Twenty Minutes Into The Future - Television Tropes & Idioms

A new Volkswagen commercial has someone debating about buying a car, only to have his future self (wearing nifty "futuristic clothes") from "13 days in the future" pop into the showroom and tell him to buy the car.

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Neon Genesis Evangelion, first aired on Japanese television in 1996-97, is explicitly set in the year 2015, with a Back Story involving an apocalyptic cataclysm in the year 2000. Despite having artificially intelligent computers, giant biomechs, and the ability to sequence a genome stored in particle wave matter in seconds, the Japanese governments' nuclear-powered giant robot runs MS-DOS, and the wifi-enabled laptops in schools (despite doing wireframe 3D modeling) can only draw dialogue boxes using ASCII art. And to top it, Shinji still uses a cassette player instead of an iPod! Where are we, in the Retro Universe?
- Surely an intentional spoof of the Bog-Standard Anime Future?
Serial Experiments Lain has a creepy Opening Narration that states "present day, present time", but it's obvious by the cell-phone-esque HandyNAVIs and the existence of a Cyberspace that this is not the case.
- Or is it?
  - ha ha ha ha
- A direct Shout Out to Max Headroom's original Twenty Minutes Into The Future opening.
Patlabor is easily the seminal Twenty Minutes Into The Future Humongous Mecha series, made in 1988 and set in 1998. "This story is a work of fiction — but in ten years, who knows?"
Manabi Straight takes place in 2035, which looks just like today, but with fewer people and slightly fancier tech gadgets, such as PDAs and cell phones.
Fist Of The North Star takes place in a post-apocalyptic future after an atomic war in "199X".
- This was parodied in episode 24 of Excel Saga:
  Narrator: The future! Nineteen-ninety...
  Audience: It's already passed!
  Narrator: Oh crap! You're right...
The Astro Boy manga, original publication 1951, had the titular robot boy being created on April 7, 2003, a time in which robots and flying cars were routine. When that date rolled around, the flying cars and robots were absent, but we did get a new television series, first broadcast on that exact date in Japan.
- At the very least, when that day rolled around in Real Life, the Japanese government granted full citizenship to Astro Boy.
The future of Macross features not only the Macross crashing to Earth in 1999, but a global unification war where the forces that overthrow the world's governments are the good guys. And this is Back Story for the actual alien invasion in 2009.
Attack of the Super-Monsters, a memorably bad live action/anime combination, had sentient dinosaurs (played by hand puppets) returning to take over the Earth in 2000.
Code E is set in 2017, although the only immediately recognizable difference from the actual modern day are computerized blackboards in the classrooms and computerized billboards and ads on buses. Note that these both exist, but aren't as widespread as in the series.
Akira begins a with a nuclear explosion in 1988 that sets off World War III.
Digimon Adventure 02 is set in 2003 (2002 in the original). Since the show was first premiered in 2000, the anime was set 3 (4) years into the future. Digimon Tamers also plays with the trope, but is set in 200X.
- Ironically, when they show a "25 years later" scene in Adventure, the Japanese apparently think there will be disappearing doors and computers.
Alien Nine takes place in 2014, but the setting isn't that different from the present, except for alien invasions being a daily part of life.
Wangan Midnight is set in the year 20XX. The manga was first published in 1992, and is still being published to this day. The year allows for cars that were previously nonexistent to be introduced in later chapters of the manga without forcing the story to advance years at a time. After all, how else can you make a Skyline GT-R R34, which started production in 1999, appear in the manga without making everyone age seven years?
Considering the nature of the heroines of Mnemosyne, it's a rather interesting case in that we get to see 2011, 2025, and 2055 in the span of four episodes.
X1999 is set in, you guessed it, 1999. When it began publication in the early 1990s, it was Twenty Minutes into the Future. The series is still unfinished as of early 2009. CLAMP now admit that they guessed wrong on some noticeable details, such as the rise of cellphones.
Android Announcer Maico 2010 (made in 1998) provides another example of how hard prediction is. In 2010, the android Maico's first OS (operating system) is on a 3 1/2 inch floppy, and her full OS is on 50 C Ds. Today, a 30 gigabyte OS would be supplied on DV Ds or downloaded from the Net ...and I can't remember the last time I used a floppy disc.

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Watchmen is set 20 minutes into the past. It was first published in 1986, but is set in an Alternate History 1985. This subtlety seemed lost on a reviewer for TIME magazine, who seemed to think that it took place in a dystopian future. Its contemporary grim and gritty superhero comic, The Dark Knight Returns, really did take place twenty minutes into a future in which Batman has retired. As did numerous other "grim and gritty" superhero comics of that ilk.
The DC Comics crossover Armageddon 2001, released in 1991. When 2001 rolled around, of course, none of the future events happened (and because of the floating timeline, the crossover could no longer have really happened in 2001 anyway.)
