I didn’t want to hit top speed. I just wanted to go fast. To get away from here. To catch up with the elusive sunset, but not to lose the wave of your favorite radio station broadcasting nu-disco. And most importantly, to forget. Forget all those retrovave blogs. Forget the Wikipedia article. I learned the truth. The truth, about a past that never happened.
What is synthwave?
I want to start my blog by saying that experts deny the connection between 80s synthpop and modern synthwave. In particular, music critic Iron Skullet, in his blog Why Synthwave Isn’t Synthpop (And Why It Matters), analyzes both genres and comes to the conclusion that they are different genres that never had anything in common except a few albums similar in sound.
And there’s nothing surprising about that. 80s synth-pop is a motley mix of rock music, synth electronica, new wave, and pop. It went out of fashion, but it did not complete its existence. The musicians have continued and continue to put out releases. There was no magical transformation of synthpop into synthwave. But then where did the synthwave come from? And most importantly, when?
All the same Iron Skullet writes that the genre emerged in the 2000s from the house and nu-disco, and its ideological inspirations were funk, electro and disco 80s. Ideological inspirations, not musical inspirations. Simply put, the creators of synthwave were listening to Daft Punk, not Depeche Mode or the Pet Shop Boys. A characteristic feature of the new genre was the use of retro synths and electronic drums.
The most important thing for the future of the genre was not even the music, but the inspiration of the culture and life of a bygone era – from the mid 70s to the early 90s. Fantastic, action and horror movies (often category “B”), cassettes, vinyl, youth spent at the beach and behind video games, a cool car and other dreams of teenagers of the 80s…And of course the characteristic sound and electronic instruments of that era.
The first landmark release was the mini-album Teddy Boy by the French artist Kavinsky. It wasn’t just an album, it was a whole concept.
Kavinsky is not just a pseudonym, it is a character created by Vincent Belorghi, his alter ego. It’s a guy in a stylish bomber who died in a car accident in the late ’80s but came back to life in 2006 as a zombie, writing music about what’s important to him. About his car, his girlfriend, his crazy adventures.
Kavinsky’s car was a red Ferrari Testarossa. Why her? Retro game fans know the answer. This car is from the iconic 1986 arcade race Out Run. This game is still popular, only now, its fans are no longer limited to the purchase of the game, and buy immediately shabby life arcade machines. Unless, of course, they can afford it.
It was a strong and interesting project. And it was probably the first big step towards synthwave. By the way, musically it was still electro house. Kavinsky was not the only such project. In 2008 the Brits Futurecop! released their first EP, in 2009 they released After Hours by Mitch Murder. Something remotely similar to synthwave was also played by Flashworx.
The 2010 album Early Summer is released by Miami Nights 1984, and they have a prevailing aesthetic of romance – carefree rides along the Miami coast right into the sunset. A very strong album was released by Lazerhawk – Redline 2010 is the quintessence of what people mean by the word “synthwave”. Sorry for the difficult word, I couldn’t resist. A leisurely beat of electronic drums, a variety of synth parts, electronic voices, and an atmosphere floating from growing anxiety to peaceful tranquility.
Kavinsky was the luckiest of all – his song “Nightcall” was on the soundtrack of the 2011 film “Drive,” directed by Nicholas Winding Refn. The film won a lot of awards and had a huge impact on contemporary culture, and “Nightcall” became the anthem of a genre that was gaining momentum – Outrun.
Why Outrun? There was no such term as “synthwave” back then, but there was the term outrun electro. Apparently it came about because Kavinsky and Miami Nights 1984 had a cool red car like in the game of the same name. Later, in 2013, Kavinsky released his debut album, Outrun.
The genre of the two games
Synthwave has had several waves of increasing popularity and came to the mass listener around 2012-2013. Once again, the game was involved. Which one do you think? And while you’re thinking, I’ll tell you something about the games of that time.
Since 2008, the gaming industry has felt very bad. The global financial crisis had its effect. While the weak were leaving the market, the more or less strong were buying up the remnants of their competitors and looking for new ways to finance their companies. Subsequently, these ways will be found in the form of DLC and microtransactions. But before that, the gaming industry will face a new nightmare – indie games. Inexpensive to produce and radically different from the products of major companies, they were literally tearing the market apart.
Indie games didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They always have been. It’s just that now they have comfortable conditions for work, and their ideas have turned out to be much more attractive to customers. Besides, these were no longer just enthusiasts creating art in garages. The indie crowd was made up of people from big companies who were looking for a better life on the waves of independent creativity. Thrilling, atmospheric, unusual, stylish, and often incredibly complex, they awakened in players long forgotten feelings.
