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Hello everyone and welcome back to a brand new episode of RetroNots Micro. This is your host bot Mackey and as is the case with these episodes, these smaller episodes, it will just be me talking for roughly 10 minutes or however long it takes me to make my point.

So to begin I'd like to say that we at RetroNots get a lot of feedback about what we do right and what we do wrong and usually when you guys tell us what we do wrong, it's very constructive, it helps us become better podcasters.

And one of the most common pieces of criticism I hear is the fact that we really just ignore PC games entirely and I will say yes that's kind of true.

If you look at the past episodes we've done in these past two seasons, you'll see there's not a whole lot of PC games highlighted in what we've talked about so far.

And you probably wouldn't have guessed this about me based on what I write about, what I podcast about, what I talk about, what I tweet about, but I was actually a pretty big PC gamer.

I would say roughly from the mid-90s to probably the early 2000s and that's back when PC games were so much different than console games.

Today that's kind of the case but really you'll find all of those console experiences on the PC but maybe they look a little better or there's less loading time but there's not really that much of a distinction between PC games and console games anymore.

Maybe if you look at the indie space there is but still that was such a great time for games because they offered so many things you could not get on consoles.

So unless you're a new listener knowing what you know about me you may be surprised to hear that one of my favorite games is a PC car combat simulator from 1996.

And that's actually the focus of today's micro and that game is Activision's Interstate 76.

Let's take a trip back to the 1970s, the decade where you would find your water gates, your pet rocks, your cheaches and your chongs.

Let's see, Abba I think was in the 70s and okay yeah I was actually born in the 80s so I experienced no part of the 70s.

So let's go back to the 90s. Okay that feels much better. So here we are in the 90s and I have to point out that nostalgia typically works in 20 year bursts.

So let me give you an example in the 70s we had the TV show Happy Days which was a tribute to the 50s.

In the 90s we had that 70s show which was a tribute to the 70s. So the 90s were really focused on 70s nostalgia. I mean there are so many hilarious jokes about leisure suits, disco, you know, nixon, everything like that.

And this was the perfect time for a game like Interstate 76. As indicated by the name this game takes place in the Groovy 70s. In fact during the bicentennial celebration of the 70s.

This version of the 70s is a bit different than the one that we actually experienced here in the real world. In Interstate 76 the oil crisis which actually happened here goes on for much longer.

It's much more desperate causing things to break down in a kind of Mad Max way. It's not quite as extreme but there are vigilantes roaming the deserts and gas is a very valuable resource in this world.

As society begins to break down in this alternate 1976 a shadowy figure begins to recruit other vigilantes known as creepers into his private army.

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