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It had to feel so real when we were doing it." "We were somehow able to channel the artists of that time, like Stevie Nicks and Laura Branigan, and tap into that time and channel that feeling so well. "We were in another world when we were making this record," Bosley, 35, told me last week. "Push Play," utterly new and yet innately familiar, hits anyone who lived in that decade with the memory of a car-seat-dancing, one-hit wonder that dominated the FM dial, from the summer at the pool through every pep rally and football practice and past homecoming.
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But for many who have played it, nothing sutures together Firewatch's sense of place and time like "Push Play," by Joy Chun and Nate Bosley, a Louisiana couple who fell in love four years ago while concocting their marvelously hallucinated 1987 pop act called Cheap Talk. The game's dialogue references the 1988 wildfires at Yellowstone National Park, a disaster that became a cultural landmark for those living in the Interior West in that decade. The song is "Push Play." It's the dancey, peppy, poppy tune blaring from a boombox while two tipsy teens go skinny dipping, and the player's story in Firewatch unfolds in the solitude of Wyoming's Shoshone National Forest.įirewatch's visual props include made-up hardback books with dust jackets that are dead ringers for the usual potboilers found in a vacation home. But it all lingers with the quality of real memories because, like the late 1980s, everyone is still playing and talking about the song they heard up at the lake. The summer of 1989 is long over, and so are the events of Firewatch, the mystery-adventure video game set in that year, which launched just two weeks ago.