Unintentional Period Piece / Turn of the Millennium - Video Games

• The Ace Attorney series is set between 2016 and 2027, but a lot of things in the game point to its 2000 to 2001 development cycle. Cell phones are depicted as the small plastic rectangle design of early-2000s phones, particularly Nokia.^note While smartphones are currently popular throughout the world, there is still a large market share in Japan for "minibrick" and flip phones, especially among teenagers. The English localizations also tend to reference pop culture of the time, such as Apollo's mention of The Grid and Godot's outburst of "Know your role, and shut your mouth" dating them to the mid-2000s easily. The inclusion of juries in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney was due to the reappointment of lay judges in the Japanese court system, which had been in "suspension" since 1943. Starting from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, the game was given a much more futuristic approach with the introduction of sentient robots and holographic screens.
• The 2002 game Aggressive Inline not only has the obligatory period "extreme sports" soundtrack (late '90s/early 2000s Pop Punk, Ska Punk, and Hip-Hop in its case), but one of the characters you can play as, a woman named Chrissy with blonde pigtails and a sexy schoolgirl uniform, is pretty obviously based on a young Britney Spears from the video for "...Baby One More Time".
• Animal Crossing came out in 2001 and it's obvious it was made during that period between the fifth gen's end and the beginning of the sixth.
  • During fetch quests, Villagers would sometimes ask to deliver or retreat GameBoys or a Virtual Pet toy called Pokémon Pikachu. This was fine for the original Japanese Nintendo 64 version; however, the international version was the rerelease on the Nintendo Gamecube, which came out in 2002 in North America, 2003 in Australia, and 2004 in Europe, time by which the Game Boy Advance was already commonplace (and in the case of the European version, the Nintendo DS came out two months after the game was first released for that region). Over a decade later, the Pokémon Pikachu is an obscure toy that barely anyone remembers, and the fact that the in-game characters only use the Game Boy Color was already odd for the American and the European versions because a real-world Game Boy Advance is needed to unlock the Island.
  • The use of playable Nintendo Entertainment System games also dates the game's release to the time when nostalgia for The '80s was first starting to kick in among the general public, with unofficial NES emulators like NESticle having already made major headway online in the late 90s.
  • Outside of gaming culture, the game also dates itself by the fact that videotapes are an item occasionally used in fetch quests (and are treated as commonplace enough to be regularly loaned to neighbors), CRT televisions are the only kinds obtainable in-game, and the only stereo systems available are CD players, cassette decks, turntables, and a reel-to-reel tape player. Later games would introduce flatscreen LCD televisions and stereos whose designs could only feasibly make sense with digitally-downloaded music and streaming services, reflecting changes in commonplace technology in the years after the first Animal Crossing's release. That said, later games would still retain the original series of stereo furniture (due to a combination of the Grandfather Clause, the Vinyl Revival in the late 2000s making turntables fresh again, and CDs still maintaining a good amount of popularity in Japan). Cranky villagers also speak about e-mails as if they were a completely never-been-heard-before type of technology, invoking Technologically Blind Elders, when nowadays they are even more common than the hand-written letters the in-game character use. These and all the points above are made strange because the game moves in-real time, so villagers still use all this outdated technology over two decades later. Granted, the dialogue is obviously not programmed to keep up with "modern" times, but still.
• Bad Day L.A., a parody of disaster movies combined with a stab at satire on life in America and Los Angeles during the Turn of the Millennium. The protagonist is an expy of Dave Chappelle, other supporting characters are parodies of Paris Hilton and George W. Bush, the Wanted Meter is based on the color-coded (and oft-mocked) Homeland Security Advisory System instituted after 9/11 and quietly replaced during the Obama administration, and much of the humor is based on the fears and political controversies of the mid-2000s, including terrorism, Latin American immigration, and same-sex marriage.
• Blacksite: Area 51, a satirical take on The War on Terror in the form of a first-person shooter, fell pretty painfully into this just a few years after it came out. The plot revolves around a failed Super-Soldier program created to fill the ranks of the US military with expendable Cannon Fodder drawn from disenfranchised groups (such as criminals and illegal immigrants) so that they wouldn't need to restore conscription and send the kids of middle-class voters to die in some faraway country. This was an explicit reference to the perception (especially among anti-war liberals and libertarians) that the war was disproportionately hurting the working-class people who made up the ranks of the military, as well as the fears of the draft being brought back that were common among those same groups at the time. Ambrose outright states the former in one scene, asking Dr. Weiss "oh, so it's okay for poor kids to come home in body bags?" when she lays out the goals of the Reborn program. Most of the mission titles are also references to media phrases and quotes from the Iraq War, such as "Regime Change", "Misunderestimate", and "Stay the Course".
