Released by fledgling development studio Blue Sky Entertainment to little fanfare in 1995, Welcome to the Future has been all but forgotten today. It never topped any best-of lists; it never received a re-release on GOG or similar retro-gaming services; it never became a “cult classic.” In fact there is virtually nothing of substance written about it, critical or otherwise, and hardly a screenshot to be found even in the deeper corners of the internet.
Yet for those who remember it—or those who have, against all odds, recently discovered it—Welcome To The Future occupies a singular position in the history of interactive software art. Perhaps the only title to fully deliver the “multimedia” experience that so many CD-ROMs of the era aspired to, it feels less like a game and more like a concept album played out in virtual space—a collection of music, images, poems, narrative fragments, and environments that interweave to create something truly greater than the sum of its parts.
The music features not only sprawling ambient instrumentals, but also several fully developed songs written and performed by Blue Sky Entertainment’s Lisle Engle. Sitting at a unique intersection between new age, techno, and cubase-core 90’s cali-rock (see also, Geno Andrews), the OST transcends the background-role usually reserved for videogame music to become a central feature of the experience. The vast collection of artwork on display is similar in tone, equal parts early-photoshop time capsule, exercise in ufo-fetishism, and prophetic Net Art ancestor. The total audio-visual experience is bold, feverish, and at times almost drug-like, straddling the absurd and the sublime in its myriad psychedelic bursts and echoes.
The game takes place across two maze-like environments: an overworld, created using actual photographs of Malibu hiking trail Corral Canyon; and an underworld, which consists of interconnected 3D ray-traced corridors. The narrative pulls equally from the “ancient alien” hypothesis of Erich Van Däniken and the mystical writing of Carlos Castenada. An introductory poem describes an ancient race of humanoids who once populated the mega-maze beneath the mountains, the remnants of whose culture must now be recovered by the player on a quest for enlightenment. It’s a fitting set up for an exploratory journey that feels at once so alien and so familiar—all symbols and signifiers and ominous implications, but with precise meaning always out of reach.
Playing Welcome to the Future today conjures up a sense of strange anachronism, as if the stylistic tropes of seapunk and vaporwave were somehow projected back in time to become the very material they strive to reference. Which is to say, Welcome to the Future feels more like 1995 than 1995 ever actually did—a romanticized fiction of the era as filtered through the aesthetic concerns of 2015, somehow created 20 years in advance.
