If you miss MTV and Dunkaroos, this indie game is for you

At a record store in North Los Angeles, I walked past shelves of albums, a DJ spinning records, and a stack of Dunkaroos, a cookie-and-frosting snack that was all the rage in ’90s America. It was like stepping back into an earlier era, the same one that serves as the backdrop for the upcoming game Mixtape, the story of a group of self-mythologizing teenagers hanging out before life took them away from their American suburbs.

In an amusing twist of fate, the main mastermind behind the game is an Australian rocker who didn’t set foot in the United States until he was 30 years old. Johnny Galvatron (stage name and lead singer of The Galvatrons), creative director of Beethoven & Dinosaur studio, envisioned a mixtape based on a blend of American youth culture broadcast around the world, with his own upbringing loving the music of the era and playing in bands.

In a recording room behind the record store, I chatted with Galvatron about why a man from the Antipodes would prey on American youth, about nostalgia through the prism of music and analog audio technology, about the grave mistake of being a teenager, and why the United States is like Middle Earth.

I also got to play a short slice of Mixtape before the conversation, a demo I saw initially at Summer Game Fest last year (but with a few extra scenes exclusive to that event). It opened with the game’s older teenage heroine, Stacy Rockford, skateboarding down a winding road with her friends, lazily pulling kickflips and calling out to oncoming cars in the golden hour before dusk, a fitting start for a game about the final days before adulthood.

From what I’ve seen, there’s a bit of overlap with other nostalgia-laden narrative games about teens growing up, like studio Don’t Nod’s Life is Strange series or last year’s Lost Records: Bloom and Rage. But Mixtape eschews the plot drama of those games in favor of the humble wonder of teenagers killing time. And it does it in style, with kinetic editing and needle drops that immerse players in the MTV-immersed lives of kids whose rebellious days are numbered. The tone is different, reflecting Galvatron’s memories of being a serious, music-loving, opinionated teenager.

“There are a lot of stories about teenagers where they’re portrayed as very shy and insecure. And that’s not really my teenage experience,” Galvatron said. “I was very confident and wrong about things and how I felt about music.”

Galvatron’s serious teenage years were spent in Australia, but setting the game there was perhaps too close to home. Additionally, his favorite music and culture came from America. Although he didn’t come to the United States until he was 32, he observed America every day of his life, he said. Seeing it in person is like coming to a theme park or fantasy land: “For people who live in Western cultures, America is Middle Earth,” Galvatron said.

The game is divided into chapters, each modeled after a carefully chosen song. They all come together in the titular mixtape, the swan song of a group of dear friends, one last rock-out to tunes that speak of the moment. It was these songs that led to the creation of Mixtape’s emotional sequencing, Galvatron told me. While most games begin development by creating a “vertical slice” that represents the central loop of the game, Beethoven & Dinosaur created “a really shitty version of the entire game” and swapped the songs to see what different stories the setups told.

“We were playing around with this soundtrack until it seemed to have this cinematic flow, like a really beautiful narrative that strings these songs together,” Galvatron said. “Once we had that right, we were able to put the story and the characters in there.”

Choosing the songs was a delicate process to find the right tone (and to ensure variety, as Galvatron joked that he always wanted more Devo songs, which the team vetoed and limited him to just one). There’s a pivotal moment in the game where main character Rockford is betrayed by his friend, and despite the saddest songs they could think of, none worked. So they switched the emotions to the other extreme, trying tunes evoking exaggerated happiness like Stuck In The Middle With You, and opted for songs by 1960s artist BJ Miller, “and that seemed to make the whole thing even more devastating,” Galvatron said.

I saw parts of 4-5 song chapters out of what Galvatron told me was a total of 26 or 27. But each one felt like a sublime snippet (in Pixar parlance, a central memory) that the player can control, from a beautified shopping cart escaping the cops to an awkward tongue-wagging first kiss to rocking in the car on the way to a party. It sounds trite, but these delightful moments recall a time in everyone’s life when the people and songs around you elevated the simple to the unforgettable.

“We don’t have skill trees, we don’t have (gameplay) loops. We have moments where the mechanics, the music, the dialogue, the narration come together and reach these crescendos,” Galvatron said, emphasizing the importance of their brevity. “Come in, deliver the mechanic, spruce it up, make it a great experience. Don’t overstay your welcome.”

There’s no denying that Mixtape reaches back into the past to evoke a sense of place and time, particularly that moment in the American 90s when music boomed from cassettes and CDs. There’s a warmth to this equipment, Galvatron noted, and to the music it produces. Additionally, tactility lends itself very well to tapping, rotating and clicking movements on game controllers, giving players a real feel for the music they are playing on screen.

Yet when I asked him how he thinks the game fits into our current era of nostalgia—on which media like Stranger Things have built intellectual property empires with period-appropriate references, fashions, and songs—Galvatron says the game serves a different purpose than getting viewers to remember specific songs, CD players, and Tamagotchis. “What I want people to remember is when you defined yourself by the singles that you loved, by the art, and I think that’s something naive and sweet,” he said.

If the rest of the game meets the bar set by the demo I saw, players will be quite amazed by the polished and electric delivery of moments from one scene to the next. Mixtape seems intentionally designed, probably meticulously scripted, to create moments with camera angles and timing that make you feel part of it.

Beethoven & Dinosaur’s strengths lie in the greatness of the cutscenes and music, Galvatron said. “That’s how I remember my teenage years,” he said. “[it’s] something theatrical and fast, and it all meant the end of the world or the beginning of the world. »