  
  Moving beyond the war, another component of the game's dystopian Next Sunday A.D. setting is gas prices at the exorbitant level of... just over $3 a gallon, which would become quaint just a few years later once gas prices started well surpassing the $4 a gallon mark. The player character also meets a Red Shirt civilian in Rachel, Nevada who chose to stay behind because he had a massive mortgage on his house and didn't want to lose it, referencing the free-wheeling home loans that, even before the Great Recession, were putting many people deep in debt.
• In recent years, Brütal Legend has become an unintentional time capsule of mid-to-late-2000s metalhead culture. While the game is mostly set in a fantasy world rooted in nostalgia for classic Heavy Metal, the prologue set in the then-present day features Eddie working as a roadie for a Fake Band called Kabbage Boy, a very unflattering parody of virtually every major trend in mainstream rock/metal music in the 2000s. The band's members include an obnoxious jerkass dressed in "street" clothes and a flamboyant Pretty Boy frontman with a Phantom mask and what appears to be a T-Mobile Sidekick phone, and their music is an unholy fusion of every negative stereotype of Nu Metal, Rap Metal, Emo Music, and Metalcore (their genre, according to the game's soundtrack, is "Second Wave of American Tween Melodic Rap Metalcore".) In addition, there's jabs at Hair Metal (even if the soundtrack includes Hair Metal songs), and also mocking of the aforementioned Nu Metal, Emo Music and Metalcore genres that were commonplace in 2000s metalhead culture. Eddie himself embodies the zeitgeist of the mid-to-late-2000s metal fandom, and his severe disdain for any genre other than classic heavy metal and those genres' fans would make him seem unlikeable to modern players. The very politically incorrect humor wouldn't also be seen as acceptable in modern times.
• Between the rampant Product Placement, soundtracks with copious amounts of Nu Metal and Pop Punk, obnoxious radio DJs, and general Totally Radical attitude, the Burnout games are as aggressively 2000s as is possible for a plotless Racing Game.
• Captain Rainbow stars several forgotten and C-list Nintendo characters, one of which is Little Mac from Punch-Out!!. This came out just shy of a year before the 2009 reboot game, which propelled Mac back into the mainstream and made him a popular Nintendo character again, enough to become a mainstay of the Super Smash Bros. lineup.
• It should go without saying that the Def Jam Series was a product of its time. The rap game has changed exponentially since the 2000s, and the vast majority of rappers that were signed with Def Jam or another label at the time are no longer under them. It didn't help that many of the rappers and celebrities on the games are either one-hit wonders or once-famous people who have since faded from public memory. Joe Budden also retired from rapping in 2018 (with his last album, Rage & The Machine, having been released in October 2016), while Prodigy (one half of Mobb Deep) and Chris Lighty (who portrayed the character Baby Chris) died in The New '10s and DMX succumbed to an overdose-induced heart attack in 2021.
• Destroy All Humans! features a lot of sly jokes and references to George W. Bush and the Iraq War. Within a few years, both would be dated to the point that they risk being incomprehensible.
• The Deus Ex games.
  • {Errant Signal}, in its episode on the original game, examined it with regards to this trope. While it's a science-fiction game set in a cyberpunk future, its presentation of the conspiracy lore that its plot is built around is rooted in a very pre-9/11 view of such. Conspiracy Theorist characters are presented in the Fox Mulder mold of the dashing, romantic truth-seeker, the theories in question are of the pulpy, apolitical and actually plausible sci-fi sort that formed the defining image of such in the '90s, and the anti-government National Secessionist Forces are portrayed sympathetically, largely divorced from the far-right ideology of the real-life militia movement that they were inspired by. The fashions of many of the characters, particularly the prevalence of trenchcoats of several varieties, also reek of the time when films like Blade and The Matrix defined the 'hip' counterculture. However, even with how dated he found much of the game to be, he felt that its portrayal of the future of capitalist society, and of the arguments over globalization, localism, meritocracy, and technocracy, was incredibly prescient.
  • As mentioned on the game's own trope page, Deus Ex: Invisible War becomes dated to the early 2000s simply by the tagline on the box art alone: "The Future War on Terror."
• The Emo Game series.