Why am I telling you this? Indie games have become a powerful platform for the promotion of synthwave. It happened by chance, thanks to a single game. But you can see the result for yourself. That game was Hotline Miami.
Explaining the Hotline Miami phenomenon is hard enough. It was published by a small company, just settled on the market, Dеvolver Digital, which previously worked only with Serious Sam series games. It was run by industry veterans, but that hardly mattered. Rather, it was the novelty effect. Hotline Miami had a completely different look at the top-down shooter genre, constantly challenged the player (even when he didn’t expect it), and had an interesting story and an unrealistically cool soundtrack, which was written by musicians known to very few people.
A cool soundtrack was a necessary part of almost all major indie releases of the time, but the developers of Hotline Miami went ahead and chose a genre few people were familiar with. Probably because their main source of inspiration was the movie “Drive”, the soundtrack of which is also retro-electronics by composer Cliff Martinez.
They started looking for musicians on Bandcamp and found a lot of talented guys. Since the game was released on PC in 2012 and on consoles a year later in 2013, its popularity grew in waves. As Hotline Miami began to gain popularity, the term “synthwave” began to overtake the term “outrun” in popularity.
Hotline Miami was a hit. One of the main characters of the game, Jacket was added to other games, the music set with the soundtrack was added to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and in the popular cooperative action Payday 2 appeared a heist based on Hotline Miami. The music from it came out of every iron, and gamers wanted more games like it. A lot of memes were made about Hotline Miami, the characters of the game cosplayed, composers rushed to write similar music. The jerk games appeared.
Well, the musicians who created the Hotline Miami soundtrack became stars. Because gamers liked synthwave so much, it became abused and added to games that had nothing to do with the 80s. However, even more widespread is the design of games and their advertising in the style of “retrovave” even if the game had nothing to do with the 80s. But what is this “retrowave”?
Retrovave as a mirror of the synthwave
One day Ubisoft, and more specifically Creative Director Dean Evans, decided to get action fans, especially action fans of the 80s, interested in games. And released a parody action Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. It was a typical open-world game, but its trick was an unusual setting – the player found himself as if in a stereotypical action movie of the 80s, like “Universal Soldier”. The game had a lot of jokes, references to 80s culture and an electronic soundtrack from the band Power Glove. It was a mockery of an entire era in film history.
There is an opinion that the release of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon helped synthwave to gain a wide audience. But that’s not true. Synthwave gained a wide audience thanks to Hotline Miami, which by that time (2013) was gaining popularity in an avalanche. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, on the other hand, flashed brightly, attracted the attention of a huge number of gamers and…that was it. Therefore, the game’s importance in popularizing synthwave is greatly exaggerated.
The fact is that the commercials and artwork of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon were a rich breeding ground for strengthening the visual style of “retrowave”, which became the perfect representation of the synthwave. Some work has already been done by musicians working in the outrun genre, but Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon did it in a really beautiful and stylish way.
Let’s go back to the ’80s, to the West Coast of the United States. What do you associate it with? Without a doubt it is the sea, the beach, surfing, cafes, fun carefree days of youth. Add a personal car and you have a dream…What do you think the West Coast residents who live by the sea see most often?
The setting sun, whose crooked reflection shakes on the surface of the water. Sooner or later it had to be reflected in culture and advertising. That’s what happened. Stores, surf clubs, various companies related and not related to the sea began to use the image of the striped sun on their logos.
Moreover, I suspect that the stripes were not even due to the stylization of reflections in the sea or clouds. And simply for easy printing and easy recognition. After all, just a circle, whether filled with paint or left behind by the former, bears little resemblance to the sun. The stripes, on the other hand, make us see the sun in it. Logos like this were popular all over the country and it’s possible that someone turned a logo like this into a neon sign, and later designers picked this up.
Things are much simpler with the other retroview symbols. The neon grid is taken from movies and TV series of the time, such as Tron, Star Wars, the Airwiolf series and many others. She can also be seen in the Daft Punk music video Technologic. The low-polygon mountains are a reflection of the graphics of those years.
Palms is the game Outrun, the Miami Vice series, and a lot of logos and labels. The cool cars are again Outrun and Knight of the Road. And, of course, neon signs, including triangular signs. Although, in general, triangles were used in the design of albums even before the advent of synthwave.
Gamers’ interest in this aesthetic was very high, and in the hope of attracting attention, many developers began to add elements of retrovave to their games, using purple and pink colors, to invite the synthwave musicians to the soundtrack. Retroway-inspired skins began to appear in games, and the creators of cheap and low-quality games began to flood Steam and Itch with small games created from off-the-shelf retroweave-inspired Assets.
Retrowave has become a rendition of the synthwave genre.