Disc Room's nightmare future will always be 69 years away

One of the problems with speculative fiction is that, unless you can accurately predict the future, your vision will always look remarkably quaint by the time we reach whatever far-off year you picked. But no matter how much time passes, indie blade-dodger Disc Room will forever take place 69 years in the future.

As RPS spotted, co-developer Jan Willem Nijman recently updated a long thread of Disc Room design tricks with one more little touch. As 2020 rolled into 2021, so too did the game's intro video tick over from 2089 to 2090, ensuring that there'll never be a point where someone might say "this is the year disc room was set in".

now that it's 2021, I can safely spoil that Disc Room will always be Set In The Future. It used to be set in 2089, but just so that our ancestors don't have to deal with the whole "this is the year disc room was set in" drama we add an extra year whenever necessary. pic.twitter.com/HKdZT2yL4UFebruary 11, 2021

Yes, it's a very silly joke, but it's one more nice little touch on top of a game that's absolutely full of them. James wrote a while back on how Disc Room is brutal, but never punishing, and the thread above is full of tiny tricks on the developer's part that make the game's challenges feel fair, fun and (via a second thread) accessible.

It just so happens that this trick is more of a cultural service, ensuring that Disc Room will never have the Back To The Future-style "where's my hoverboard?" moment when its far-future calendar finally rolls around. For whatever nightmares 2089 brings, worrying about the lack of semi-sentient flying buzz saws shouldn't be one of them.

Nice.

20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she's not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.