  • The main series games are Affectionate Parodies of early 2000s Emo Music and culture done in the style of retraux 16-bit side-scrollers. Playing these games is like stepping back in time to 2002-04, what with all the pop culture references, '80s kid show nostalgia, emo treading the line between "underground" and "mainstream", a Running Gag featuring Mandy Moore portrayed as an underage Teen Idol (she's since had a Career Resurrection with an image far removed from her early days, which she has completely distanced from), and MTV still, at the very least, basing its reputation around music videos.
  • The spinoff The Anti-Bush Game, as its name suggests, is a political agitprop piece made in protest against the George W. Bush administration. It's firmly dated to 2004 by its references to the impending Presidential election and its endorsement of John Kerry in that election (including a link to his campaign website at the end), as well as political controversies and issues from the early 2000s like the war in Iraq, Bush's tax cuts, Janet Jackson's Wardrobe Malfunction, stem cell research, the Enron scandal, health care reform, same-sex marriage, and the power of the Christian Right. Notably, it doesn't contain any reference to controversies from Bush's second term in office, such as Hurricane Katrina, the housing bubble, or the onset of the Great Recession, because none of these had happened yet. The fact that John Edwards, Kerry's running mate in 2004, appears in the game as a populist crusader for economic justice also rings Hilarious in Hindsight given how Edwards' career imploded in a sex scandal a few years later.
  • This trope wound up killing the planned third game in the series, Super Emogame III. It had become one of these to 2005-06, and it even had a demo released, yet it had been languishing as vaporware well into 2007 and beyond as Jason Oda's work commitments making advergames started piling up and eating into his time. It would've taken another couple of years to finish, meaning that, by the time of its eventual release, most of its humor and references (to things like MySpace, Ashlee Simpson, the original click-wheel iPod, and then-current emo bands) would've been very outdated. Any attempts to update the humor would've delayed production for even longer. Realizing this, Oda pulled the plug on it.
• Tom Clancy's Endwar is a 2007 strategy game set in a 2020 based around assumptions which have now been proven false:
  • A United Europe, while still a plausible development, has not yet come into being. And with the rise of Euroskeptic parties on both the political left and right, culminating in the UK's official exit from the EU in 2020, this outcome looks more and more unlikely.
  • Relations between the United States and Russia have continued to deteriorate, but Russia has not become a resurgent superpower as a result of being the world's leading supplier of oil and gas. Rather, the shale oil and gas boom has resulted in the USA becoming the world's largest producer of petroleum products, while Russia's energy-reliant economy is slumping due to the glut.
  • Although the Middle East and North Africa went through periods of great instability through much of The New '10s, the countries didn't collapse into utter anarchy, and they certainly didn't start a nuclear war between each other.
  • Military technology of Endwar's envisioned 2020 is much, much more advanced than our own. There is no missile shield, no American military space station, laser weapons are still very much experimental pieces, weapons systems like the M1 Abrams and the T-90 are still in use, etc.
• So many of the jokes in Escape from Monkey Island are based on Turn of the Millennium pop culture that, today, they fall horribly flat. The plot, meanwhile, spoofs a lot of social issues that are far less relevant now than they were in 2000 (such as big corporations dehumanizing middle America). It's like American Beauty: The Game.
• While the Sanity Effects of Eternal Darkness have held up well, there are some effects that take the player out of the experience a bit due to the UI effects utilizing features that modern televisions don't have anymore, but televisions in 2002 did. Examples include big green volume bars and a blue screen for the inputs.
• Eternal Fighter Zero was clearly made in the early 2000s, with all its late '90s and early 2000s references that would go over the heads of many younger ones.
• The opening cutscene of Fahrenheit, set in a Next Sunday A.D. 2013, features a shot of the Lower Manhattan skyline that prominently includes one of the earlier suggested concepts for the rebuilt World Trade Center by architect Daniel Libeskind. The actual One World Trade Center tower wound up looking quite different (here is a side-by-side comparison of the two), marking the game as having been made post-9/11 but before they started rebuilding the World Trade Center.
• The Final Fantasy VI hack Awful Fantasy is in the same boat as the Emogame series. It was made in 2003, and it shows.
• J2e's fan retranslation of Final Fantasy IV is loaded with pop culture references that were nowhere to be found in the original script, some of which (like a Pulp Fiction quote or a few lines of lyrics taken from "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)") firmly date it as being a product of the late '90s-early 2000s.
