I often find it difficult to talk about authenticity in art. My gut tells me that all art contains some element of artifice, and determining whether a piece of art is or isn’t authentic is often a James Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it” type deal. I recently played through the buzzy new video game Mixtape, and its dreamy 90s pastiche has me grappling with the subject anew.

Music is the discipline to which I can speak most authoritatively, and certainly all music contains some element of fiction. Performers embody a persona on stage; singers affect a different voice or accent; songwriters summon feelings from outside of their lived experience; studio engineers make edits that trick the listener’s ear. Mixtape is a fundamentally musical game, so it only makes sense that it is built on a degree of artifice. Okay, a lot of artifice.

Created by the independent Australian studio Beethoven & Dinosaur, Mixtape sets a collection of 90s movie tropes to a carefully curated playlist, resulting in what amounts to a three-hour interactive music video. As I was playing it, I liked it a lot. Afterward, I couldn’t stop picking at it, trying to reach its authentic core.

On the first and most evident level of artifice, Mixtape is about a place that isn’t real, starring characters who never could have existed. That isn’t just to say it’s fiction, but that its fiction is purposefully blurry and decontextualized. “I kind of imagine the town that they live in is like a classic radio station,” the game’s writer/director, Johnny Galvatron, told Vice. “It’s like an amorphous blend of the greatest hits of things. So nothing’s ever really nailed down.”

The setting, a sleepy NorCal burg called Blue Moon Lagoon that the teenage protagonists derisively-but-maybe-also-lovingly refer to as “The Big Suck,” is not an actual place in our world. I’ve lived in the greater Pacific Northwest for most of my adult life, and found the town’s topographical milieu readable yet unplaceable. Blue Moon Lagoon exists within a vibe, not a zip code.

Then there are the main characters: talented stoner Slater, rebellious good girl Cass, and preternaturally hip music snob Stacey, who serves as the game’s narrator and DJ. The trio are less recognizable as people I knew in high school and more as amalgamated characters from famous 90s movies. A bit of Wayne Campbell; a touch of Ferris Bueller; a sprinkle of Randal Graves; a dab of Ted “Theodore” Logan. As Galvatron told Vice in that same interview, he envisioned them as each representing a different microgeneration: Slater comes from the late 80s, Stacey from the mid 90s, and Cass a bit closer to Y2K. Even in that framing, they don’t resemble actual people from those eras, but characters. Slater is from Bill and Ted, Stacey from Clerks or Mallrats, and Cass from Can’t Hardly Wait, or maybe Varsity Blues.

Finally, and most centrally to what makes Mixtape go, there’s the music Stacey has assembled for her Last Day Playlist, and which provides the game’s emotional and structural framework. It’s a mix of tracks from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and, a bit provocatively, the 2010s, and it feels disconnected from even the game’s heightened reality, to say nothing of our own. Mixtape’s marketing slug describes it as being “set to the soundtrack of a generation,” but notably doesn’t specify which generation. When Stacey turned to the camera to introduce another classic rock deep cut, I was glad for the music but couldn’t quite believe that this character would have picked this particular collection of songs. Some of them, sure, but all of them? Nah.

All of that artifice was fine with me. In the moment, as I cruised down sun-dappled streets on my skateboard, or played clever minigames designed to evoke memories of my own lost youth, I did so with a smile. The protagonists’ bedroom hangouts and pre-party hijinks mixed with their memories of new friendship, first betrayals, juvenile delinquency, make-out sessions, and dreams of sports superstardom, all accompanied by songs that felt chosen with intention and love. Cool.

In a crucial scene early in the game, the perpetually beheadphoned Stacey lays out Mixtape’s musical manifesto. During the rare moments when she isn’t listening to music, she says, she begins to feel what she calls The Panic. “Time feels like it’s drifting by,” she explains. “I feel like I’m wasting something.” It’s not that music helps her block those feelings out, but rather that “sometimes, I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be feeling. Some days, I feel nothing at all. But you pick the right song? It holds you in the moment. Gives it meaning. Because the music’s going somewhere, and you’re going with it.”

It’s a lovely thought, and a true one, in my experience. Music has taken me so many places, and given me so much meaning. And so Stacey builds her mixtapes, attempting to wrangle the passage of time into something she can hold onto. To that end, she—or rather, the guys who wrote the game and picked the music—has chosen a collection of tracks by artists ranging from the well-known (Devo, Smashing Pumpkins) to the less well-known (Alice Coltrane, Rainbow), to the notably Australian (John Paul Young, Mondo Rock), to the so obscure you definitely haven’t heard of them (Curtis Dunn, Bertrand Dolby, Allclear). More on that last category in a bit.

I was aware as I played that, given my age and background, I was squarely in this game’s demographic crosshairs. The older I get, the more vulnerable I am to nostalgia, and at points, Mixtape played me like… [searches for period-appropriate reference]… like Kim Thayil plays a Guild Polara. I’m fond of all the movies it evokes; my love for Wayne’s World, in particular, has only grown over time. And while in 1996 I was too much of a jazz dork to make space for grunge or shoegaze, I certainly appreciate it now. Mixtape’s combination of those elements felt like an indulgence, but a loving and harmless one. Many of the minigames were quite clever. And I admired the ease with which it moved; the seamlessness of it all, cross-fading from scene to scene, cleverly looping musical stems to extend a song far past its original runtime, never allowing dead air to interrupt the flow.

