By time setting, I mean what year it could have taken place. There are numerous different clues, that point to different eras in time which makes it even harder to fully declare. I've included titles of each speculation, and some of them will connect with each other.
INTERNETIn the mission Hattrick vs. Galloway, there is a cutscene in the beginning which shows Mr. Galloway arguing with Mr. Hattrick, then Jimmy walking in, then Jimmy and Galloway have a conversation.
Bully Scholarship Edition: Hattrick vs GallowayI noticed this part just now as I was replaying all the missions. At 1:21 in the video, you'll hear him say:
"I've tried any number of things to dull the pain; yoga, meditation, needle point, looking at dubious sites on the internet."Now as human beings, who lived through most, if not all of the 2000's, we should all know internet wasn't really released to the public too long ago.
I've done some research on the internet earlier, as there is no solid answer on Google when you search "when was the internet released to the public". According to my research, the World Wide Web became publicly available on August 6th, 1991.
VEHICLESThis is a screenshot taken from someone on Youtube who replaced the gokart with one of the in-game vehicles. Now we know, CARS in this game can strictly only be driven by NPC's, but with simple modding you can easily allow the player to drive any car.
Back on topic, tell me. When have you last seen people COMMONLY driving cars like this? Down your block, highway etc. And I don't mean those people doing it because they like classic cars, I mean people driving them because it's the only cars we have? Not really that common(or at least not in the USA).
Not to mention, the filename of this car is actually "70wagon".
BULLWORTH ACADEMY FOOTBALL TEAM PHOTOWe've all seen this photo hanging on the wall in the boy's dorm. I believe this can even be seen on the PS2 version. If you look closer at it, you'll notice it says "Bullworth Academy Football Team 1976."
So, let's use these previous 2 things, and see what we can come up with:
• A reference to the internet, internet being released to the public in 1991.
• Old looking cars.
• And a picture referring to the year 1976.
We know internet probably existed in 1976, but was it publicly released? It was released in 1991 as said above. But the cars? The cars and the photo, point right to evidence being that the game may have taken place in the 70's or 80's.
Then again, we can put that all aside, and just call this photo "old". Think about it: we still have PHYSICAL photos from the 80's and before.
CAMERASIn Bully, you can obviously unlock a camera early in the game. Sure it's black and white, but it's still a camera. Black and white cameras still exist today, but no longer what we'd consider "commonly cheap". Commonly cheap being something basic. Like today, if you had a kid, you wanted to give him/her a basic camera, it would most likely still have color, just lower quality and/or small, possibly for a lower price.
But in this game, commonly cheap would be a black and white camera. Later in the game, you'd also unlock a COLORED camera. And it seems to have really nice image as well. Don't forget, colored cameras DID exist in the 80's. right?
But in the pause menu, your photo album actually shows a camera ROLL. It wasn't that long ago camera rolls lowered in public usage. And keep in mind, even on the Scholarship Edition(2008), this game was still created in 2005-06. This is a tough piece of evidence to point to, as camera rolls are still used in some places.
Clearing up all that,
most of the evidence I listed points to somewhere around the 1970's.As for the internet speculation, there really are no computers in the game as far as I can remember. The TV in the Boy's Dorm looks pretty modern, or 2006-ish. And in the mission "A Little Help", the TV DOES in fact show color, however it is really low quality. Then again, even today, any TV can show low quality image.
Feel free to post other speculations.