Interestingly subverted in Scott McCloud's series Zot!. Here, it's a world of retro-futurism, with jetpacks, food pills, and flying cars—basically, every cool thing they thought we'd have by the year 2000. Except here, the year is 1965. In fact, as characters from our world eventually discover, it's always 1965. On New Year's Eve, the whole world counts down (with a clock projected on the moon with lasers, no less) as 1965 ends...and 1965 begins. Everyone in this world has a kind of perpetual amnesia — as the new year begins, events are suddenly pushed back a year into the past, so the person you met in 1963 you now met in 1962, and so forth. The world is thus always kept perfect, with nothing changing and the future always just a step ahead.
V For Vendetta is set in the grim future of 1997, in a post-apocalyptic Britain ruled by Nazis. Some of the original comics used the tagline "Pray the future never needs... V For Vendetta!" Scarily, the omnipresent CCTV surveillance systems, which seemed inconceivable in 1982, are now an accepted feature of British life.
- The film adaptation shifts this into the near future as seen from 2006, thinly veiled references to the Bush administration and all.
- Actually, it's set in at least 2020, the date given as the Archbsihop's "promotion."
Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future. The original series (written in the 1950s and 1960s) took place in an "advanced" future starting in 1995 spanning which had Britain as the world leader of space flight; missions to Venus, Mars, Mercury and Saturn's moons (all of which had/have their own civilization) and beyond the solar system.
DC's Tangent Comics imprint (1997), like Watchmen, ran with the idea that the presence of superhumans caused technology to advance more quickly than in our world. According to editor Eddie Berganza: "Leaps in technology, due in part to the superhumans, make the Tangent Universe about 10 years more advanced than where we are now. If you think you spend a lot of time in front of your computer now, just wait. It's not so hard to imagine print on paper going the way of the dodo."
- Considering how well newspapers are doing in 2009, Eddie's prophecy dart is at least hitting the board.
Deathlok, a character in the Marvel Universe, is a time-traveling cyborg from the 1990s, where civilization has been almost destroyed by nuclear war. In 1974 when the character was created, this seemed plausible, but by this point he's had more than one major Retcon.
The comic strip Judge Dredd is set 122 years in an alternate future, and the character ages in real time, meaning that number never changes. It also means that as of 2009, Dredd himself has aged 32 years since his inception in 1977.
Actually a strip, but Flash Gordon started being published in the 1930's and took place in the future of 1970. Adaptations have variously taken place in the present, Twenty Minutes Into The Future, or in the far future.
In one old comic book (forgot the name), Aliens show up to a futuristic looking Earth and contact the planet. When nobody answers, they take it as an insult and attack. In the last panel, we learn that humans are now living on Mars, and Earth has been uninhabited since the Nuclear War of 2000.

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Seminal movie example: 2001: A Space Odyssey, which in the titular year had commercial spaceflight and space stations, moon bases, cryogenics, and at least two sentient computers. Oh... and the Cold War. Not to mention Pan Am and the Bell System. However, notably, it was critically praised for realism in other things such as not having sound in space, not running the engine unless accelerating, and having flat panel screens.
It's looking like we won't get our hoverboards and flying cars in time for Back To The Future's vision of 2015. The humongous six-channel televisions are getting there, though, and at least it doesn't cost $50 for a Pepsi. There is currently an Internet petition to compel Nike to produce the garish self-tying shoes seen in the movie, however.
- To their credit, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale foresaw that their version of 2015 would inevitably end up being wrong. Their solution was to play it rather tongue-in-cheek.
The setting of the movie I, Robot. Chicago looks pretty much like here in 2008, but with sleek monorails replacing the elevated trains, big shiny buildings with a lot of glass and open space, long underground highways and sleek cars with automatic pilot. ...and sentient robots everywhere, of course.

Lampshaded in the quasi-futuristic Dystopia Brazil, which takes place "Somewhere in the 20th Century" at "8:45 p.m.".
Parodied in the Family Guy movie, when Stewie hitches a ride to the future with his future self. Stewie is amazed that not only has he not conquered the world, but there aren't even flying cars — however, there is Time Travel.
Demolition Man predicts the advanced cryogenic freezing technology of 1996, a mere three years after the movie's release date.
- It also predicted that Taco Bell would become the most powerful economic force on the planet. Make of that what you will.
  - And President Schwarzenegger.
The Japanese Godzilla movie Destroy All Monsters, made in 1968, was set in 1999, a year when humans would've supposedly set up a moon colony, built an island capable of holding Godzilla and his buddies, and contacted aliens in shiny silver suits.
According to Michael Bay's The Island, we will have flying motorcycles, hovering trains in the deep South, and really ugly hotrods. Oh, and an entire city of clones kept for their organs (which already seems archaic, as we can do the same thing with pigs).
Escape From New York occurs in 1997. By this time, crime is so rampant that the island of Manhattan is walled off and converted into a penal colony, and the US is an authoritarian state.
- The part about New York was becoming a genuine fear at the time since the film was made only a few years after the 1977 blackout and riot.
Gattaca is frighteningly plausible. The most out-there thing? A manned mission to Titan, which is in our own solar system.
