Not exactly PS1 style games but does anyone here found the aesthetic revival of 'Y2K' very lame. It feels like a caricature of the genuine design and expression of the time. More about aping checklists of aesthetic instead of creating something interesting.
Check this desktopGeneration 'design movement' here :
https://x.com/dsktpGeneration
and its website :
https://www.desktopgeneration.com/
And compared this to the 'OG' like
Depthcore,
Designers Republic, Andreas Lindholm, etc. even the name Desktop Generation feels like a terminally online ironic joke. Like how Geocities sites were genuine, Neocities are troons role-playing the old internet and their websites are nothing but them monologing about themselves.
There are just too many troons crawling in there to count but this is one of them. of course he's anime obsessed and into speedrunning. and much of his work is in this style. I also found how he described his style as 'vectorheart', 'metalheart' very lame, they just want labels for everything. back then there were no such labels as art was a fluid and evolving things.
https://wsx.moe/
Now compares this to a graphic designer who was actually part of 2Advanced studio back in the day and his works are mix of personal and regular commercial works.
https://www.shanemielke.com/
Original Y2K back then had energy, it was futurism of its time. All of this is just a rehash by deeply uncreative people. Or compare this to
David Rudnick whose works were clearly inspired by 90s rave posters but he has his own vision to actually create something new about it. (Though he paid lip service to troons tbh, but it's in a weird philosophical view that trans identity is just an expression of hypermodern world)
There's a difference between 'inspiration' and just aping the aesthetic without actually feeling and understanding. Y2K on itself was inspired by 1960s modernism (which in turns was inspired by 1920s Bauhaus stuff) but with digitised sheen, but it has enough of vitality to actually mean something at the time.