1986 called, it wants everything back | The Rewind Vol. 1

My name's Marty Kessler. I'm 47, I live on the west side of Cleveland, and for nine years in the 90s I stood behind the counter of a strip-mall video store called Video Vault in Parma, Ohio, wearing a name tag I was genuinely proud of. That job built me. The building's been a vape shop since 2011, and I still drive past it slower than I need to, the way you do with an ex's house.

So you know exactly who's talking to you, here's a Thursday night in 1996: the rewinder humming behind the counter. A line of people holding empty clamshells. Somebody's dad asking if Heat was "any good" (sir, it is three hours of Pacino and De Niro circling each other like weather systems, go home and find out). And me, seventeen, running the floor like air traffic control with a cordless scanner. Best job I ever had.

This one just went to second and it's climbing.

Newretro asked if I'd write a weekly magazine about synthwave and the whole retro universe around it. The music, the games, the art, the tapes, the culture, all of it, every week, in one place. They pay actual money, which puts them ahead of every music blog I wrote for from 2016 on, and the office is my attic, which in July is a sauna with a record shelf. I said yes before they finished the sentence. (Management, if you're reading: the box fan up here is losing its war with Ohio. A window unit would do wonders for morale, and morale writes better columns.)

Why Sunday nights? Because when I was a kid the Plain Dealer hit our porch fat on Sunday mornings, and for about an hour, over cereal, the week made sense. Comics, sports, the TV grid for the week ahead. This is that, for our little neon corner of the world, minus the coupons. Pour something, put a record on, catch up. That's the whole product.

Full disclosure while we're shaking hands: I'm writing this in a windbreaker from the shop, because the same people who won't spring for the window unit believe very hard in something they call brand immersion. It's a good windbreaker. That's the whole ad, I promise.

One more thing about tonight. This first issue is going out on a Monday. The debut of a Sunday magazine, one day late. In 1996 I'd have blamed the printer. In 2026 the truth is that we greenlit this thing at ten o'clock and I type like a man in oven mitts. Next week it's an actual Sunday. After that, every Sunday, until the heat death of the universe or my Civic, whichever goes first. Hold me to it.

1986 called, it wants everything back

Saturday marked forty years since Aliens opened in American theaters. July 18, 1986. I was seven when it came out, which means it belonged to the big kids first. I met it the way most of my generation did: on tape, years later, in a basement, at a volume calibrated to not wake anyone. Mine was my cousin Pete's basement in Akron, 1991, twelve years old, one blanket, zero adult supervision. Somewhere around the point where the motion tracker starts pinging and the ceiling stops being a ceiling, I aged four years in nine minutes. I have not trusted a drop ceiling since. My ex-wife Dana can confirm that to this day I take stairwells over elevators and give air vents a look on my way past. Some movies move in permanently.

Here's what the anniversary retrospectives keep skipping, though. For everyone my age, Aliens was never really a theater movie. It was a tape. It was the tape. The theatrical run made it a hit; the rental shelf made it a religion. There's a whole generation walking around whose formative Aliens experience involves tracking lines, a mono TV speaker, and the specific terror of hearing a parent's footsteps upstairs during the eggs scene. The movie was engineered for surround sound and we absorbed it through a coat hanger antenna's worth of fidelity, and it still worked. That's not nostalgia talking. That's a compliment to the machine James Cameron built.

At Video Vault the movie was a permanent problem, and I mean that as the highest compliment a rental clerk can pay. By the time I got my name tag in '93 it was seven years old and still never on the shelf. We had four copies. Four, in a suburb of maybe thirty thousand people. On a Friday they'd be gone by six, and I'd spend the rest of my shift as a grief counselor, steering the heartbroken toward Predator like a sommelier with a busted cellar. We kept the waiting list on a legal pad. The legal pad had a waiting list.

The anniversary isn't stopping at a round number, either. This Thursday night at San Diego Comic-Con there's a 40th anniversary panel with a healthy chunk of the cast: Michael Biehn, Jenette Goldstein, William Hope, plus Carl Toop, the man who actually wore the alien suit and therefore did more cardio than the rest of the call sheet combined. And if you missed it in the spring, the Aliens Expanded documentary, four-plus hours of it, with Cameron, Weaver, Biehn, basically everyone still standing, got a two-disc 40th anniversary edition they only sold for two weeks in April. Even documentaries do limited drops now. That is the most 2026 sentence I will type tonight.

