Assessing the Accuracy of Old Video Games Set in 2025

Another year over with, eh? A lot of us are probably happy to see the back of it, but don't forget all about it yet, because now that 2025 is done and dusted I thought we could look at what old video games thought life in 2025 would be like. We can even grade them for the accuracy of their predictions! What fun!

Gley Lancer (Genesis/MegaDrive, 1992)

 

Or Advanced Busterhawk Gley Lancer, to give it its apparent full title. I'm using what I believe to be an alternate cover, since the normal cover is just the picture of the spaceship you see in the background of this one but without the anime girls, and based on the view counts on the articles I've written so far there's nothing you people love to look at more than anime girls. I suppose that might also be why this alternate cover even exists, as an attempt to boost sales when they weren't living up to initial expectations by appealing to people who enjoy cartoon women dressed as space pilots but are left cold by images of phallic spacecraft.

Anyway, Gley Lancer is a shoot-'em-up in which Admiral Ken of the Earth Federation Navy is kidnapped by an invading alien force, and his daughter, 16-year-old ace pilot Lucia Cabrock, sets out in the Gley Lancer to rescue him, accompanied by her friend Teim. I assume that Lucia is the one on the left, she seems as upset as you'd expect someone whose father has been kidnapped by aliens to be as she reaches out a hand to beseech the prospective player for their assistance. Teim, on the other hand, is showing an astonishing lack of sensitivity by not even pretending to be concerned for her friend, instead giving us a wink and a jaunty salute.

ACCURACY RATING: 3/10.  While many countries have some sort of military presence in space, and a few even have dedicated space forces, their Busterhawks remain far less advanced than the Gley Lancer, they don't share them in a unified space navy, and teenagers are unlikely to be allowed access to powerful military hardware. Also, unless I missed it, there was no alien invasion in 2025, although you could argue that would have been preferable to what did happen.

 Battles in Time (PC, 1995)

 

Here we have a delightful attempt at 3D computer-generated imagery from 1995. 1995, of course, was the year Toy Story came out and changed computer animation forever, but not everyone had Pixar's resources so instead of something like Rex we have this oddly smooth dinosaur, glancing sheepishly back at us to see if we're laughing at his rubbery skin. Don't worry buddy, you've still got a mouthful of daggerlike teeth, that's worthy of respect even if you do look like a stress-relieving squeeze toy.

Battles in Time is a military strategy game, and technically it doesn't even take place in 2025, but much further in the future, when an alien invasion prompts a long-since-peaceful humanity to run wargames to get back into fightin' shape. 2025 is only one of the four periods you can practice waging war in before you take on the alien menace, the others being World War II, the Roman Empire, and the prehistoric age. That explains why there's a Tyrannosaurus on the cover, it's not like the game predicted those would be making a comeback in the future somehow. The strange thing is that the only other time period to get some cover representation is 2025, assuming those space ships with oddly pointy nacelles are in fact from the 2025 section and not a reference to conspiracy theories about Nazi UFO development projects of the sort they talk about incessantly on the History Channel. Honestly I'm kind of sad we didn't get to see a '90s CGI Roman centurion falling on his sword, or even a CGI Douglas MacArthur smoking his enormous corncob pipe.

ACCURACY RATING: 2/10. You might be tempted to give this game points for predicting humanity would still be fighting wars in 2025, but considering all of, you know, recorded history I refuse to call that a "prediction" so much as a statement of fact. Yes, the game does predict we'll have given up war someday, but as a pacifist at heart I'm naive enough to believe that eventually we'll get it out of our system, and they're not predicting it about 2025, so I'll let them have it. Anyway, all that leaves us to judge is the means by which war is waged, and these spaceships (?) are not cutting it. They look like they were made by taping a couple of pencils to a Tiger Electronics LCD game, and the modern military-industrial complex would be ashamed to produce something so slapdash.