- Small detail: Vincent tells Irene that the scars on his legs are from a '99 Le Baron. Chrysler discontinued that line a few months after the film's release.
Minority Report famously had a group of futurologists working on the staff of the movie to make the shown future as plausible as possible. Discounting the precognitives and the somewhat improbable traffic system, the future they came up with, with its omnipresent retinal scans and subsequent total loss of privacy (as well as businesses using said scans to bombard you with advertising) and gesture-based computing controls, certainly could happen.
Gackt's vampire-yakuza movie Moonchild starts at the Millenium celebrations in Tokyo, then jumps forward to various points in the main characters' lives, passing 2014, and "A few years later". The setting has Japan devastated by an economic crisis leading to massive emigration to a fictional city on what appears to be Taiwan, where Japanese are low-class.
Predator 2 predicts the grim voodoo gangs of 1997 Los Angeles.
Robocop predicted rampant crime, rampant A Is, and working cybernetics. Admittedly, crime is rampant in Detroit, where it took place. There were also first-generation Ford Tauruses (1986-1990) still in front-line service as police cruisers.
The very first scene of the film version of A Scanner Darkly states that the story takes place "seven years from now". An oddly harmonious pastiche of the '70s (when the book was written), the early '90s (when the story was set), and the early 21st century when it was made.
Strange Days was written in the mid-1990s, and much of the plot has to do with the millennial celebrations. Aside from the VR headsets that project another person's experiences (both physical and emotional) directly into someone else's brain, and the riot-torn Los Angeles, it's not that much different.
Terminator, in The Eighties, features a nuclear war that kills three billion people in 1997, started by a self-aware computer program that controls all military software, and a planetary war between humans and machines that starts and ends before 2030.
- Terminator 2, taking place in 1994, features a Screw Destiny plot that creates a possibility of averting the 1997 holocaust. Terminator 3, however, chooses to have that holocaust take place in the year following its release, effectively divorcing the series from Real Life history at that point.
- Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (The Series), on the other hand, pulls a double-whammy: it RetCons that the events of T2 happened in 1997, when John was 13, implicitly moving the original projected holocaust, and then asserts that the various changes to the timeline have relocated the pending holocaust into 2011. The characters themselves, time-hopped from 1999 to fall 2007, are themselves experiencing some Twenty Minutes Into The Future. John, something of a computer geek, has an unforgettable reaction when he walks into a Mac store. Think about that: a fifteen-year-old missed the invention of the iPod and the ubiquitous goddamn cell phone.
Time Cop, the 1994 movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme, takes place in several time periods, including 2004, when the typical family car resembles a tank and can drive itself.
In the 1960 film version of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, the time-traveling hero sets off to the future from the start of the 20th century, stopping off at the time of both World Wars. Then he stops again in the year 1966, when World War III is starting. When he eventually gets to the far future, he finds, via an ancient computer archive, that the world of the Eloi and Morlocks emerged in the aftermath of "a great war between the East and West."
Twelve Monkeys (1995) starts in 2035 and alludes to an epidemic that began in 1996.
Poked fun at in The Lake House, when Kate communicates across time to tell Alex about the flying cars and other technological wonders in her era ... which is a mere two years later than Alex's.
The first of the X Men Film Series X-Men movies is set in "the near future", with its two sequels following after that. Its prequel, Wolverine, is set about 20 years earlier (since Scott Summers is a teenager), setting it sometime between The Sixties and The Eighties. The climactic scene, set at Three Mile Island, would seem to imply it's set in 1979, if Deadpool slicing one of the cooling towers to pieces with his eye-beams is assumed to be analagous to the real-world event that occured in that year.
The much-maligned MST3K-featured film City Limits is set "15 years from now".
G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra is set roughly ten years in the future, and while styles in clothing and automobiles seem more or less unchanged from the present, exotic (but semi-plausible) technologies like powered armour, energy weapons, active camouflage and metal-eating nanites are out in full force.

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Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell was allegedly titled when Orwell inverted the year of its authorship (1948). However, the early 1980s featured a great deal of hand-wringing about whether or not we'd succumbed to Orwell's dystopia.
- League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier put the book's events in 1948, allowing them to show a fallen Airstrip One government ten years later.
House Of The Scorpion is set sometime at a indeterminate date, where a country run by drug lords exists between Mexico (known as Aztlan in the book's universe) and the United States, cars can fly, human cloning is common place, computer chips are put into horses and people's brains to control them, and illegal immigration on the U.S.-Mexican border flows not just towards the north, but towards the south too.
Tom Clancy's first Jack Ryan novels, written throughout the 1980s, were set at an indeterminate point in the near future; the Cold War is still in full bloom and there's a vaguely Reaganesque Republican in the White House. The Sum of All Fears, however, tied the series to a specific point in history (the end of the first Gulf War), and from that point on the Lead Time inherent in the writing and publication of Clancy's increasingly long novels meant that the series turned into an Alternate History of sorts; The Bear and the Dragon, published in 2001, must occur no later than June 1997 for the internal chronology to hold up. With The Teeth of the Tiger, Clancy moved the series back into an indeterminate near-future setting.