The trailer for the 40th edition, in case four hours sounds like a normal amount of Aliens to you. It is.

As for Thursday's panel, I know what I want from it and it isn't trivia. Biehn's told the casting stories a hundred times and they're still good, but the one I'm hoping somebody asks about is the boot camp, the two weeks where Cameron sent the Colonial Marines off to train together and kept Weaver out of it so the distance would be real on camera. Every actor on that call sheet still talks about that shoot like a tour of duty they're proud of. Forty years on, that's the stuff worth an hour of folding chairs. If they get through it without anyone saying "game over, man," I'll eat my pretzels with dignity.

Forty is the magic number, if you're wondering why everything from 1986 suddenly has a press cycle. Forty years is how long it takes the kids in the theater to become the adults with the disposable income, the bad backs, and the weaponized memory. Hollywood knows the math. The games industry knows it too, which is why the back half of this issue is basically 1986 in a trench coat. I don't even resent it. They're aiming straight at me, and I can appreciate a clean shot.

The sound is running the same loop, by the way. The gear that defined 1986, the DX7 bells, the gated snare the size of a garage door, spent twenty years as a punchline and the last fifteen as scripture. Every producer in this scene owns a plugin that lovingly recreates equipment their parents' bands hauled to the curb. I own three of the records that prove it.

History doesn't repeat, but it does get remastered.

And here's the part that actually gets me, the thing I keep turning over while the attic fan wheezes. Synthwave itself is old enough now to be its own nostalgia. The scene that started as a love letter to 1986 has records old enough to get anniversary vinyl. TimeSlave's shelf right now has reissues of the scene's own classics sitting next to the new stuff, like the tribute act got a tribute act. I don't know what you call that. A feedback loop with a fog machine. Anyway, it sounds tremendous in a parked car.

This week in music

A confession up front: the new-release shelf this week is emptier than the drama section the month Titanic finally came out on tape. The only fresh entry on Album of the Year's synthwave ledger is an LP called ESP by an outfit named Extremely Sloppy Productions, which I have not heard yet and which I already respect on name alone. Naming your project like a shrug takes confidence. If it's good, you'll hear about it next week. If it's bad, you'll hear about it louder.

It's mid-July. That's the real story. Half the scene is on the road and the other half is saving powder for Bandcamp Friday on August 7, the first Friday of the month, when Bandcamp waives its cut and the money goes straight to the artists. If you've never done one: you build a cart over the week like a normal person, then at midnight on the day you check out like it's a heist. Last Bandcamp Friday I went in for two records and came out with six, a cassette, and a patch for a jacket I don't own. Circle the date. My checking account already flinched.

My history with Scandroid goes back to the overnight shift. When I was running the board at the classic rock station, 2am to 6am, I kept a personal folder of songs for the drive home, because after four hours of Zeppelin blocks you need something with a straight spine. The first Scandroid record lived in that folder for most of a winter. There's something about Klayton's stuff that works at 6:15am with frost on the windshield, all that precision, all that chrome, the sound of somebody who has alphabetized his entire life and made it groove anyway.

So this week I went deep instead of wide, and the record I kept feeding the aux was two months old: Lost in the Stars, the Scandroid single from May. Scandroid is Klayton, the man who's been welding chrome to guitars since the first Celldweller record back in 2003, and on this one he duets with Celldweller, who is also Klayton. A man harmonizing with himself across two stage names is either peak efficiency or a cry for help, and I've decided it's both, and the song still rips. It's cleaner and poppier than the last Scandroid record, big chorus, guitars exactly where you want them, and it does that thing I'm a sucker for where the bridge drops to half-time and the whole track suddenly weighs twice as much. There's a full album called Lost Horizon slated for 2027 with an honest-to-god companion book, because Klayton doesn't do anything small. I'll believe the date when Bandcamp takes my money. The single is real, though, and it's right here:

Meanwhile TimeSlave in Cardiff, the label that calls itself the home of UK synthwave and has the receipts to prove it, is repressing Simulations, the 2018 ALEX record, on red and black marble vinyl with new artwork. I need you to understand something about this album. Hologram Lover is one of the best synthwave songs of the last ten years, full stop, and I will not be taking questions. The Megan McDuffee feature alone. I've owned Simulations digitally since it came out, I have a burned CD of it in the Civic with the title written in Sharpie, and I still pre-ordered the vinyl inside of four minutes. Pressed in the UK, ships in about eight weeks, which for my Ohio address means a shipping fee I refuse to say out loud in front of my mailman. This is the part of the column where I pretend to have financial discipline, and we both smile.