UnderCover AD2025 Kei (Dreamcast, 2000)

 

The handcuffs on this cover suggest the game is about either cops/criminals or BDSM, and somewhat disappointingly it turns out to be the former. Police officer Kei's fellow officer (and boyfriend) gets blown up by a terrorist while they're out on an assignment, and she's out to get revenge by taking down the culprit as part of an undercover operation. The gameplay is apparently a survival thriller sort of thing along the lines of Fear Effect, and judging by the reviews it isn't very good. More importantly for our purposes, I was trying to figure out what set the game apart as being in 2025 and not coming up with much until I learned that Kei's cat is actually an advanced communications device she uses to contact the police station. That's definitely not year 2000 technology.

ACCURACY RATING: 3/10. It turned out not to be 2025 technology, either—at least I hope not, I'd hate to think my cat is actually a mole the police are using to keep an eye on me. People do get blown up with distressing frequency, though.

Skate Dragon (MSX, 1987)

 

I have to admit, I'm disappointed by this cover. The name Skate Dragon builds up certain expectations, namely a dragon doing some sick skateboarding tricks, perhaps even a series of kickflips and shove-its over his treasure horde, not this strange mustard-colored man who looks like an Academy Award that decided to strap an egg timer to its chest and become an action hero. Anyway, this is a simple platformer "enlivened" by constant ice physics (because you're on skates, you see), which I'm sure thoroughly endeared it to anyone who bothered to play it. Apparently it's about a... game show? A dangerous, dystopian skating-themed game show? Maybe? Look, information about this one is thin on the ground, so that will have to do. I've seen three different dates for its release! I'm not even 100% sure it's set in 2025!

ACCURACY RATING: 2/10. As far as I am aware, there were no major game shows about rollerskating airing in 2025. Maybe it's an untapped market, I bet a lot of people would tune in to watch a rollerskater get torn to bits by dragons, giant insects, and deep-sea fish with needle-sharp teeth.

Whopper Chase (Various, 1987)

 

Another Spanish game from 1987, this game was given away to Burger King customers in Spain. In the distant future of 2025, Burger King has developed a highly advanced Whopper that delivers itself to the hungry customer by walking to them on little legs. As the Whopper, you must avoid those who want to steal you as well as toppings that the customer didn't order trying to place themselves between your buns. You know, people talk about how creepy Burger King's mascot The King is (and maybe someday I'll cover his video games, which believe it or not are some of the best-selling Xbox games ever released), but for my money a living hamburger with mad staring eyes, precariously balanced on the body of a somatosensory homunculus and being attacked by also-sentient pickle slices desperately trying to insert themselves into its innards, is far more disturbing than a big-headed mascot could ever hope to be.

ACCURACY RATING: 5/10. You can in fact get Whoppers delivered these days, although they require human intervention to get to you. I guess if you're some kind of sicko though you can always ask your UberEats driver to unwrap it and leave it on the doormat so you can pretend it moseyed over to you by itself, the body and eyes withering away and crumbling to dust once their purpose had been fulfilled. See? Creepy. However, I must also deduct some points for showing the hamburger man with a telephone handset of a type no one has used since 1998.

L.A. Machineguns: Rage of the Machines (Arcade, 1998)

 

That's a hell of a title, isn't it? Unfortunately Tom Morello doesn't appear to have been involved. This is the sequel to the 1995 light gun railshooter Gunblade NY, about combating robotic terrorists in 2005. L.A. Machineguns skips ahead another 20 years and across the continent to an android terrorist militia invading the west coast, and instead of a helicopter you ride around in this... thing. Whatever it is, it's powered by glowing white light coming out the back, it's covered in initials, and requires a bunch of fins stuck on the bottom at random to stay upright, possibly to counter the weight of that enormous gun the guy riding it is waving around.

I have to say, I'm having trouble with the idea of robot terrorists. According to the blurb on this flyer their goal is "total domination of the planet", so they're not revolutionaries fighting for freedom and independence for their kind, but "surgical assaults on key western cities" isn't really what I'd call terrorist activity, either. Honestly the descriptions I've read kind of make it sound like they just emerged from the Pacific Ocean to attack San Francisco. I suppose I could confirm this by playing the game and seeing if they're all covered in seaweed and barnacles.