• The original First Encounter Assault Recon, though set around 2025, dates itself to its 2005 release quite readily by background details. Chief among these, as it tends to be, is that in a game where 85% of the levels are set in the offices or super-secret underground laboratories of a MegaCorp that's developed a battalion of cloned Super-Soldiers and a genetically-engineered telepathic commander to lead them, almost all of the exposition is delivered through either voicemail from land-line phones or very bulky Alienware laptops; when mobile phones are shown at all, they're of a very 2005 design with a fixed screen over physical buttons, and desktop computers are universally set up with big bulky CRT monitors or flatscreens that don't look any bigger than 720p at maximum. Another big detail is one of those voicemails left on Norton Mapes' phone, where he's asked to tone down the innuendo around a female coworker lest a sexual harassment case gets dropped on him — while taking a stand against sexism in the workplace (and quickly establishing a character as a bad guy by having him be sexist) is still very relevant today, the caller's almost-completely nonchalant attitude about the harassment in the first place (he even outright says he wouldn't give a rat's ass if not for the fact that such a lawsuit would bring unwanted attention to the secret task force they're all part of) is very much a product of an earlier time - today it's almost a daily occurrence of someone in a major company like what Armacham would be losing their job over sexual harassment, either performing it directly or knowing it's happening and choosing not to speak up about it.
• Frontlines: Fuel of War, set in a dystopian near-future 2024 where a worldwide petroleum shortage has triggered an economic collapse and World War III, will be forever rooted in that time in the late 2000s when gas prices were hitting then-unprecedented levels of $4 a gallon, which was causing peak oil disaster scenarios like the "Long Emergency" (which is referenced by name in the intro) to get mainstream press.
• The Interactive Buddy Flash game is obviously a product from around 2004, as the caricatures you can choose to play with (or beat the hell out of) include George W. Bush, John Kerry, Michael Moore, StrawberryClock and Maddox, who were all at the height of their relevancy around 2004.
• In I Wanna Be the Guy, one of the many obstacles is a fake error message which will drop down and kill the player if they don't realize the trick and move out of the way as soon as they regain control. It's a Windows XP error message, dating the game to when XP was the current iteration of Windows, and ensuring no one will be fooled by it if they play the game on a later OS (even Vista, which came out worldwide the year of the game's release).
• The Newgrounds Flash game K-FED: Dancing with Fire is a satire on Kevin Federline, his then-recent album Playing with Fire and his short-lived marriage to Britney Spears, released in 2006. Federline was swiftly forgotten about by the general public after Spears divorced him in the same year, instantly dating the game to the year of its release.
• Kingdom Hearts II features the main character of Chicken Little as a usable summon. Both came out in 2005—which is the only year where a Disney product would acknowledge Chicken Little in such a significant capacity, given its generally awful reception. It also reads like a who's who of up-and-coming voice actors in the early-to-mid 00s, some of whom were eventually replaced and did not return (such as Christopher Lee after II, and Hayden Panettiere after 2.8), as well as casting Jesse McCartney, a popular Teen Idol during the time of the games release, to voice Roxas. Even the Final Fantasy characters that appear in this game reflect the period it was released, with Cloud and Yuffie appearing in their Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children outfits, a film that was released the same year as Kingdom Hearts II, and the Gullwings of Final Fantasy X-2 appearing, a game that released in 2003, the same year II's development began. One mechanic in the game also has Roxas and Sora using a skateboard to travel around areas faster, a sport that while still has a following, is not nearly as popular as it was during the early to mid-2000s.
• Kirby & the Amazing Mirror prominently features the eponymous character wielding a blocky pink cell phone with an antenna, instantly dating itself to the mid-2000s. Perhaps tellingly, no Kirby game released afterward features modern tech to this extent; even the one based around a high-tech invasion, Kirby: Planet Robobot, focuses on fantastic machinery like cyborgs and Humongous Mechas.
• Luigi's Mansion: Similar to the first Animal Crossing list above, this Nintendo GameCube launch title has a sort of "in-between generations" feeling. Luigi has a gadget called "Game Boy Horror", a take off on the Game Boy Color, which felt instantly dated as the Color's successor the Game Boy Advance released a few months before the game did. According to the developers, the GBA's design was not finalized in time to be included in the game. Future games in the series would also feature gadgets based on Nintendo hardware, but would be more deliberately retro, with Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon (released in 2013 on the Nintendo 3DS) using an original model Nintendo DS (discontinued 8 years prior in 2006), and Luigi's Mansion 3 (released in 2019 on the Nintendo Switch) using a Virtual Boy (released and discontinued in 1995, 24 years prior).
• The first few LEGO Star Wars games are dated by both the LEGO elements and the Star Wars elements, something rather evident in Complete Saga. The sets on display are all pre-2007, meaning that several designs are incredibly blocky (the Bongo that shows up in a few cutscenes was rather old even back then), and the characters have Black Bead Eyes with no eyeshine, dating it to before 2010. It's also evident in the fact that the game features content from the six George Lucas films only.
