Twenty Minutes Into The Future - Television Tropes & Idioms

They claim an indeterminate "near future," but a careful analysis of the fashions, haircuts, vehicles, and computers seen in this 1987 movie lead us to believe it took place no later than 1988.

—Cracked.com's 8 Movie Futures Already Proven Wrong

Welcome To The World Of Tomorrow! Literally.

The future, but not so far into it that you'd notice except for the abundance of Applied Phlebotinum. Often, the future is a lot dirtier than the present, and vaguely Dystopian. This is often a linear extrapolation of national malaise, so American works of the 1970s have endlessly skyrocketing crime and inner urban decay while the 1980s brought the notion that Japan Takes Over The World. Economic recovery shifted this towards Japan no longer taking over the world, where the Japanese extrapolated their own malaise.

If an explicit date is given, it's usually less than 50 years forward from the airdate of the show.

Obviously, the setting of most Flash Forward stories, though they usually don't make a big deal of it except as a minor joke. Of course, Science Marches On, so it's fun to watch 10 years later to see how wrong they got it.

Shows set here seem to have a higher than usual failure rate, as well as falling victim to Science Marches On and The Great Politics Mess Up .

Compare Zeerust. Next Sunday AD is this, without the Applied Phlebotinum.

Examples:

Live Action TV

The setting (and subtitle) of Max Headroom. You can still smoke in public buildings. It's a federal offense to turn your TV off. There's no Internet. There's no reality shows. Japan rules the world. Network news is filmed on camcorders.
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.
The setting of Dark Angel. USA as a third world country.
The setting of Century City. Bright, clean, genetically engineered.
The setting of 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".
- Should have been the setting of the framing story to Power Rangers Time Force, as it was a world indistinguishable from our own except for the flying cars. But this was purportedly the year 3000.
The (stated) setting of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Next Sunday, AD.
The setting of the framing story to Quantum Leap, set in the far-off world of 1997.
The setting of 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. The writers, of course, forgot this by the time of 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.
- Hand-waved and lampshaded in "The Sontaran Strategm", where the Doctor's not even sure when he hung around with UNIT.
- The UNIT dating controversy hadn't been "forgotten" in regard to 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 1996 Doctor Who movie was set at the end of 1999, and part of the plot revolved around the new-millennium celebrations.
- The 2005 series began in the contemporary setting (that is, 2005), but in four episodes a Time Skip had put them one year later. Since every subsequent series has had a Christmas Episode, everything since has had to be set one year in the future from the airdate. An unfortunate side-effect is that Torchwood and Who writers seem to have already forgotten that the "present day" Whoniverse is one year ahead of us. For example, the seventh Harry Potter book apparently isn't yet out in Martha's time as of "The Shakespeare Code," although it's been two Christmases since "Aliens of London," and therefore should be 2008. Fans may calm their tempers by supposing that what with the destruction of #10 Downing Street, the Sycorax invasion, the Battle of Canary Wharf, the Racnoss invasion, and the monster in Cardiff in "End of Days", Rowling had to push her deadline back a bit. Or else, that this is Doctor Who, home of the Timey Wimey Ball. (Let's not even bring up the fact that The Sarah Jane Adventures takes place six months in the future of the other two shows. Except that according to "Turn Left", it doesn't.)
  - Don't forget the Torchwood radio drama "Lost Souls", deliberately and clearly set on the very day it was broadcast: September 10, 2008. Torchwood's time relative to Doctor Who is, at the least, somewhat flexible.
- 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...
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 and visited the near-future world of 1969 in "Assignment: Earth". Star Trek Deep Space Nine visited the second quarter of the 21st century. Star Trek Voyager flashed back to 2000 in 1998.
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: of course, we have 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.
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.
Galactica 1980: Set in the year of its production. With flying motorcycles.
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 upcoming seventh season, which will begin in January 2009, will presumably be set in 2015 or so.) 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.
The Movie and the third season of Transformers are set in the early 21st century (in the far-off year of 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. Then again it took place in Los Angeles, so that's not much of a stretch.
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.

Western Animation

Batman Beyond is set forty years into the future from the rest of the DCAU, 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.

Film

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. Though 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.
- Based on the current economic paranoia (September 2008) — $50 for a Pepsi might be too low.
  - Actually, severe economic depression generally leads to deflation, not inflation. Perhaps the Pepsi should cost 20¢.
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. Let's not forget the sentient robots.

