Imagined Past and Future

Abstract

Aztech Forgotten Gods, developed by Mexican studio Lienzo, has as its main setting a futuristic unconquered Aztec civilization. The developers took elements from the pre-Hispanic past and projected them into an imagined alternative future. Following this premise, the present article borrows from Penix-Tadsen the division of “the culture in the video game/the video game in the culture” and thus is divided into two parts. The first traces some of the cultural notions present in Aztech that can be found by examining some ideologies with an origin in the Mexican Post-Revolutionary regime from the 1920s. Initially, these ideologies considered the pre-Hispanic era as a “glorious past”; thereafter, toward the 1970s with the Tlatelolco massacre and economic crises, the past was rather seen as “tragic.” These ideologies are also related to ways of thinking about pre-Hispanic culture in relation to other beliefs and religions, or with a desire to “recover” the “Aztec” culture and essentialize it. The second part of this article categorizes and analyzes some of the contemporary cultural notions activated by Aztech Forgotten Gods. This is achieved by analyzing the reactions of internet users to the promotional videos of the video game on YouTube. These responses include the identification of some people as Mexican and their relation to ancient “Aztec” culture, similarities of the game’s music to the music from other video games, and issues of gender representation. The article discusses the complexities that come when a video game takes some aspects from contemporary identity, and some of the different ways the audience responds to cultural aspects of a video game. That is to say, it is fundamentally concerned with the relation between culture and video games.