The Year Is 2010. Civilization Has Progressed Little in the Last 20 Years

About

The Year Is 2010. Civilization Has Progressed Little in the Last 20 Years is the opening line of the intro for the 1994 video game The Firemen for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Starting in 2020, the year in the image has consistently been edited to the current year, with the edits being used as reaction images across social media.

Origin

On September 9th, 1994, the action video game The Firemen by Human Entertainment was released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.^[1] The opening intro of the game starts with the player learning that the year is 2010 and that civilization has progressed little over the last two decades (shown below).

The year is 2010. Civilization has progressed little in the last 20 years.

On January 1st, 2020, X^[2] / Twitter user @MITOLLdesu posted an edited version of the image in which the year was changed to 2020, commenting, "today is the first day you can retweet this." The post (shown below) received over 72,900 retweets and 138,000 likes prior to deletion.

Spread

On January 1st, 2020, iFunny^[3] user tou_ reposted the image, with the repost gaining over 83,300 likes on the platform in four years.

On December 28th, 2020, X^[4] user @Standplaats_KRK reposted the image. The post received over 83,000 reposts and 171,000 likes in three years.

In the following years, the image has repeatedly been "updated" to reflect the current year, with the edits being used both as reaction images and on their own. For example, on December 31st, 2022, X^[5] user @Gravantus posted an edit that received over 35,000 reposts and 101,000 likes in three weeks (shown below, left). On the same day, Tumblr^[6] user seasidesapphix reposted the image, with the post garnering over 124,000 notes in the same period (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References