Joe Haldeman admits that setting his novel The Forever War, about a deep space war to start in the far-off future of 1996, was silly in retrospect, and was done mainly so that the non-coms could be Vietnam veterans. He told any objectors to just "think of it as a parallel universe."
Brave New World postulates a future in which people watch televison for over two hours a day.
- Don't forget the mass-produced children, those of which in the lower class each have 95 clones running around.
  - Then again, the term "mass-produced" is sort of misleading, considering that the number of children "produced" is much lower than the number of children born in the real world. The planet's population in the novel has been kept at a constant 2 billion for centuries.
The Dirk Pitt series of novels by Clive Cussler are usually set a year or two into the future, with the United States switching to metric and super A.I. computers with hot chick holograms.
Any time Heinlein's predictions didn't happen, it was an alternate timeline. He was fair in this, too, in that there were also timelines for the worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. E. "Doc" Smith, and others. Interestingly, he DID manage to predict a few things completely accurately, including waterbeds and the rise of the Christian Right. Though perhaps the best one was Stranger in a Strange Land, which predicted the 1960s counterculture.
- Heinlein invented the waterbed as a concept. That prevented it from being patented. He makes an amusing comment about it in his brick-sized diatribe Expanding Universe from 1980.
- To say that Stranger in a Strange Land "predicted" 1960s counterculture is somewhat ignorant of the social mileau prior to its creation, and its subsequent influence. The themes in the book extrapolated heavily from the 1950s "Beat Generation" subculture, which was the precursor to the counterculture movements of the '60s and early '70s. Its "Church of All Worlds" was based on elements of the neo-pagan/"New Age" mystery religons which were gaining popularity among disaffected youth of the time. Heinlein himself wrote that the book "could not be published commercially until the public mores changed. I could see them changing and it turned out that I had timed it right." Many prominent figures of the counterculture would refer to Stranger in a Strange Land as a major influence on their thinking and philosophy, particularly the aspects of free love, communalism, and social liberation. Rather than predicting it, the book in fact helped to create it.
Spider Robinson has a habit of setting stories five to ten years in the future and including elements such as zero-gravity vehicles, over-population to the extent that murder is no longer a crime even in Canada, and futuristic swear words ("You taken slot!") that have completely replaced our current Saxon words.
- Not to mention "dilating doors" and a character glancing at his "watch finger". Robinson has in fact had to redate some of his own stories in reprint: the original (1982) edition of Mindkiller was set in 1995 and 1999, the reprint in 2005 and 2009.
- His [[Callahans Crosstime Saloon Callahan series] is set in pretty much here and now. Including the characters attending the launch of STS-28 and 29 when it actually happened (mostly [1])
David Brin's Earth is set in 2050 or so, and one of the primary notes in his foreword is how difficult it is to create a believable world set 50 years in the future.
Earth in Garth Nix's Keys To The Kingdom books seems to be situated here, especially in terms of medical technology — understandable, as part of the backstory involves a deadly flu epidemic.
The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the book that was the basis for the musical Damn Yankees, was published in 1954, but set in 1958. The musical, which came out in 1955, is just set "sometime in the 1950's".
Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas & Electric is set in 2023 and features a world almost devoid of black people, due to a genetically targeted plague, robots and mutant sewer sharks.
The epilogue of the last Harry Potter book (published in 2007) would, according to the official timeline, take place in 2017. We don't really get to see what the Muggle world is like by that time, but at the very least they still have cars and driving tests.
PG Wodehouse's Ring For Jeeves is an interesting twist on this. Even though the Jeeves stories were written between the 1910s and the 1970s, they all take place in Christie Time...except for this one. Ring For Jeeves is the only novel that is actually set when it was written (the 1950s): World War II has happened, atomic technology is referenced, televisions exist and, most significantly, Britain is experiencing its post-war social upheaval that's dissolving the aristocracy and has resulted in Jeeves' and Bertie's temporary separation. This troper would even go so far as to say that this is the closest thing to Darker And Edgier that Wodehouse ever wrote.
Shepherd Mead's The Big Ball Of Wax (published in 1954) predicted that in 1999, videophones would be common (though he failed to predict personal computers or the Internet, the things which made this very nearly right), TV sets would be wall-size and stereoscopic (we're still waiting...), videotapes would be widespread (he got that right too, though he thought they would be open-reel and didn't foresee DV Ds), power transmission would be a reality and cars would thus be electric, contraceptive pills would be easily available (yes) and nearly all diseases eradicated (sadly, no), the Soviet Union would have fallen and Leningrad reverted to its old name of St. Petersburg (both yes)... and that XP would take over (he got that right — sort of, anyway, though his XP was EXPeriential Broadcasting, a way of recording and transmitting full-sensory material). Let's hope that the last one never comes true, or at least not the way Mead depicted it...