Strange Days was written in the mid-1990s and much of the plot has to do with the millennium 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.
Lampshaded in the dystopian quasi-futuristic Brazil, which takes place "Somewhere in the 20th Century" at "8:45 p.m.".
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).
The very first scene of A Scanner Darkly (the movie version, duh) states that the story takes place "seven years from now."
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.
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.
- To be fair, at that point in the Godzilla continuity, mankind would have had time to reverse engineer technology from the half-dozen or so previous alien invasions, so the idea of mankind having moonbases isn't that farfetched.
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".
Demolition Man predicts the advanced cryogenic freezing technology of 1996, a mere three years after the movie's release date.
Twelve Monkeys takes place in an apocalyptic 1996, giving only one year for the audience to try to avert the horrible plague that kills five billion people. But no one seemed particularly worried. Until SARS. And even then, no one cared. The Apocalypse is just one of those things, you know.
Predator 2 predicts the grim voodoo gangs of 1997 Los Angeles
Blade Runner looks like it might be heading this way, although there's still a little while to go before we get our off-world colonies, flying cars and human-like replicants.
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.
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.
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, 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.
Gattaca is frighteningly plausible. The most out-there thing? A manned mission to Titan, which is in our own solar system.
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.
Robocop predicted rampant crime, rampant A Is, and working cybernetics. So, what, 3/6 of the way there?
- Rampant crime in Detroit? yeah...that's far fetched.

Anime

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 geonome 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.
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.
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".
- Fist Of The North Star was parodied in episode 24 of Excel Saga:
  Narrator: The future! Nineteen-ninety...
  Audience: It's already passed!
  Narrator: Oh crap! You're right...
Astro Boy (manga originally created 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.
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 backstory 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 busses.
- Actually, it already exists, although it's not widespread, except for the first one which can be found mainly in univercities.
Akira begins a with a nuclear explosion in 1988 that sets off World War III.
Ghost In The Shell.
Or Cowboy Bebop, which was set in the year 2071, if this troper remembers correctly. By the late 1990s hyperspace gates were developed, all the planets in the solar system are colonized, and the gate nearest the moon has exploded, turning the Earth into a backwater constantly pummeled by "meteors"—really fragments of the Moon. The series actually did a fairly good job at portraying a world that could conceivably evolve (well, except for the space travel), except for one episode which revolves around the crew trying to play an old Betamax tape, which was recorded (if you work out the date) about 10 years after Betamax became redundant.
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.
Alien Nine takes place in 2014, but the setting is not really 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.

Literature

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.
Tom Clancy's first Jack Ryan novels, written throughout the 1980s, were set at an intederminate 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.
Kind of averted in The Historian where while the narrator's present is around 2020 and a major terrorist attack on FBI headquarters is mentioned. However, most of the book is set in Cold War Europe.
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. Oh, and super A.I. computers with hot chick holograms. (Somebody more experienced with this stuff can add links.)
The Whateley Universe is nominally Twenty Minutes Into The Future (even if it currently is in fall of 2006) because of all the gadgets and devises built by the mutant inventors.
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 1960's 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 Exapanding Universe from 1980.

Comic Books

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.
  - Thinly veiled? More like barely veiled at all, if you ask me. Or Alan Moore.
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.
Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis is a quite prominent example of it.
- Or, rather, a prominent aversion: The City exists in a future where no one knows the date/year, so all memorials have to say "30 years, 3 months, and 27 days ago, stuff happened" not "stuff happened on that date".
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."

Video Games

Other than the prequels, the Metal Gear Solid series is set a decade or so after its production... and the series is about twenty years old now, putting many events in the main story line in the past.
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.
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.
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.
Nearly every Tom Clancy game.
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, Mega Man ZX, and Mega Man Legends would be set even further still.
- MegaMan Battle Network also takes place in 20XX, but it's set on an Earth-like planet where Everything Is Online.
- Hope Rides Alone, a Rock Opera very loosely based on the Mega Man mythology, is similarly set in the year 200X.
Somewhat 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 real life, with a few exceptions, such as anti-gravity warships, holographic AIs, portable railguns and powered battle armor.
- The Cyberdyne company in Japan recently announced its 5th prototype of their HAL powered armor, subverting it even further.
  - They're taking orders now. Lease a powered (un)armor for only 150,000-200,000Y/month, plus maintenance fees.
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. However, this does not count as the original "Command And Conquer" storyline was an alternate timeine created by Albert Einstein.
Chrono Trigger. Though it is obviously a non-Earth world, its dinosaurs did die on 65,000,000 B.C., making it clear that it was somewhat Earth-like. Supposedly in 1999, mankind would live in domes with air fortresses and sentient robots... utterly useless against a giant space crab bacterium, but I digress.
- 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.
Persona 3 Takes place during the 2009-2010 school year, and there are battle robots and guns that force out a physical manifestation of your soul when you shoot yourself in the head with them. Of course, most people don't know about this, making it look superficially more like Next Sunday AD.
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 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).
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. Though we ~~might get~~ got that last one after all.
Uplink, focusing on Hollywood Hacking in Far Off Year of 2010 AD and written in 2001, 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.

Webcomics

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 Venus Ascending, the characters apparently entered the space academy right after graduating their modern high school, and by their graduation, the space program has reached Wagon Train To The Stars levels.
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.

Newspaper Comics

Brewster Rockit: Space Guy both follows this trope normally and had an arc where the heroes fought aliens that were literally twenty minutes more advanced then they were.

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