Walk into any competitive socialising venue in 2025 and you’ll see the same thing. Pink neon. Purple haze. Electric blue accents. Electric Shuffle‘s got it. So has Hijingo, F1 Arcade, TOCA Social, Flip Out, Immersive Gamebox, NQ64 and many more.

This isn’t random. It’s an industry that cracked the code on making millennials and Gen Z spend money. It all accelerated in July 2016 when Netflix dropped Stranger Things.

How Stranger Things changed everything

The internet aesthetic movements had been building for years. Vaporwave. Synthwave. MTV rebranded with vaporwave graphics in 2014. Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video featured neon pastels in 2015.

But it was niche. Internet culture. Not mainstream.

Then Stranger Things arrived.

Season 4 hit 1.15 billion viewing hours in 28 days. Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” reached number one on Spotify in 2022, 37 years after release. Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” topped charts. Neon purple merchandise sold out globally.

University of Sydney researchers called this “pseudo-nostalgia”. Younger consumers buying products and seeking experiences from an era they never lived through. Gen Z was born after the 1990s but felt nostalgic for a decade that existed mainly in media.

Not the real 1980s. A reimagined version filtered through modern sensibilities. Brighter. More optimistic. Less complicated than today.

Perfect timing for competitive socialising venues looking to differentiate themselves from traditional pubs.

Why nostalgia sells

Both millennials and Gen Z graduated into economic disasters. Millennials faced the Great Recession. Gen Z got COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis.

When the present feels uncertain, people retreat to memories of safer times. For millennials, that’s childhood in the 1980s and 1990s. For Gen Z, it’s media representations of those decades.

The pink-purple-blue aesthetic promises playful, energetic escapism. Venues figured out how to monetise it.