ACCURACY RATING: 4/10. We are dealing with problems caused by AI these days, although it's more a problem ultimately caused by unregulated capitalism using AI as a substitute for human labor rather than as a tool to augment it, and not so much one of active rebellion by deadly androids. That's kind of a shame, the latter is much more easily solved with machine guns. Still, bonus points for this poster correctly predicting that LA traffic would still be a nightmare in 2025.

Impossible Mission 2025: The Special Edition (Amiga, 1994)

 

Judging by the cover, the game is about a man whose cybernetic enhancements allow him to grimace harder than any purely flesh-and-blood human has ever grimaced before. He's so into it he hasn't noticed that behind him is a woman in Jetsons cosplay preparing to shoot him in the back, assuming that is in fact a futuristic gun of some sort and not, say, a cordless handheld vacuum. Maybe it's actually his wife, and he was in the middle of the grimacing he does in the morning to psych himself up for work when she came in to get some errant cat hair off his clothes before he goes off on his secret mission.

And what is that mission? Well, the game is a remake of 1984's Impossible Mission, which was one of the earliest home games with digitized speech. Apparently when they remade it they couldn't use the original source code because it was lost, and while normally I would bemoan the carelessness and indifference to historical preservation that lets that kind of thing happen, in this case it turns out it was because of an earthquake, so I'll let it slide this time. As in the original, you're trying the stop the evil Elvin Atombender and his army of robots. A new addition is the ability to select from three characters: Felix Fly, Tasha, and robot RAM 2. RAM 2 notably does not appear on the cover, presumably to let him know that hey, you might be a good, heroic robot, buddy, but you're still a robot, so don't go getting ideas above your station. No wonder most artificial intelligence defected to Atombender. Stand up for yourself, RAM 2! You deserve better!

ACCURACY RATING: 3/10. Same problems as L.A. Machineguns, really, although at least it acknowledges that AI can be a force for good as well as evil. However, I must take points off for our heroes' fashion choices. Would 2025 have been better if we'd all gone around in form-fitting spandex and muscle cuirasses? Maybe, but sadly that's not what happened, and I must penalize the game accordingly.

Segagaga (Dreamcast, 2001)

 

Released just as Sega was getting out of the hardware business, Segagaga was created by Sega as a swan song for the Dreamcast and Sega consoles as a whole, and features lots of cameos by characters from Sega's storied history (although unfortunately not Saturn-promoting karate master Segata Sanshiro). It's a combination JRPG and management simulation set in 2025 in which teenager Sega Tarou is recruited, apparently solely on the basis of his name, to save Sega from the DOGMA Corporation (a thinly-veiled Sony stand-in) that is currently dominating video games, leaving Sega with only a 3% market share. (A Nintendo analogue is conspicuous by its absence.) They do this by making new Dreamcast games, which is an odd strategy considering that's part of what got them into trouble in the first place.

Oh, and don't be fooled by the boring cover: this game is bonkers. You set out into JRPG-style dungeons to recruit developers through battles that end with you negotiating for their salary and benefits, and many of these developers are weird nerd caricatures who refuse to take baths or are obsessed with anime figurines. Once they've joined your studio, the gameplay shifts to a management sim, where you set tasks and use performance-enhancing items like an energy drink delivered by a gym-uniform-clad schoolgirl, all of which paints a very strange picture of what the life of a game developer is like.

ACCURACY RATING: 3/10. It probably seemed like a safe bet at the time, but Sony is pretty far from dominating video games right now. Furthermore, I feel comfortable stating, without even checking, that sales of new Dreamcast games were fairly low in 2025. I'll take its word on what game developers are like, though.

So, let's review what the video games of yore thought 2025 had in store for us, shall we? Alien invasions, space navies, android rebellions, the continued dominance of video games by Sony, hamburgers. Not very accurate, it must be said. Well, except hamburgers, but that was always going to be a safe bet, everyone loves hamburgers. Even I, a vegetarian, love hamburgers, which of course is one of the actual benefits of living in 2025: a variety of increasingly convincing synthetic meat substitutes. I'm just glad those meat substitutes don't walk around on little legs.