You may be looking at the title of this post, and figuring that I’m somehow a decade or so off. Perhaps you assume I’ve hit my head and am living a part of my youth vicariously once more. But no, what I’m referring to is the spiritual death of the 90s, particularly when it comes to nerdish entertainment.

You have the End of Geocities approaching.

Central Park Media, one of the most significant anime companies of the 90s, while already in its death throes for years now, is now truly finished, its properties scattered to the winds of which one is named ADV.

And now there is talk of 3DRealms, creators of the Duke Nukem series, shutting down with perennial vaporware Duke Nukem Forever potentially gone for good. In other words, forever. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Ha.

Oh, and this doesn’t really count but baggy pants have had a continuous decline for a while now too.

And yes, a lot of Central Park Media’s properties were from the 80s, and Duke Nukem is a throwback to the 80s too, but they’re also very much symbols of the 90s and a time when games and anime targeted a very different audience than it does today, when Final Fantasy VII was only just beginning to attract a large audience of girls to video games and by extension them Japanese cartoons.

Oh yeah, and Mortal Kombat’s kind of in trouble too what with Midway trying to sell the property.

And sure there are 90s properties still alive, like Street Fighter 2, but SF2 always felt more timeless to me, with its wacky stereotypes and solid gameplay and the fact that it says Zangief is from the USSR.

Wait a second-

Recent times and movies and remakes have shown this point to be much more of an 80s revival than anything else, so it’s possibly that 10 years from now we’ll be seeing the nostalgic return to the good ol’ 1990s when cartoons were good and video games knew how to be fun.*

*Like every other decade which features both