John Ringo's Posleen War Series, the first book (A Hymn Before Battle) published in 2000 but set in 2004. For the most part, his Into The Looking Glass series, with Travis Taylor, seems to be Next Sunday AD, with references to the current War On Terror, but the eponymous first book of that series has Powered Armor suits, the Wyverns, far beyond anything currently feasible with modern technology.

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The setting of Max Headroom. You can still smoke in public buildings. It's a federal offense to turn your TV off. This being cyberpunk, there is an Internet, though it gets called "The System", and the way it's shown to work is pretty thoroughly gonzo. There's no reality shows. Japan rules the business world. Network news is filmed on camcorders.
- Max Headroom is the Trope Namer here. The titular character, a computer-generated television announcer, was originally created to host a British music video show. A television movie called Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future gave him a back story and also spawned the Max Headroom television series. The phrase "20 minutes into the future" appeared on screen at the opening of each episode.
- Although an actual lip-synching computer-generated television announcer could be created today, in the '80s they faked it with makeup and blue-screenery.
The setting (and almost-subtitle; they went with "Almost Tomorrow") of the second season of War Of The Worlds. Martial law. Bad air. Food shortages. Genetic engineering. "Totally real" VR simulations. Eight-bit computers.
Dark Angel. USA as a third-world country.
Century City. Bright, clean, genetically engineered.
Power Rangers SPD. Rubber Forehead Aliens live among us and no one seems bothered in the least by this. But if you happen to be a human with special genetic abilities, you're an outcast.
- The setting of the first half of Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, until the writers outright forgot that they'd claimed the show was "In the not-too-distant future".
- The framing story to Power Rangers Time Force feels like this, as it was a world indistinguishable from our own except for the flying cars. But this was purportedly the year 3000. Justified by saying that technology had been brought back up to this level After The End.
- Power Rangers RPM. Exact date unknown, but it's at least four years from now (about a year After The End with a three-year buildup beforehand).
  - According to some sources, it takes place in 2085.
The framing story to Quantum Leap, set in the far-off world of 1997.
Sea Quest DSV. Genetic engineering. Compulsory vegetarianism. Air-processing plants.
The setting of a bunch of episodes of Doctor Who. Note that many of the stories explicitly set in the 1990s and the 21st century aren't really Twenty Minute into the Future; they're really distant-future stories dated by a writer who didn't realize that the year 2000 really wasn't all that far off. However, The Invasion and subsequent UNIT stories were always intended to be set just a few years in the future. This was ignored in Mawdryn Undead, but by UNIT's final classic-series appearance in Battlefield, the setting was clearly re-established as the very-near future. The issue of "UNIT dating" (when exactly the UNIT stories take place, since there's a bucketload of contradictory evidence) is a major topic of debate among fans, has been parodied a number of times in the Expanded Universe and gets its own Wikipedia entry (it also got lampshaded in the books and the new series episode "the poison sky" by having sarah jane and the doctor respectively say they "used to for UNIT in the sevenites, or was it the eighties?").
- In Mawdryn Undead, producer John Nathan-Turner demanded that one of the story's time periods be 1977. This caused Script Editor Eric Saward incredible trauma, because he knew about the UNIT dating situation and, more importantly, he knew the fans knew and would pillory the creative team for the 1977 decision. This is exactly what happened.
- The Second Doctor's companion Zoe comes from the 21st century, but few dates are given for her era... until in The Mind Robber (aired in 1968), she is familiar with a cartoon character from the year 2000, implying that she's from a few years past that time at most. Or that she's a comics geek, which wouldn't be out of character for her.
- The Tenth Planet (1966) was set in the futuristic age of 1986, and features the discovery of Earth's twin planet of Mondas, which begins to siphon off Earth's energy. Come 1985, and the show's still running — the story Attack of the Cybermen sees the Sixth Doctor heading off the titular attack before it affects the Mondas attack...
- All episodes set in "present day London" since Aliens in London take place a year after the airing date.
The setting of Sealab2021, of course. The show it parodies, Sealab2020, arguably suffered worse from the trope because it took itself seriously.
One of the places that they liked to reference and visit in Star Trek. Star Trek: The Original Series gave us some troubling news about genocidal wars of the 1990s. Star Trek: Deep Space 9 visited the second quarter of the 21st century. When TOS visited the near-future world of 1969 in "Assignment: Earth" and Voyager flashed back to 2000 in 1998, those were examples of Next Sunday AD.
Space Island One was set on a space station just a hair more advanced than would be possible today.
An interestingly related setting is that of the new Battlestar Galactica. The viewer is initially given no reference frame for when it occurs relative to Earth history, but it fits the pattern of Twenty Minutes into the Future in that it combines highly advanced, futuristic technology with a culture that is almost indistinguishable from the USA of 2005, down to the clothing. As the series progresses, more specific elements of American culture start appearing, and the fleet discovers the post-apocalyptic remains of a planet they believe to be Earth, whose inhabitants also had a culture resembling 2000s America. Eventually, the series is revealed to be occuring somewhere around the year 148,000 B.C.. All this has happened before and will happen again, after all.
