“1989 the number another summer (get down)” Public Enemy

1989: The Year Everything Happened

We’ve already made the case that 1989 was the best year the beat-’em-up genre ever had — Golden Axe, Final Fight, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, three studios, ten months, zero coordination between them. That piece could have stopped there and still been worth writing. But the more you look at 1989, the harder it becomes to stop at games. This was a year that seems to have decided, all at once, to get everything done.

Games: Beyond the Brawlers

The beat-’em-up boom wasn’t even the biggest gaming story of the year. Nintendo launched the Game Boy in 1989 with Tetris in the box, a pairing that helped make a monochrome handheld a hit with adults as well as kids. The same year, Sega’s Genesis and NEC’s TurboGrafx-16 both arrived in North America, with Atari’s colour Lynx following in the autumn — four new pieces of hardware inside twelve months, a density the industry has rarely matched since.

Beyond the hardware, 1989 quietly invented or popularised entire genres. Will Wright’s SimCity gave the world the city-builder from a standing start. Bullfrog’s Populous did the same for the god game. Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia used rotoscoped animation, filmed from real movement, to give its hero a lifelike fluidity that nothing else on a home computer at the time could touch. On the JRPG side, Phantasy Star II and the US localisation of Dragon Warrior both helped pull the genre toward a Western audience that had barely noticed it existed. And under the hood, Creative’s Sound Blaster card gave PC gamers affordable, AdLib-compatible sound with digitised audio on top. Meanwhile a chess computer called Deep Thought, which had become the first machine to beat a grandmaster in tournament play the year before, won the World Computer Chess Championship — then lost both games to Garry Kasparov in October. Humanity kept its lead, for now.

Music: An Impossible Spread

Set the games aside for a moment and 1989’s record shelf is almost absurd. De La Soul released 3 Feet High and Rising, a sample-collage record that redrew what hip-hop was allowed to sound like. The Stone Roses put out their self-titled debut and effectively defined an entire British guitar-music movement in one go. New Order, meanwhile, went the other direction entirely with Technique, leaning hard into house music years before that crossover was an obvious move. Pixies released Doolittle, tightly controlled chaos that would go on to shape a full decade of alternative rock. The The’s Mind Bomb landed the same year, moodier and more overlooked, but just as good. Public Enemy contributed Fight the Power, commissioned specifically by Spike Lee for a film that was about to matter a great deal in its own right.

Five records, five completely different sounds, the same twelve months. It’s hard to find a comparable year since.

Film: Blockbusters, Renaissance, and a Very Different Kind of Statement

Tim Burton’s Batman effectively invented the modern blockbuster superhero movie as a genre unto itself — the template every studio is still chasing, for better and worse. Disney’s The Little Mermaid kicked off what’s now generally called the Disney Renaissance, a run of animated films that reshaped the studio’s entire identity. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Back to the Future Part II both proved 1980s franchise filmmaking still had real gas in the tank. Field of Dreams and When Harry Met Sally covered the more sentimental end of the year’s output, and Dead Poets Society gave a generation of teenagers a very specific idea of what an inspirational teacher was supposed to sound like.

And then there’s Do the Right Thing — Spike Lee’s film about a single scorching day in Brooklyn, carrying real weight about race and policing that the rest of the year’s releases weren’t attempting. That’s the same Fight the Power already mentioned above, written specifically for this film, not incidental to it.

The Rest of the World Wasn’t Sitting Still Either

Step outside entertainment entirely and 1989 keeps delivering. The Berlin Wall fell in November, ending a physical division that had defined an entire generation’s understanding of the world. Seinfeld’s pilot aired, eventually growing into one of the most influential sitcoms ever made, though nobody watching that first episode could have known it yet.

And on 12 March 1989, at CERN, a researcher named Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal titled Information Management: A Proposal. It didn’t get much attention at the time. It became the World Wide Web.

Why That Last One Matters Most

There’s a genuine symmetry in closing on that date. Everything else in this piece — the games, the records, the films, the Wall coming down — is something you can only really discuss today because of the thing Berners-Lee quietly proposed that March, sitting almost unnoticed among everything else 1989 was doing. The year that gave us Golden Axe and 3 Feet High and Rising and Batman and the end of a divided Berlin also gave us, almost as an afterthought, the infrastructure that would eventually let anyone alive look all of it up, argue about it, and read a retrospective like this one about a year that hadn’t finished happening yet.

Worth sitting with, the next time someone says nothing important happens in a single calendar year.