Many critics were equally, even surpassingly, charmed. It netted high scores from popular outlets, and as of this writing, its Metacritic average is a better than respectable 86. Its reception outside of the Metacritic aggregated games press (newsletters, social media, YouTube) has been less consistently glowing. There’s the predictable group of rearguard reactionaries, lambasting it for its short length and lack of complex gameplay. But another, more compelling, collection of critiques has called into question the game’s embrace of artifice in the pursuit of nostalgia.

After rolling credits, I read and watched Mixtape reviews with great interest, and discussed them with friends who had also played. My pal in podcasting Cameron Kunzelman has written my favorite essay of the bunch, a sharp and frankly devastating critique of the game as empty, even nefarious nostalgia. He describes Mixtape as “more like a Pinterest board than a mixtape” after comparing it to Space Jam: A New Legacy, then connects its brand of repackaged nostalgia with capitalism in a way that I find convincing, if depressing.

I couldn’t deny his indictment of Mixtape’s most abject nostalgia plays, despite having had a perfectly nice time playing it. But when another critic Kunzelman cites in his review, Kaile Hultner, went after the music, I found myself feeling more defensive. Here’s Hultner:

Leaving aside the fact that Mixtape feels more 1994 than ‘99 to me—a microgenerational blink that for a variety of reasons actually makes a difference—the obvious artifice of Stacey’s playlist hadn’t really been an issue for me. In fact, after going back through the tracklist while reading interviews with Galvatron and his producers about their choices, I found myself increasingly charmed by its specificity.

For every two familiar songs on Mixtape’s mixtape, there’s an oddball pick. Smashing Pumpkins to accompany a sequence of teenage rage? Sure, of course. But John Paul Young, whose ebullient “Yesterday’s Hero” sets off a Ferris Bueller-inspired backyard dash? That’s exactly the kind of lesser-known-in-the-States Aussie artist that Australian Strong Songs listeners like to email me about. Maybe I’m just a sucker for Australians telling me about their favorite bands, but Galvatron and his team’s indulgent inclusion of homegrown acts like Young, Silverchair, and Mondo Rock worked for me. (I’m surprised he didn’t feature Farnham’s “You’re The Voice," but I guess Stan Bush’s “The Touch” gets the same job done.) The artifice of the playlist made Mixtape feel more personal to me, not less.

With those critiques and rebuttals swirling in my mind, I spent a day or so chewing it all over. I wrote out some thoughts, put together some playlists, and looked deeper into more of the musicians on Stacey’s playlist. Unfortunately, what I found undermined my planned defenses, and put a dent in my lingering appreciation for the game.

One of my favorite sequences in Mixtape involves Stacy and her friends lazing at a lake on a summer day. They idly talk about movies and life, as Stacey skips rocks across the water at a series of ever-more-elaborate targets. She’ll knock down a set of cans, rocks, and bottles, only for new, sometimes stranger, targets to magically appear further out. It’s hard not to be drawn into casting another stone.

The player can opt to stop at any point, which created an interesting tension between my desire to relax and enjoy the moment, and my knowledge that at some point, I’d need to move on. I have felt exactly that way, in almost exactly that setting: sitting with my friends on a lazy day, trying to stretch the moment out, to put off thinking about where I have to go next. The whole minigame only lasted a few minutes, but it’s still in my head. A little game-design triumph.

Later, as I contemplated the rock-skipping sequence, I struggled to remember which song had been playing. It was a synthy ambient track, a deep cut Stacey had introduced from an artist I’d never heard of. Oddly, I couldn’t find the track in any of the articles listing the songs from the game. I looked up a let’s play on YouTube and skipped around until I found it.

“We’re now crossing Little Mill Creek,” Stacey says, “perfectly timed to coincide with ‘Deepspace Scan’ by Curtis Dunn, who released one incredible album then disappeared into the ocean.” The trio looks off the side of a woodland bridge, and Stacey continues: “We listened to Deepspace a lot when we first started hanging out and wasting time, not far from here…”

I looked up Curtis Dunn and found nothing. Like actually nothing, zero evidence of a musician with that name, or a song called “Deep Space Scan.” A few searches later and I came to a surprising realization: a handful of the songs from Stacey’s mixtape, by artists credited in-game with names like “The Eye Gougers,” “Allclear,” “Bertrand Dolby,” and “Wooden Sword,” weren’t real songs at all. They appeared to be fictional, most likely library tracks provided to the developers by Extreme Music, the Sony-owned production-music label listed at the end of Mixtape’s credits. The developers, apparently, took those tracks, assigned each one a fictional artist and title, and added them to Stacey’s playlist alongside the real stuff.

