Imagine for a moment: It’s the year 2007. All software looks like glossy, rounded plastic, dewy glass, and photographs of verdant fields. Every electronic device makes ethereal chimes when it starts up. You’ve never heard the phrases ‘live-service,’ ‘large language model,’ or ‘prediction market.’ It’s safer here, amidst the dreamy lime greens and ocean blues. It’s better.
And now, thanks to a new house-builder that launched on Steam this week, we can live the definitely-healthy fantasy of retreating into the security of yesterday’s software aesthetics. Frutiger Home is a home decorating sim where you can build an impregnable psychic cocoon out of the finest design elements of an era where technology could still feel optimistic, and not like perpetual cognitive radiation poisoning. Hooray!
All its architectural themes, available color swatches, and interior accent pieces are inspired by the Frutiger Aero aesthetic—a term retroactively coined by Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute co-founder Sofi Xian to describe the glossy, glassy, gleaming visual language that dominated tech and UI design from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s. Here, sharp corners are an aberration. Every surface that can be polished, will be polished.
When I loaded into an empty home to begin decorating, one wall of the living room was dominated by a screen showing clownfish and dandelions. I could change it to show a collection of citrus slices, because of course I could. Once, our devices held these images in reverence. A computer was a window to an idealized version of nature: one that was mostly seagulls and water floating through the air for some reason.
It was the Zune’s time.
(Image credit: frutigerdev)
After browsing the selection of furniture that looked like it was extruded straight from the dimension where sans-serif typefaces live, I stepped outside of my fully-rounded home and into a field where the impossibly green hillsides of that Windows wallpaper—you know the one—stretch into the distance, forever. You can join me here. I’ve placed two chairs with loops for legs. We can pretend it’s 2007 for as long as we need to.
Frutiger Home is available now, on Steam, in 2026, for $5.
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