• In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Bowletta uses a Game Boy Advance (replaced with a Nintendo 3DS in the remake) as a communicator and one book mentions the rumble feature of the Nintendo GameCube.
• Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (2000):
  • The game came out in the waning days of the era where X-Men was Marvel's biggest Cash-Cow Franchise, and it really shows in the roster: eighteen of the 28 Marvel representatives hail from that series in some sense, including two versions of Wolverine. The really telling part is the presence of Marrow, though; an absolute E-lister who wouldn't warrant an appearance even in a purely X-Men fighting game nowadays, but she was actually getting something resembling a push in the mid-late 90s (one that did not last).
  • On the Capcom side, Street Fighter unsurprisingly takes up the most roster slots, with all of them being composed of the well-known and popular characters from the Alpha series. More disconcerting is almost all of the other characters hail from games that, were while popular in the '90s, are no longer actively published by Capcom, with major exceptions being Jill Valentine (in her original RE1 costume no less) and Mega Man (and Roll by extension).
• Mega Man Battle Network's version of the internet is based on the relatively ancient webring model of the internet from The '90s, in which users navigated webpage to webpage by clicking links on them to pass directly from one address to the next, and groups of friends would share their links with each other to facilitate this.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is set in the not too distant future of 2014... where Snake has an actual iPod as his music player. That alone shows the age of the game, released in 2008. Especially so considering it appears to be a fifth-generation iPod Classic^note In Real Life, Apple would discontinue the entire iPod Classic product line in 2014., neatly dating its inclusion to before the touchscreen-enabled iPod Touch took off in 2007, and before smartphones rendered dedicated portable music players obsolete even later.
• The EA Black Box-era Need for Speed games are absolutely steeped in early-mid 2000s tuner culture, following upon the success of the early The Fast and the Furious movies. The slang, dialogue, and Excuse Plots are painfully evocative of the era, the cars featured can be customized extensively into something garish, and the soundtracks are filled to bursting with rock, electronica, pop, metal, and hip-hop of the period.
  • Need for Speed: Underground in particular is so painfully ingrained into early-to-mid 2000s with the tuner car culture with bright neon, spinning rims, gaudy yet unique paint jobs, big sound systems in the trunk and whatnot, not to mention the awfully dated slang, that one may wonder why the hell EA was looking back towards them in the franchise's 2015 reboot (other than to capitalize on those jonesing for something akin to those past games). Plus, the original Underground had a song by Lostprophets in its soundtrack, something that would be flat-out inconceivable 10 years later after the band's frontman was arrested for child molestation (although, admittedly, Forza Horizon had it way worse for featuring two of their songs just months before those allegations). Underground 2 also prominently features the Cingular brand name and logo for the SMS. The Cingular name was phased out in favor of AT&T in 2007, setting the game firmly before that period. That game also added a Wide-Open Sandbox popularized by Grand Theft Auto.
  • 2005's Need for Speed: Most Wanted, meanwhile, combined the high-speed chases that had been sporadically present as far back as III: Hot Pursuit with a Wanted Meter straight out of the aforementioned GTA, and traded permanent night for permanent afternoon, which just happens to be slathered in the brown and bloom common in the early 7th gen (the game, in fact, being a Xbox 360 launch title).
• The inclusion of shows that were airing at the time of the games' release but have since ended such as Danny Phantom and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius solidly dates the Nicktoons Unite! series to the mid-2000s - while characters from said shows have appeared in later Nickelodeon games, it's unlikely they'd be the central focus if the series was made today. Especially notable with Toybots and Globs of Doom's focus on Tak and the Power of Juju (2007), a series that only lasted one season, was critically panned and is highly obscure by modern standards. It's also definitely the only time when The Fairly OddParents! (heavily pushed in that era, a forgotten and oft-mocked afterthought any time thereafter due to a legendary case of Seasonal Rot) would have ever been trumpeted as a major player in the game. Tellingly, Nickelodeon Kart Racers and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (released in 2018 and 2021 respectively) don't feature The Fairly OddParents at all.
• ParaParaParadise was made in the early 2000s to capitalize on the Eurobeat and para para dancing trends of the time, which have since come and gone, not helped by Eurobeat hotspot Velfarre closing in 2007 (though it was re-opened as Nicofarre in 2011, dating the game even more). It even has a song titled "velfarre 2000". Seeing such a machine still running today can make one feel like they stepped back at least a decade in time.
