(It's a film noire-ish detective story set in booming postwar Los Angeles, with a mostly open world you can drive around in accurate models of period cars, and walk around.)
I didn't feel that because it was a nice social environment (it wasn't), nor did I want to be the traditional white male head of household (it was especially not-nice for POC and women), and I actually dislike cars.
I think what caused the feeling was the immersion in the prosperity, and new/recent construction, which seemed accessible to most. (While in real life living in overpriced, deteriorating old New England apartments.) I'd guess the game atmosphere like background music also contributed.
It's a persistent general feeling of curiosity tinged with melancholy while in the game, longing for something I want maybe more than I realize, but that I believe doesn't exist or is inaccessible.
The strangest thing happened while I was watching Частное пионерское 2 (set in 1979, including computer printed samizdat): a song I knew came on in the background, and I had a very strong nostalgic sensation, as if I had just heard "Heart of Glass" as diegetic music — but for music I'd never heard before this century and YouTube (2005).
Not what you’re talking about exactly, but it seems like a similar vibe.
BTW we got to meet the psychiatrist who coined the term, he went independant and was still practicing with a florishing business in Paris mainly targeting Japanese patients.
* "Heimweh" (what the articles names as "Nostalgia") * "Fernweh"
The common part, "weh", means something like the english "hurt".
"Heim" means "home"
"Fern" means "abroad" or "distant".
Since Germans are VERY travel friendly (e.g. if we can pay for it, we do one holiday per year in a foreign country), we're people that have a high amount of "Fernweh". But ... "Fernweh" for us is mostly only some mild kind of yearning. If we cannot travel, e.g. due to finances or due to COVID-19, we won't die. The extreme form of "Heimweh" described in the article however is some kind of serious illness. Something that one will never attribute to "Fernweh".
Also toys. When the Marvel Movies started up I was mostly excited for Iron Man, a character I’d never actually seen in anything, but I had a couple different colored Iron Man’s when I was a little. It turns out that they are mostly all the same guy which is sorta boring.
Other people probably were nostalgic for the movie about the silver robot from Marvel vs Capcom.
See my other post on "Heimweh" vs. "Fernweh" here.
Maybe not as much now because of the "gun", "bad healthcare" and "expensive college" memes (in the scientific sense of the word "meme"), but it definitely used to be a thing.
edit: weeaboo?