And if June got away from you, the one to catch up on is Dynatron's Dark Matter, out June 5. Dynatron makes space music in the oldest sense, the kind that assumes the void is not your friend, and this is the coldest thing he's done. Black Hole opens the record like the lights going down in a planetarium, and the three-part Endless suite in the back half is 15-odd minutes of sub-bass and dread that I mean as a five-star review. It's the rare synth record with no romance in it at all, no sunset, no girl, no chrome Lamborghini, and that restraint is the whole appeal. I took it out on I-90 past the airport around midnight last week, watched the tower lights blink through the windshield, and seriously considered just continuing on to Toledo. That's the test. Dark Matter passes.

Quick spins from the rest of the summer pile. FiXT Neon keeps firing off 3FORCE singles like a Pez dispenser, four of them stacked on the storefront right now. Street Fighter is the keeper, two and a half minutes of arcade-cabinet aggression that does its business and gets out, the way singles used to. Albums are a commitment; singles are a text that says "thinking of you," except the text has a synth solo. Waveshaper's Alternate Reality from May is sturdy Swedish comfort food, and I mean that with love, because nobody on this planet builds a chorus like the Swedes. Thirty years after Roxette, it's still not close. And The Midnight put out the deluxe cut of Syndicate in mid-May, which tests my principles, because I think deluxe editions eight months after the record are a racket, and I think the extra tracks are pretty good, and both of those things are true at once. I've been in the tank for that band since Endless Summer, a record that still smells like sunscreen to me, and I've defended the saxophone at actual parties, out loud, to people I'd just met. The sax remains undefeated. So does my willingness to get baited into buying the same album twice, apparently.

One more thought on slow weeks, because I can already hear somebody typing "slow news week huh" at me. A scene isn't only its release calendar. Weeks like this are what back catalogs are for, and synthwave has one of the deepest, strangest back catalogs in electronic music, fifteen years of Bandcamp basements most people have never spelunked. If every seven days owed us a masterpiece, we'd all be burnt out by Halloween. Some weeks you harvest. Some weeks you just water the plants.

On the radar for the back half of summer: the Bandcamp Friday pile on August 7, the UrbX campaign, Defender in August, and the November festival collision I'm already dreading (see Static). The season's back half looks a lot louder than its front.

The deep cut

Last month, with zero fanfare, Garoad released VA-11 HALL-A: 10th Memory Sound, ten new tracks for ten years of a game about pouring drinks for sad cyborgs in a rainy city. It's a warm, generous little record, half an hour of it, opening with a track literally called Memory, which is on the nose and earns it anyway. And it gives me the excuse I've been waiting for to talk about the original 2016 soundtrack, because if you missed it, you are owed this one.

The game came out of Sukeban Games, a tiny studio from Caracas, in 2016. You play Jill, the bartender. People bring you their broken weeks, you mix drinks with fake ingredients like Karmotrine, and mostly you listen. The trick, the thing that made it a cult object, is the jukebox: before each shift you load your own playlist from Garoad's soundtrack, so the game hands you the soundtrack of your own night. It understood something most games still don't. Sometimes the story is just what plays while somebody talks.

I found it late, in 2019, early in my no-drinking-anymore era, which is a strange season to fall in love with a bartending sim and exactly when I needed one. Ninety-some nights that year ended the same way: attic, headphones, one more shift at the bar that doesn't exist. The music did the heavy lifting. The ritual mattered too. Picking the jukebox lineup before a shift is the game's way of asking what kind of night you're having, and answering honestly to a video game at 1am turns out to be easier than answering most people. Every Day Is Night is the kind of song that makes you stare out a rainy window even when it's seventy and clear, and Your Love Is a Drug swings harder than a track made of pixels has any right to. Both records, the 2016 original and the new anniversary one, live on Garoad's Bandcamp. Start the player below, open a window, and lose an evening on purpose.