- The prequel series Caprica, set about 50-60 years prior to the main series, follows the pattern to a degree by dressing the characters in fashions reminiscent of the '40s and '50s.
- In addition to similarities in clothing, the series features other modern-day elements, such as British rifles and American HMMW-Vs.
The original Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, had A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away setting with few cultural links to Earth aside from some design motifs reminiscent of ancient Egypt and some Greco-Roman inspired character names. The final episode, Hand Of God, definitively establishes a near future setting for the series when the crew discover a transmission of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but it's impossible to tell how long after the fact this is. That is, unless you take Galactica 1980 as canon, which nobody does, including Richard Hatch.
Head Of The Class, where Howard Hessman's character comments at a reunion that his teacher's salary has finally reached six figures, and that even though teachers are now paid what they deserve, he's too old to enjoy it.
The first season of 24, aired in 2001, was set in March 2004 (as retroactively indicated by a shot of a character's driver license shown in season 4), and each following season has been set a few years after the previous one. (The most recent season, the show's sixth, aired in 2007 and was set in 2013; the seventh season, which began in January 2009 is set in November 2017.) Could be Twenty Seconds into the Future if not for the Applied Phlebotinum (real-time satellite surveillance, handheld remote heartbeat sensors, &c.) that pops up from time to time.
The 1992 series Wild Palms was set fifteen years in the future, with technology and fashion that look nothing like that of the real 2007.
Transformers: The Movie and the third season of the 1986 cartoon are set in the early 21st century (in the far-off year 2005), just far enough forward for Spike to have grown up and had a son. Likewise, Transformers: Energon is set just long enough after Transformers: Armada for the human characters to have grown up.
The TV series (and the film) Alien Nation was set in the near-future of the late eighties/early nineties. The TV movies took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Emily was 13 in "Dark Horizon" and presumably between 16 and 18 in "The Udara Legacy", as she was still attending high school. Of course, the transition from TV series to TV movies involved some unfortunate timeline-tweaking with rather inconsistent aging.
- For the record, you could smoke in the police station, there were a few gags about non-existent sequels to famous movies (Back to the Future VI, etc.), and by the TV movies they had video-phones... but the cars still looked distinctively Eighties.
  - At the time, they were using the most aerodynamic and "futuristic" looking cars they could get.
- Also, the computer user interfaces are also distinctively Eighties or "Graphic-DOS" styled, with no notion of CUA-like interfaces anywhere... but Internet has been replaced by something called "Optinet".
The British 1970s series Time Slip showed several potential versions of the year 1990. Cloning. Melted polar icecaps. Longevity serums. Global computer control. Europe being geologically restructured to maximize efficiency. And, of course, computers were still room-size monstrosities with reel-to-reel tapes. And as to the sense of taste in decor, let us just say that it is truly fortunate for our corneas that only one episode has survived in its original color.
Space: 1999. Still waiting for the moon to leave orbit.
The Outer Limits episode "The Duplicate Man", filmed in 1964, is set in 2025, when space travel is common, cloning has been outlawed and statues of alien lifeforms are exhibited in a museum. The smaller changes from the present are also interesting: future tech includes video phones (with rotary dials!) and light-activated drinking fountains, and the protagonist wears an early Beatles-style collarless suit and drives a car that looks suspiciously like a souped-up Pontiac GTO.
Humorously invoked by Conan O'Brien in his recurring "In the Year 2000" sketches: All of the "future" predictions are based on current events and celebrities. He took the joke even further by continuing the theme well past the arrival of the actual year 2000, although with his recent move to The Tonight Show it's finally been updated to "In the Year 3000".
Fringe is presumably this... as the very least, it's suggested by the scenes set inside Massive Dynamics and particularly by Nina Sharp's... generous enhancements.
The 1960s series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was set in the 1970s-80s.
In the not too distant future / Next Sunday A.D....
Several episodes of the original Twilight Zone were set in a future that has come and gone.
In the 1979 movie and subsequent TV series, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the titular character, Buck begins his journey in 1987 in a deep space probe that was supposed to last a few months. Something goes wrong and he's frozen for 500 years. When he's awakened from his frozen state, he learns that a nuclear war has made most of Earth uninhabitable. The war took place in the early 1990s.

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Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is set in 2035, 36 years after Dracula was supposedly defeated for good and his castle banished into a solar eclipse. Ironically, the only modern or futuristic things and people in the game are a U.S. Army soldier, in-game items that are never shown graphically, a handgun, and a positron rifle.
The first four .hack games take place in 2010, with a virus having wiped out all computers except for the Altmit OS in 2005. The next three games take place in 2017.
Chrono Trigger. Though it obviously takes place on a non-Earth world, its dinosaurs did die on 65,000,000 B.C., making it clear that it was somewhat Earth-like. In its version of 1999, mankind lives in domes with air fortresses and sentient robots.
- The domes and robots were in 2300 AD, actually.