• Persona 4, released in 2008 and taking place in 2011 Japan, a rare example of a JRPG in an entirely modern setting, can sometimes fall into this; although a lot of it can be justified by Inaba being a backwater that is explicitly several years behind the times. At the same time, Values Dissonance is a large factor to be considered here, as Japan ended up having a different attitude towards DVD rentals and smartphones:
  • Television, and the influence it can have on the populace, serves as one of the underlying themes of the plot. With the rise of the Internet and smartphones only a few years later — just around the time the game actually takes place — as the main source of entertainment and news for many people in first-world countries, especially for those at the high school age all of the main characters are at, this may seem slightly outdated. It's very noticeable that the Internet is never mentioned by anyone, and there's nary a computer to be found in the game world. One that's even remarked upon in-game is the rise of HD TVs when most of the characters are still using old standard-definition sets, a few lamenting that they'll eventually have to upgrade. A wall of fancy widescreens sits in the electronics section of the local department store Junes, a contrast to the old sets the characters own. Funnily enough, the game itself was released on a mostly SD console a couple of years after its HD successor had already come out. Kanji's family upgrading to an HD TV is actually a minor plot point in the sequel, which was released in 2012 and takes place in the same year.
  • On a similar note, a major subplot in the game, as well as a major factor in a number of other subplots and social links, is the opening of a department store chain, the aforementioned Junes, in town and its various effects on the local economy. In 2008, this was a hot topic, even in the US with the rise of "big box retailers" and "Megastores" like Wal-Mart, Target, and others. A decade later, while the Big Box and Megastore age has not died completely, online retail through sites such as Amazon, Ebay, Alibaba, etc. has taken a huge chunk in the business of physical stores, to the point that larger chains such as Macy's, JC Penney's, K-Mart, Sears, and Toys R Us have either closed a huge number of stores or been forced into bankruptcy.
  • The characters all rock simple flip-open cellphones, used solely for calling and texting. The first iPhone was released only a year before the game and smartphones would very quickly begin phasing out older cellphones not long after. However, Japan took longer than most countries to adopt smartphones, with flip phones still well in use in the mid-late 2010s and even anime in the 2020s such as Horimiya still having its cast use flip phones; thus, while it's strange to outside audiences to see modern teens use flip phones, it wouldn't dart eyes in Japan. Regardless, it's noticeable that the 2011 anime adaptation of the game retcons this a little, as some characters now use smartphones and there's even a song on the OST that makes an iPhone joke.:
  "iBreak! Just might be the new app on your smartphone."
  • Kanji's questioning his sexuality is a major facet of his character, and his personal dungeon is a bathhouse with deliberately exaggerated Hard Gay overtones. While a hot button issue and the source of much social commentary and humor (which the game provides both of) at the time, only a few years later the idea of major and entirely-sympathetic LGTBQ+ characters in fiction would barely raise an eyebrow - although the concept of a teenager struggling to figure out their sexuality remains relevant. At the same time, this does reflect Values Dissonance in Japan over the portrayal of LGTBQ+ characters along with other details (none of the characters bring up the idea of Kanji liking both, which shows how other sexualities such as bisexuality often go ignored or not considered).
  • On a more subtle note, the several references to DVDs in the early game also dates it a bit. While DVDs and similar products still exist, the popularity of them are nowhere near what they were like in the 2000s, with streaming services becoming popular. Surprisingly enough, the next game, which was released in 2016 (2017 in the west) and is implied to take place in the same year, allows the player character to rent DVDs, perhaps because the system would be easier to implement in-game than a streaming service with a subscription fee. As with Persona 4, this is in part caused by values dissonance between Japan and the West; DVD rentals ended up surviving in Japan to a greater extent, meaning the game only appears as a period piece to non-Japanese audiences. In fact, DVD sales are still up there with streaming services in terms of direct ways of supporting Japanese content.
• Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal: One of the characters of the game, Courtney Gears, is a clear parody of Britney Spears, with the game having come out in 2004, around the time when her popularity was still fairly widespread.
• Resident Evil 4 has a scene where Leon (who works for the US government) confronts Salazar and says that what Salazar and Saddler are doing (kidnapping the US president's daughter and infecting her with a parasite to use her as The Mole in their Take Over the World plan) is "terrorism". Salazar comments "isn't that a popular word these days?", making it obvious that Resident Evil 4 is very much a product of the mid-2000s when The War on Terror was an ongoing, hot-button concern. There's also Ashley's alternate 'pop star' outfit, a Hotter and Sexier ensemble designed to evoke a very specific type of 'pop princess' (Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in particular) that was at its height in the late '90s and early 2000s.
