and the game was the only thing that felt like a small kingdom you controlled. PSN's trophy list does not know the difference between a trophy you earned alone at 2am and a trophy you earned because your partner was nearby and you both wanted to see what would happen. Xbox's "most played" graphs are the most damning, because they are honest in a way that misses everything that mattered.
Even the way most platforms structure a review is wrong for this. A review is one artifact, filed at the end, with one star rating attached. It cannot say I loved this game in October the year my dad got sick and would not love it the same way again. It cannot say we beat the final boss together over voice chat, and a year later we don't talk anymore, and that's the part I want to remember and also don't. It is a verdict pretending to be a memory.
This is the thinness Mixtape is, I suspect, going to push against. The whole framing, the narrative-adventure structure, the soundtrack of Devo and Smashing Pumpkins and Iggy Pop and Joy Division, the John Hughes inheritance the studio has been open about, all of that is in service of one specific argument: a song, played on the right night with the right people, becomes a portable artifact for the rest of your life. The game wants you to feel that and then not get over it.
The journal is the closer cousin
This is the part of the post where, by professional obligation, I should mention that we made Perthro for adjacent reasons. So: yes, partly. The existing places to keep a record of the games you played did not really make space for any of the above. You could rate a game out of five stars or you could not rate it. You could mark it complete or you could not mark it complete. Reviews tended to be one block, and there was a quiet expectation that you'd written the right one.
We are trying to make something where the review is a paragraph if you want it to be a paragraph and three pages if you want it to be three pages, where you can come back two years later and edit, where lists are first-class and yours, so you can have a list called games I played the year I lived in Vancouver alongside the more standard ones, because that is, in fact, how the record actually shapes itself.
The character in Mixtape is making a tape because he wants to preserve who he was on a specific night, in the specific company of the specific people he was about to leave or be left by. He is not making a five-star scorecard of the music. He is making a small, particular, dated artifact in his own voice. That is closer to journaling than to reviewing, and the framing is good. The framing is the whole point.
The 2046 problem
We don't know, in May 2026, which of the games on this year's release calendar are the ones we'll be sentimental about in twenty years. Some of them will not be the prestige releases. The game that ends up being the cassette of your specific 2026 might be a small thing your friend recommended on a Tuesday, the one nobody else you know will play, the one with the strange UI and the soundtrack that gets stuck in your head when you're falling asleep. Stardew Valley shipped in 2016 to a polite reception from the discourse and is now, for a generation of players, a date entry as load-bearing as the wedding it played at.
The argument is the same as the one for keeping any kind of journal. You don't know which days will have weight to them later. The day-of entry is the only one you can write that isn't already shaped by what you found out next, and the small ones, more than the big ones, are usually the ones that surprise you. A paragraph written in the middle of a thing, in your real voice, is more honest than a perfect retrospective written years after.
So when Mixtape lands on Thursday, mark it down somewhere, even if you don't end up playing it. Mark down what you played that week, who you played it with, what the apartment looked like, what was on at the time. The platforms will not do this for you. They are not built for it. The cassette decays whether or not you press record. The act of pressing record is most of the thing.
See you on the other side of the playlist.