  - I can see why you might say that, but when Lavos attacks in 1999 we clearly see the domes in that period as well.
- Of course, this one is obviously on purpose, considering that A.D. 1000 corresponds roughly to modern times, and A.D. 600 to medieval times.
Nearly every Tom Clancy game; see his Literature entry.
- Pretty much comes to a head in End War, where the US is able to now deploy units anywhere in the world in an hour and thirty minutes, nuclear weapons are rendered useless by shields (but "rods from God" aren't, and neither are Kill Sat lasers), and many European nations have banded together. There are miniguns and better armor, and evil Russians, and technology that's conceptual or prototype here is deployed (there's even a bit of Back Story about H&K and FN suing the US Government for stealing the name and design for their own weapon).
- This Troper was playing one of the Splinter Cell games and saw this trope happened almost literally. Each Splinter Cell game is set just a couple years into the future, and has a specific real-life date and time to the minute for when each level starts. Since I had a late start into the series I ran into a level that was almost quite literally just 20 minutes into the future.
The Sims is never said to take place at any specific time in the Simverse, although it is clear that Sims 2 is set after the original. The neighborhoods in The Sims are very similar (well, with the limitations of the game) to our current society and levels of technology - except for the robots (both A Is that begin functioning as household servants but can be freed and helpful household robots), aliens, werewolves, ninja teleportation, ressurection, the Grim Reaper, zombies, plantsims (Sims that function like plants, needing oxygen and water to survive), and more. So Yeah.
Crystalis: October 1, 1997. The END DAY.
- The Game Boy Color remake didn't specify the date of the end of the world (it was released after 1997, which should be obvious since the system it's on was also released after 1997). Seeing how the remake wasn't received as well as the original, most Crystalis fans probably don't care.
Though the original Command And Conquer game took place in 1995, the same year it was released, subsequent games are generally set Twenty Minutes Into The Future; circa 2030 for Tiberian Sun and 2047 for Tiberium Wars.
Duke Nukem 3D is played in 2007 December. It was released in 1997. Its kinda funny (sad) how the sequel was promised to be out in 98...
Deus Ex, released in 2000, is set in 2052 and features some impressive — but not too out-there — advances in computer science (A Is), genetics (engineered mutant species), robotics (commercially used security robots) and, most importantly, nanotechnology. One of the game's plot points is the nanotechnologically augmented, super-powered protagonist who replaces the old cyborg augments. There's also mention of mining operations on the moon.
- The sequel (yes it exists) moves the setting 30 years and into the actually future. Bio-mortification is common place, the nation-state is gone and replace with competing international interest groups, the Borg control the black market, and nanotechnology can now build or dismantle cities in a matter of minutes.
Sa Ga Frontier is set in a time where travel between regions is possible by spaceship, in addition to robots and advanced medicine but still people travel by normal vehicles and Magic is still known and used and bookstores are still standing.
Grand Theft Auto 2 took place 'three weeks into the future'. The official website lists the date as... three weeks into the future.
The original Half Life took place sometime during the 2000s.
Inverted in Halo; though the game takes place in 2552 and the overall series takes place in the 26th century, most of the technology is remarkably close to preset day, with a few exceptions, such as anti-gravity warships, holographic AIs, portable railguns and powered battle armor.
The House Of The Dead III, a 2002 game, is set in 2019, and by then the world is in a post-apocalyptic state.
- Inverted in The House of the Dead 4, which was released in 2005 in Japan. On top of being a prequel to the third game, it's set in the past (2003).
The original Mega Man games were set in the year 20XX. The continuation of the series, Mega Man X, was set in 21XX. Posterior series in the franchise, such as Mega Man Zero and Mega Man ZX would be set even further still.
- MegaMan Battle Network also takes place in 20XX, but in an explicit Alternate Universe. (The point of divergence is a grant going to fund Dr. Light's network technology, rather than Dr. Wily's robots.)
- Hope Rides Alone, a Rock Opera very loosely based on the Mega Man mythology, is similarly set in the year 200X.
Each game in the Metal Gear series (with the exception of prequels) is set nearly a decade after the ones when they were released: the first Metal Gear, originally released in 1987, is set in the placeholder date of 199X (later established to be 1995 or '96, depending on the source), Metal Gear 2, released in 1990, is set in 1999; Metal Gear Solid, released in 1998, is set in 2005; Metal Gear Solid 2, released in 2001; is set in 2007 and '09; and Metal Gear Solid 4, released in 2008, is set in 2014.
- In Kojima's earlier game, Snatcher, the Catastrophe (an event which results in the deaths of 80% of the Eurasian population) occurs on June 6, 1991 in the Japanese versions (the first versions of the game were released for Japanese computers in 1988). Changed to 1996 (convenient due to the presence of a third 6 in its date) in the English Sega CD version released in 1994.
- Policenauts, the Spiritual Successor to Snatcher originally released in 1994, states that mankind's first fully functional space colony would be launched in 2010.
