A Rockstar’s Journey to Game Development
A rockstar lifestyle, chart-topping singles, and supporting big names like Cheap Trick and Def Leppard was all that Geelong-raised musician Johnny Galvatron ever wanted. Despite success with The Galvatrons’ 2008 single “When We Were Kids,” the frontman-turned-game-developer recalls how that lifelong dream soon turned into a nightmare.
“It’s pretty easy to leave a mid-tier rock and roll band,” jokes Galvatron, who knew he’d live the rest of his life with regret if he never tried making it in the music business. “Travelling in a mid-tier band is the worst thing ever. I still feel a panic attack when I see a two-seater van! I wanted to do something where I never had to leave the house again.”
The former animation student decided video games were the right medium for a homebody artist like himself, so he told an eager publisher about his demo he had ready for the PAX games convention in Melbourne. It was a lie. He had no demo, or even a booth booked to show his non-existent game.
With friends, he spent the next three months cramming YouTube tutorials in a frantic rush to turn his lie into reality. When they made it to Australia’s premiere games convention, the ragtag team of illustrators, animators and musicians who became Beethoven & Dinosaur earned a publishing deal for the game that became The Artful Escape. The psychedelic platformer, about a rocker’s odyssey to escape the confines of their folk heritage, went on to win the BAFTA Games Award for Artistic Achievement in 2022 for its Bowie-meets-Dylan surrealism.
Starting with a Song
The studio’s next game, Mixtape, seems more grounded at first glance: a loosely 90s-set coming-of-age story about three teenage friends contending with the end of high school. Music nerd Stacey Rockford has compiled a custom mixtape for the occasion, before abandoning her best friends Slater and Cassandra (and a long-anticipated road trip) for a far-fetched plan to become a music supervisor in New York.
Each song is accompanied by a new and distinct gameplay experience. The musical collage conceit wasn’t born from a concept, a premise or mechanic. It came from a song. “All I really wanted was to start a game with That’s Good by Devo, lay out all my favourite songs, start rearranging them and see what kind of narrative they told,” Galvatron says.
The American 80s rock single became the backdrop to a rollicking skateboarding opening, kick-flipping along Mixtape‘s forested, vaguely Pacific-Midwestern roads. Galvatron’s goal was to make an eclectic musical journey through various gameplay mechanics, spanning street chases, skateboard thrill-rides, first-person party camcorder shoots and a memorably drunken stumble through Blockbuster.
“A mixtape is an art of arrangement,” he says. “What’s amazing about mixtapes is you can take people from different eras, different musical styles, different parts of the world, and find this emotional through-line that connects everything.”
A Mixtape Can Only Be As Good As Its Songs
A mixtape can only be as good as its songs, and rest assured Mixtape delivers with bands like Silverchair, Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop and Joy Division. All licences were secured in perpetuity, an important safeguard after expiring music rights led to games vanishing from storefronts in recent years.
“It’s gratuitous, isn’t it? I’m as shocked as you,” says Galvatron, surprised they landed these “precious relics” with Mixtape‘s enthusiastic commitment to design around each song (and label managers’ natural affinity for their budding colleague, Stacey).
A New Approach
Mixtape‘s cinematic music video spirit is a departure from musical games like Guitar Hero and the more recent action game Hi-Fi Rush, where players traditionally anticipate the beat, timing button inputs in harmony. Galvatron takes another approach.
“Music doesn’t feel like a rhythm game to me,” he says. “In my heart, when I play music, it doesn’t feel like you’re watching the beat come towards you. Listening to music isn’t about landing on every step. I prefer to convey the feeling of the song.”
Mixtape places those feelings at the forefront, in a grandiose, surreal and maximalist style. In one scene, betrayed by friends, Stacey floats unmoored through the suburb, clattering into buildings and television antennas to BJ Thomas’s 1970 pop hit Most of All. Later, in a more empowering level set to Love by Smashing Pumpkins, Stacey’s furious reaction to a foiled party sees her and Slater skate through town, exploding every passing bin, vending machine and vehicle into a column of flames by aiming her middle finger at them.
An Aussie Take on a US Genre
Mixtape heavily channels the American coming-of-age genre defined by films like The Breakfast Club and Dazed and Confused (with a dash of High Fidelity‘s music-nerd direct-to-camera monologues). Like fantasy authors who drew from JRR Tolkien’s works, Galvatron looked to directors like John Hughes and Richard Linklater who presented romanticised depictions of US culture.
“I guess this is my Middle-earth,” he says. But Galvatron was also inspired from his past as a music-mad teen in Australia’s rock scene, with memories of waiting outside the green room for acts to sign T-shirts and discussing music nonstop.
Despite its loosely American setting, Mixtape‘s Australian inspirations are found in its playlist, its team’s local rock scene pedigree and even an ABC rage T-shirt worn by its protagonist. Aussie acts like Silverchair are accounted for, with hits like Freak serving as a personal musical touchstone as well as propulsive headbangers.
Having grown up with posters of Daniel Johns and the band plastering his bedroom wall, even picking them as his subject on SBS’s Rockwiz, Galvatron was stunned to run into frontman Daniel Johns outside the recording studio’s bathroom. Soon after, they were downing tequila at the bar. “I’ll remember it forever,” he says.
And while for most Australians, Mondo Rock’s State of the Heart is a fondly regarded 80s hit, for Beethoven & Dinosaur’s 3D modeller Mikey it’s the heartfelt song his father Eric McCusker wrote about his mother. Outside ties to Aussie rock royalty, Slater’s American voice actor Max Korman occasionally slips into an Aussie accent, an accidental touch Galvatron credits to the actor taking his directions a touch too literally in the sound booth.
Fresh off Mixtape‘s US press tour, Galvatron admits he hasn’t quite achieved the travel-free career he hoped for. But seeing his colleagues’ fingerprints across the game’s precociously world-weary performances, splendid environments and chaotic pastiche of mechanics, the one-time rock star doesn’t seem to mind.
“I can see Mikey in the trees and I can see Roman [Maksymyschyn, technical director] in the wind. You can see all your colleagues and friends,” he says. “I think that’s one of the great joys of game development.”
Mixtape is out now.