• Resident Evil 5, released in 2009, has the Big Bad revealing his plan to exterminate most of the world's population and start it anew with him as a god, stating that six billion people would die to bring about a new balance. Not only was the world's population already over 6.8 billion at the time of the game's release, it grew to over 7 billion just two years later. Furthermore, the very problematic and controversial depiction of Africa, already widely criticized back in its release year, would become even more discredited in the following decades as celebratory (or simply less stereotypical) portrayals of the African continent became more common.
• Saints Row 2 is set in 2011, five years after Saints Row (which was released and set in 2006), but the fashion, music and cultural references within the game are all products of its release in 2008.
  • Several of the random pedestrians include emos, stereotypical nerds, and scene-esque punks, all things that were at their height around 2008.
  • The music is a big indicator as well. 89.0 GenX's playlist consists mostly of emo rock, a genre that fell by the wayside by the start of The New '10s, with several of the bands featured having since split up (though the emo subculture itself saw a revival by the late 2010s/early 2020s). Meanwhile, Krunch 106.66, itself built primarily around then-contemporary Metalcore bands, features a song from As I Lay Dying, a band that would five years later temporarily split up due to the controversy surrounding its frontman's alleged attempt to hire a hitman to kill his wife, which is the kind of thing it would be impossible for a video-game radio DJ from the late 2000s to let go unmentioned.
  • The technology seen is quite dated. Most NPCs still use older-style flip phones that would have fallen out of favor with the general public a few years later. While The Boss does have a smartphone, it's a chunky, blocky first-generation model with limited Internet access that is used just for making calls and acting as a GPS. Civilians make mention of their cars' new CD players, and in-game music tracks are purchased through brick-and-mortar record stores that are embroiled in an all-out war against online music pirates. Radio ads mention social media and video-calling as new technology, both of which have become common since the game's release.
  • The Infinity +1 Sword of the assault rifles is the AR-50 XMAC, a renamed copy of the Heckler & Koch XM8, a gun that was ubiquitous in the mid-to-late-oughties for its intent to be the future of weapons design, only for it to fail when the US Army program it was developed for was shelved in 2005. Nowadays, even with the gun seeing actual service in real life in Malaysia, it's been all-but forgotten and almost never appears in video games anymore, and most guns that get treated as "the future" of weapon development are less fantastical in their design, typically being slight modifications of existing weapons - if the game came out just a year or two later than it did, the XMAC probably would have been an HK416, a slight variation of the existing M4 that's already in the game.
  • Tera Patrick appears in the Ultor Exposed DLC, as she was a popular porn actress — which she would retire from a year later. This is especially apparent for the PC version since due to circumstances regarding outside companies, they didn't get the DLC until a decade later, by which point several players may not even remember who Tera Patrick was or know why her being a microbiologist for Ultor (to contrast the then-typical stereotypes about porn actresses) is supposed to be funny in and of itself.
  • One of the sidequests, FUZZ, involves the Boss posing as a police officer for a thinly-veiled parody of COPS, in one case doing so to highlight Police Brutality for an attorney. COPS had already been declining in popularity due to rising awareness of police brutality, which the 2010s would see several high-profile cases of, and the show would eventually be cancelled 12 years later for this very reason.
  • The Company of Gyros fast-food chain, whose name is a reference to fellow THQ property Company of Heroes, which fell into this after THQ went bankrupt and the respective developers went to different companies (CoH's Relic Entertainment to Sega, Saints Row's Volition to Deep Silver).
• Scribblenauts suffers from this quite a bit, mostly due to the meme references that stuck around from the first game. It's quite clearly a game from 2009.
• The Simpsons Hit & Run came out in 2003, and it definitely shows when it comes to technology:
  • In the game, cell phones are treated as rare and bizarre technology, with payphones being used instead and being so common that they are used by the characters to summon vehicles. One level 2 mission, "Cells-Out", stands out in particular: The mission has Bart destroy the cars of cell phone users in Downtown Springfield so Professor Frink's Truckasaurus can operate without interference, as otherwise it would go on a rampage and kill many people. The premise is already pretty bizarre for the early 2000s, but with smartphones becoming so common, it's unlikely the same premise would have been used if the game were to be released ten years later.