Perfect Dark takes place in 2024, and it seems we're less than two decades away from flying cars, self-aware robots, extra-terrestrial contact, and a black president. That last one's already in place.
The exact year isn't spoken out loud, but based on internal evidence, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney begins near the end of the year 2016. Technology's exactly the same, but the court system was severely overhauled to reduce congestion — court cases now last three days at most, trials have become battles of wits, and defendants are guilty until proven innocent.
- In the first game, the judge is apparently unfamiliar with digital cameras. By the time of the game, it would probably would be more amazing if somebody used a film camera. Then again, the judge is a little senile...
- Technology seems to have both progressed and regressed - on the one hand, you have Godot's eye mask, without which he would be completely blind, on the other hand, all the computers at the police station are much bulkier than you would imagine and forensics hasn't improved much.
- The original Japanese games are set in the present day at time of release; the American versions changed the date in a flimsy attempt to justify the differences in courtroom procedure.
- Innocent until Proven Guilty? Hahaha. No. That's old fashioned. Now you unconditionally have to find the real killer and prove his guilt instead.
Trauma Center: It's 2018. AIDS has been eradicated, tumours can be removed by a simple process, and there's a wonderful antibiotic gel that disinfects, arrests bleeding and instantly heals small wounds. On the other hand, weird man-made parasites called GUILT are tearing up your organs from the inside, petrify your liver and wrap webs around your heart, draining it of its energy.
Uplink, written in 2001 and focusing on Hollywood Hacking in Far-Off Year of 2010 AD, has more than a few issues. For the more technically-oriented gamer, this can lead to either Narm or unintentional hilarity. A 60 GHz processor is quite slow, and gateway computers with multiple processors are common, while only specialized systems support daughterboards. BBS software still holds a major part in the world, and Inter NIC can be used as a proxy and hacked into with a basic dictionary attack.
Frontlines: Fuel of War takes place in the year 2024. The biggest differences are that military robotics are widespread(everything from hand-held flying recon drones to minigun and mortar equipped mini-tanks to hand-held miniature attack helicopters to automated sentry guns); the XM8, or at least a heavily modified version of it, is in widespread service; and that oil is about to run out(specifically, Peak Oil has been reached and passed, and now everyone's scrambling to get something out the door to help people).

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The original Umlaut House takes place in 2020 (the strip having begun in 2000); the sequel takes place about twenty years later. The original sees only a few Unobtanium gadgets, which the sequel takes a lot farther.
In The Last Days Of Foxhound, the rather messy dating of the Metal Gear series is avoided by the use of 200X, typically on the cover of "The American Journal of Inaccurate Genetics", or just plain covered up, like this.

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Batman Beyond is set forty years into the future of the DCAU (meaning it takes place during the 2040s or so), and of course, by then New Gotham's a Cyber Punk dystopia of human gene splicing, flying cars, night clubs that play nothing but techno, and Kill Sats.
- Oh and it is worthy to note that Bruce Wayne had retired 20 years before the events of the show, as shown in a prologue scene during the first episode. Aside from Bruce being older and wearing a new batsuit, hardly anything else looks any different from the 'modern' Gotham City during this sequence.
- Meanwhile, Justice League has huge space stations with artificial gravity, a Kill Sat, sentient robots and lasers. Mind you, having people like Lex Luthor and other mad scientists around probably helps, as well as reverse-engineered alien technology.
Captain Scarlet is set in 2070-something, which might seem a way off, but don't worry. Aside from a floating fortress, some nifty lorry manoeuvring gear, cars that can (sort of) fly and hoverbikes, not much has changed.
- Thunderbirds and Stingray take place a decade or two earlier. The biggest oddities are relatively small nuclear reactors (which permit most of the rest of the vehicle technology) and whatever heavy duty equipment allows WASP to hide their city underground.
Parodied in The Ripping Friends, which has a two-part episode entitled "A Man From Next Thursday" where next Thursday is depicted as being highly futuristic.
Averted in South Park, episode 31 "Prehistoric Ice Man". The episode was about a man who had been frozen 32 months earlier who was thawed and had trouble adjusting to the 'future'.
The Jetsons. It takes place in 2062 (100 years from the day of the show's launch).
Transformers The Move takes place in 2005, roughly 20 years after the original series. Does anyone remember having cars like those, wearing pimped-out space suits (whilst still on Earth), the government setting up an entire publicly known organization to counter alien threats, building space-craft capable of traveling entire galaxies away or riding around on their hoverboards? Me neither.
- To be fair though, much of the technological achievements present in that universe could be chalked up to having the Autobots sharing Cybertronian technology with us if you wanna provide an excuse. The ridiculous fashion sense though...

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Space Odyssey, the final song on the Byrds' 1968 Notorious Byrd Brothers album, opens with the lines, "In nineteen and ninety-six we ventured to the moon/Onto the the Sea Of Crisis like children from the womb/We journeyed cross the great wall plain beneath the mountain range/and there we saw the pyramid, it looked so very strange." Basically a reference to the film 2001.

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