The idea for Mixtape, Beethoven and Dinosaur’s latest musical adventure, started with a song. Specifically, “That’s Good” by Devo, the song that opens the game as Stacy Rockford and her friends skateboard into their final night together in Blue Moon Lagoon. Creative director Johnny Galvatron tells Kotaku that he wanted to build a game that could have that song in it, and then the idea of a game about a mixtape of Galvatron’s “greatest hits of all time” began to form.
“I’m a big Devo fan,” Galvatron says. “There seems to be this weird, Devo-shaped hole in my heart, and when I listen to Devo, it just goes in and I feel complete. So I love that song and we started out and then we were like. ‘Well, what if we, what if we built a game around a mixtape with individual tracks?’ We laid out all the tracks that I love; it’s just my greatest hits of all time. I think there is a ‘60s track and then there’s a couple of ‘70s, mostly ‘80s and early ‘90s, and laid them out.”
Picking the songs was one thing, but as the team at Beethoven and Dinosaur learned through developing its previous game, the musical platformer Artful Escape, pacing and structuring the mixtape to compliment an overarching narrative would be the difference between a random assortment of songs and something with a deeper story to tell.
“We would put them in different orders and see where the kind of crescendos were and where things were going to land, and we’d try again,” Galvatron said. “Once we had it in a fairly level state, we built a ‘horizontal slice,’ instead of a vertical slice, which is a shitty version of the whole game, just to see if we had the pacing right and if it was gonna work. We were like, ‘yes, this is gonna be really cool,’ and then built upon those firmaments in each level and then the the things that came out of that were like ‘How are we going to get in and out of each song, what’s the kind of process of like, switching between songs, can it be hard like a mixtape, or are we gonna have to kind of flow and bridge the scene,’ which is what we learned that we did have to do.”
Mixtape has some pretty big names on its soundtrack, though, and Galvatron says there weren’t any “horror stories” in terms of getting the rights to what they wanted. Woodward explains that the team’s music supervisor kept expectations in check early on. At one point, the team floated the idea of featuring Pink Floyd as a “boundary test,” but didn’t even get to the point of deciding on a song before they were told to cool their jets because their supervisor said the band was unlikely to give them a song. Other than that, Woodward says they got “pretty much everything [they] asked for.”
“There’s just so many points in the game where Stacy turns the screen and says ‘This is the Smashing Pumpkins, and it’s fucking sick,’” Galvatron said. “You send that to [Smashing Pumpkins frontman] Billy Corgan and he goes, ‘This is the Smashing Pumpkins and it’s fucking sick, yeah, they can do that. That’s fine.’
Though Beethoven and Dinosaur has now made two music-driven games, Mixtape and Artful Escape still feel like pretty distinct projects, in tone, genre, and their relationship to music.
“I think Artful Escape is far more about being a musician or being a creator, and it’s also about the kind of satellite aspects that you build around your core medium, and then [Mixtape] is far more about being a listener, being a fan of music and what music means to you and how you can use it to kind of define the eras or moments of your life.”
The entire interview is great, you should read it.