Pixels & polygons

Two items this week, and both of them made my palms sweat in the good way.

First: next Thursday, July 30, at 3pm UK time, Tony Warriner and Stoo Cambridge launch a Kickstarter for a 16-bit edition of UrbX Warriors, built to run on actual Amiga AGA machines and actual Sega Mega Drives, real chips and real cartridges, a brand-new game for hardware from the Reagan administration. If those names mean nothing to you: Warriner co-created Beneath a Steel Sky, Cambridge drew Cannon Fodder, and for a certain kind of person, and I am aggressively that kind of person, this is the Beatles reuniting. The first UrbX campaign asked for six grand and walked off with forty-one, so the 16-bit run should move fast. Thursday 3pm UK is 10am my time, which means I'll be refreshing a Kickstarter page in a grocery store parking lot like it's 1999 and I'm checking a beeper.

You need to understand what the Amiga was on my street in 1988. Danny Kowalski's dad had the only one, an Amiga 500 in a wood-paneled den with a NO FOOD NEAR THE COMPUTER rule we violated weekly, and kids would just show up. Not invited. Summoned by rumor. My own Amiga came years later, secondhand, and died in the basement flood of '98 along with a box of Commodore magazines I still think about. So no, I'm not neutral on this one. I'll be watching that Kickstarter countdown Thursday like it's a rocket launch, and at the current exchange rate I'll be backing it before the video finishes.

There's something stubborn and beautiful about shipping new work for machines older than most of the people writing video game headlines. It says the hardware was never the problem. We didn't stop loving these boxes because they stopped working. We stopped because the stores did, and then the stores came back as vape shops.

The machines were fine. The machines were always fine.

A word about what the Amiga actually meant, for the readers who came to retro through a Spotify playlist, which is a legitimate door and I'm glad you're here. In 1987 the schoolyard divided along console lines, and we Nintendo kids thought we were living in the future until somebody's older brother booted an Amiga and the future got recalibrated on the spot. Cinemaware, the studio behind Defender of the Crown, was founded on the idea that games could look and feel like movies, actual lighting, actual composition, at a time when most games looked like graph paper with ambitions. They called them interactive movies and for once the marketing undersold it.

Second, the one I promised up top: Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns arrives August 13 on PS5, Xbox, Switch, and PC. The 1986 Cinemaware classic, the game that sold a thousand Amigas, back for its 40th birthday. I first saw the original in 1987 in that same Kowalski den, and the catapult siege rearranged my brain on the spot. Jim Sachs painted those pixels by hand, frame by frame, the way other people paint chapel ceilings, and in 1986 the result looked like a broadcast from five years in the future. Nothing on my NES came close. I have spent thirty-nine years chasing the exact feeling of that first siege, which is probably the most honest sentence in this whole magazine.

The new version ships three ways: Retro mode, which is the actual Amiga original, emulated straight; Classic, a modern remake with new art; and Kingdom, a roguelite deck-builder, because it's 2026 and everything is legally required to be a roguelite deck-builder. That's my one grumble this issue, I'm rationing them. Mostly I'm relieved the original is in the box at all. Remasters that lock the source material in the attic are a pet peeve of a guy who lives in one.

Rewind culture

Comic-Con eats this entire week, Thursday through Sunday in San Diego. I have never been. Every year I say I'll finally go, every year the flights out of Hopkins cost more than my first car, and every year I end up watching the panels on a laptop at 1am with a bag of pretzels, which I've slowly come to believe is the superior format. No lines, no lanyard chafing, pretzels. The ritual has rules by now: lights off, laptop on the ottoman, pretzels in the mixing bowl because the bag is too loud, and no checking the runtime, because knowing a panel has 40 minutes left ruins the illusion that you're in the room. Beyond the Aliens panel I'll be scanning the announcements for anything with a synth score, a VHS logo, or Cannon Films energy, and the full damage report runs in next week's issue.

