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Historically games haven't done a very good job at recreating what it's like to inhabit a specific time and place. Assassin's Creed 2 may get the surface details of Renaissance Italy down - the architecture, the costumes, and the technology - but I can't tell you how life in Florence differed from life in Venice, aside from the fact that they seemed to both have a lot of stabbing and people yelling "thief!" I've traveled the globe in Call of Duty shooting men in army fatigues and blowing up tanks, but based on that I wouldn't be able to say how modern day Russia differs from Afghanistan, besides one being a bit snowy while the other's a bit sandy. The ex-Bioshock 2 developers at The Fullbright Company are taking a different tack to the period piece in their upcoming first-person adventure Gone Home. It's cut out all the things that turn the scenery into a backdrop - combat, puzzles, large worlds, etc. - and instead placed the setting in the foreground. Exploring its relatively small but astonishingly detailed manor in 1995 is the game's central mechanic.
Upon playing the first half-hour of Gone Home at Fullbright's headquarters - a two-storey house tucked away in NE Portland's Hollywood district - I'm initially in for a stark reminder of what a different world 1995 was. While only 17 years ago, our lives were drastically different back then. The internet existed, but wasn't yet commonplace in the average household, cell phones were likewise out of the hands of the common man, and people taped television shows on VHS. Heck, EG didn't even exist back then.
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