  • A level 1 mission, "Bonestorm Storm", revolves around Marge and Homer hitting a videogame delivery truck to destroy all the physical copies of Bonestorm 2 it drops as Marge believes it to be too violent for children. Marge causes a shortage, and so the first half of level 2 has Bart trying to find a way of getting his hands of a copy of the game. Nowadays, companies give players the option of purchasing digital versions of the games they make, which would render Marge's actions useless. Tellingly, Donut Mod expands upon the mission by also adding Wi-Fi Vans that must be destroyed in order to take down digital storefronts.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Adventure 2 is dated to the very early 2000s in many ways:
    • The game features product placement of SOAP brand shoes (a brand that all but disappeared after 2001) and the use of the term "Weapons of mass destruction" in a family-friendly video game (although it's part of the Growing with the Audience thing). Had the game been released a few months later, it might've been seen as shocking in light of the 9/11 attacks and lead-up to the war on terror.
    • Maria's backstory is that she suffered from NIDS (Neuro-Immuno Deficiency Syndrome), a thinly veiled fictionalization of AIDS that her grandfather Gerald was desperately trying to cure. The nature, name, and in-story treatment of the disease firmly anchor the game to an era when AIDS was the leading hot-button health issue and reliable antiviral medications for HIV were not widely available, an era that would start to end just a few years after the game's release. Additionally, her young age and the fact that she had NIDS for most (if not all) of her life directly pinpoints the game's release to the period in AIDS discourse when children being able to contract HIV during pregnancy, birth, or weaning became widely known and talked about.
  • Shadow the Hedgehog uses the term "terrorists" to describe the Black Arms, who in most any other time period would have just been called "alien invaders".
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell dates itself as a product of the 2000s almost entirely on its premise of a newly-formed secret wing of the NSA undertaking field operations for "aggressive intelligence gathering", which takes the form of stealth-based gameplay similar to what Metal Gear and Syphon Filter had been doing for a while. It dates itself not only in its rather nebulous and fantastical idea of what the NSA actually does, echoing the sudden prominence of, yet lack of knowledge about, the organization at the time - had the series started in any other time period, Third Echelon probably would have been either part of the CIA or an entirely independent operation that answered directly to the President - but also for the fact that the games for the most part present Third Echelon and the NSA in a positive light,^note even at worst, where the protagonist is embedded in a domestic terrorist organization in Double Agent, the NSA loses trust in him if he acts the part too much which would be completely unheard of following the scandal surrounding the real NSA's warrantless wiretapping. Interestingly, the games were somewhat ahead of the curve in that regard, since several missions do involve Sam infiltrating allies without express approval from the Joint Chiefs, up to and including the headquarters of the CIA in the first game and of a PMC with several ties to and contracts with the government in Chaos Theory, though these all got a pass at the time because the player knows the reason is for the "greater good".^note e.g. the CIA mission is to trace a possible intelligence leak, so they can't tell anyone what they're doing without risking the leak finding out and hiding evidence.
• The second game of the Tony Hawk's Underground sub-series (as well as the follow-up game American Wasteland) featured Nextel and Motorola flip phones as the main form of communication for the player character.
  • Relatedly, Tony Hawk's Underground 2 heavily leans on the style of destructive, dangerous pranks and stunts popularized by Jackass and similar shows, a trend that reached its nadir sometime around 2005.
• The World Ends with You from 2007 is so full of street slang and references to the pop culture of 2000s Tokyo that the 2018 Switch remaster was marketed as an actual period piece. This isn't as bad as many examples though, as most of the game's Totally Radical slang was always Played for Laughs.
• Even the Grand Theft Auto-inspired video game adaptation of The Warriors from 2005 falls victim to this thanks to its anachronisms. Yes, it's set in the late '70s and based on a movie from that time period (which was itself inspired by a book from the '60s, for that matter), and for the most part it's pretty good about being period-accurate... until you get to that level set in the South Bronx and see, amidst a bunch of punks with Afro and shag hairstyles, one guy with a very Turn of the Millennium-appropriate soul patch.
• This demo video for the original Xbox Live is an obvious product of the very early days of the Xbox. Beyond the obvious, where part of the plot involves an American football game that very prominently displays the year 2003 in its title (and not to mention being a non-EA Sports title, dating it to before EA signed its still-ongoing exclusivity deals with the NFL in 2005) and the very late-'90s/early-'00s apartment (complete with both TV and computer monitor being big, boxy CRTs and a lava lamp near the TV), perhaps the biggest thing to date it is that the fast-paced, action-packed triple-A multiplayer game the viewpoint character invites everyone onto to prove their superiority over the antagonist is... MechAssault. A decently-big game in its own right at the time (being part of a big, ongoing franchise and having gotten a sequel), but in hindsight, not even close to as big as Halo would end up being - even in 2002 it was plainly obvious the only reason they weren't playing Halo: Combat Evolved was that the first game didn't have Xbox Live support.

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