I should acknowledge that I can’t be completely certain where each song came from. It’s possible some of them were written by Galvatron and his co-composer, Josh Abrahams. (One of the mystery bands, introduced as having written commercial jingles, is called “Abrahams and Mole,” after all.) I asked the game’s PR rep about the songs earlier in the week, and I haven’t heard back. But that uncertainty highlights my problem with this creative decision. Who wrote that music? Who is ‘Curtis Dunn,’ actually? I don’t know. Depending on the answer, the developers themselves might not even know.

Mixtape is built on layers of artful obfuscation, but until I looked into Curtis Dunn, I could at least see the hand of the author behind it all. The script is by an actual human guy, even if he uses the stage name from his former band. He and another musician composed the score. The developers have talked at length about the influences they drew on when creating the game’s characters and setting. And while the licensed music they chose might not always jibe with the time period, that dissonance is interesting, and the creators have described how each song provided the emotional core around which they built everything else. That design philosophy comes across in all of Mixtape’s most emotionally effective sequences.

But the injection of mystery music with made-up credits feels like something else, at least to me. It’s a bridge too far, crossing beyond artful artificiality and into the realm of truly decontextualized art. As a creative decision, it runs counter to the game’s—or at least its protagonist’s—stated ethos. Every other layer of artifice hung on what I had thought was a sturdy core of real, deliberately chosen music. It turned out that core was not as sturdy as I’d thought. I can’t imagine Stacey Rockford would be down with this.

A bit on library music, if that is in fact what this stuff is: Also known as production or sync music, it’s created by studio musicians specifically for commercial use. It’s usually produced by an industry-facing company or label like Extreme Music, which then licenses it directly to studios for use in media like TV, games, podcasts, and commercials. Production music has existed for decades, resulting in a lot of serviceable but forgettable junk as well as some excellent, widely beloved jingles and songs. Production music also provides steady paychecks to loads of musicians, engineers, and producers, including several friends of mine. In fact, some library musicians have been embraced as artists in their own right. (Mixtape’s Stacey actually strikes me as someone who would collect KPM Greensleeves and extol the musical prowess of library legends like Alan Hawkshaw and Keith Mansfield.)

I’ve got no problem with anonymous library music per se, but it has been employed to questionable ends in some parts of the music industry. Spotify, for example, has reportedly been investing in production labels since the 2010s, working to reduce its royalty payments by seeding its most popular playlists with bespoke, low-royalty chum. If the streaming service isn’t already replicating that playbook with wholly-owned AI music, it likely soon will be. In fact, streaming’s stealthy embrace of low-cost production music can now be understood as a prelude to the rising tide of AI dreck that threatens to engulf whole swaths of the music industry. (Reporter Liz Pelly gets much deeper into all of this in her recent book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist; a salient excerpt was published in Harper’s last year.)

With all that in mind, my robust rebuttal to Kunzelman and Hultner’s critiques had withered somewhat. I returned to Cameron’s essay and re-read it, pausing at a paragraph I found newly relevant:

He’s more right than I initially wanted to acknowledge. Yes, Mixtape is built around a collection of oddly specific, at times charmingly Australian music picks. But as successfully as it sometimes conjures the feeling of a handmade 90s mixtape, it too often embraces the anonymous artifice of an algorithmic playlist. Bertrand Dolby, Allclear, Curtis Dunn; their names evoke real artists like Thomas Dolby, Everclear, Curtis Mayfield, Brooks & Dunn. As I played the game, I assumed they were simply obscure artists I’d never heard of. But they are as artificial as the game world they inhabit.

In the grand imaginary of Mixtape, reality is relative. Memory is subjective, and history is an endless loop. The world is “an amorphous blend of the greatest hits of things,” showing how, as Galvatron also told Vice, “things are always the same.” I can get with that to a point; I even found it pleasant. The game’s joyful embrace of pastiche and cinematic cliche worked on me, as I suspect it has on many others.

But the deeper I dug through Mixtape’s layers of artifice, the more uncomfortable I found my surroundings. Eventually, I set a foot into someplace less well-lit, and closer to the world we actually inhabit. A world of depersonalized, anonymous art, given made-up names and served to an unsuspecting audience. I don’t know about Stacey, but that gives me The Panic.

That’ll do it for this issue of the newsletter. I’ve been cranking away on a bunch of different things—two new episodes of Strong Songs, on Megadeth and, today, Kind of Blue; new Patreon video deep-dives on both; some interesting recent episodes of Triple Click; the July 11 Strong Songs live show, which is really coming together, and even a whole new project that I’m excited for but still not quite ready to tell you all about.

All of which is to say it’s been a busy spring, which has meant less time for writing newsletters, making videos, and posting on social media. So it goes! I’ll have more here soon, I’m sure.

I’ll leave you with the above pic of Appa, the master of all she surveys.

Take care, and keep listening-
~KH
5/15/2026 - Portland, OR

Correction: I initially misattributed Kaile Hultner’s quote about the game’s music to Cameron Kunzelman, when he just linked to her review. I’ve corrected the attribution. Sorry about that!