A belated hat tip while we're here: the Lunchmeat and Saturn's Core crews ran Drive-In VHS Fest X at the Mahoning Drive-In in Pennsylvania the other weekend, July 10 through 12. Three nights of actual tapes projected under actual stars, at one of the last true temples of physical media in America. If you don't know the Mahoning: it's a 1949 drive-in in the Pennsylvania hills that never surrendered to digital projection, a place people cross state lines for the way other people cross them for ballparks. Putting a VHS festival there is like holding mass in the Vatican of static. I skipped it, because it's five hours each way and my Civic's air conditioning is a rumor, and then I saw the photos and regretted every mile I didn't drive. Next summer the AC gets fixed or I rent something German. This is now in print, so it's binding.

Staying on the tape beat: Lunchmeat also spent the spring chasing the legend of the banned Little Mermaid VHS cover, and reading it took me straight back behind the counter. If you worked video retail in the 90s you fielded that question, always in a whisper, like the customer was passing state secrets across the top of a display case. I once had a mom lean in so conspiratorially I thought she was about to return a tape from 1989. The whole saga's on their blog and it's a perfect lunch-break rabbit hole.

And filed under required reading: Lunchmeat's interview from back in February with a former Blockbuster VP of development. I read it twice, the way other people read true crime. Blockbuster helped kill my store in 2002. I was there for the last day, selling ex-rental tapes for a buck apiece out of cardboard boxes, including, yes, all four copies of Aliens. A man in a Browns jacket bought three of them and wouldn't say why. Twenty-four years later a Blockbuster executive turns out to be thoughtful and decent in an interview, and I hold both of those facts in my hands like a guy holding two remotes. Both things are true. I'm still not lending him anything without a deposit.

Static

• November 14 is going to hurt: Synthrave Live in Sheffield (Waveshaper, LeBrock, Wolfclub, New Arcades) and Darker Waves in Huntington Beach (Soft Cell, Gary Numan, roughly half of 1982) landed on the same night, five thousand miles apart. Pick a coast. I'll be picking neither and complaining about it here, loudly, in November.
• Vehlinggo's July interview with Obsession composer Rock Burwell is your coffee-break read. Aaron's been covering this scene for over a decade with a landline work ethic, and it shows.
• Boards of Canada put a transmission called Introit / Prophecy At 1420 MHz into the world in May. Not synthwave. It's on the synthwave charts anyway, because genre tags are a group hallucination. Filed under important weirdness.
• The Stranger Things 5 score from New Year's Eve is still my dishwashing soundtrack. Dixon and Stein could score my tax audit and I'd stream it.
• Masters of the Universe, the June movie: haven't seen it. My nieces have, twice. Their review was "fine?", with the question mark. That tracks.
• Yes, Bandcamp Friday got mentioned twice in one issue. It matters twice.

The counter list

Five for the week, in playing order, like the top-five lists I used to paperclip to rental receipts. Back then a good list from the clerk actually moved product. Consider this the same hustle with better speakers:

• Scandroid, Lost in the Stars. The duet where both guys are the same guy. Still rips.
• ALEX, Hologram Lover. Top ten of the decade. Not taking questions.
• Dynatron, Black Hole. For night highways and bad decisions about Toledo.
• Garoad, Every Day Is Night. Rain, window, you know what to do.
• College, A Real Hero. The song that pulled me into this scene in 2011. Sue me, it's a classic.

That's issue one, the real one this time. For the record, it took two pots of coffee, one order of attic-temperature takeout, and a phone call to my sister Carol that started as fact-checking what year the flood ate my Amiga and turned into forty minutes about our dad's Buick. Occupational hazard of this beat. You go looking for a date and come back with a whole decade.

If it read like a guy talking at you across a counter, good, that was always the plan. Next week, on an actual Sunday: the Comic-Con damage report, the UrbX campaign numbers, my verdict on that Extremely Sloppy record, and whatever else the week shakes loose. If you know somebody who owns a denim jacket and a strong opinion about John Carpenter, send this their way. We're building a counter crowd here.

Housekeeping, briefly. There's an art desk coming to this magazine, a proper one, spotlighting a working retrowave artist each week, as soon as I find the first artist worth building it around, and I'm taking my time on purpose because that pick sets the bar. Mailbag machinery comes later too, once I figure out which buttons do what in the back office. Rome, day one, et cetera.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty