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

At a record store in North Los Angeles, I walked past racks of albums, DJ mixes, and a stack of Dunkaroos, a cookie and iced snack that was popular in America in the 1990s. It felt like a return to an earlier era, the same era that is the backdrop to the upcoming game Mixtape, a story about a group of self-proclaimed legendary teens hanging out before life drags them away from their suburban American town.

And in an amusing twist of fate, the main mind behind the game is an Australian rock singer who didn’t set foot in the United States until he was in his 30s. Johnny Galvatron (stage name and lead singer of the band Galvatron), Creative Director at Beethoven & Dinosaur Studio, dreamed up the Mixtape based on a mix of American youth culture broadcast around the world, combined with the beloved music he experienced growing up and playing in bands.

In a recording room behind the record store, I spoke with Galvatron about why a man from the Antipodes approached American youth, nostalgia through the lens of music and analog audio technology, what’s so wrong with being a teenager, and why the United States resembles Middle-earth.

I also played a short clip of Mixtape before the talk, a demo I originally saw Summer Games Festival last year (but with some additional scenes exclusive to the event). The game opens with the game’s oldest teenage heroine, Stacy Rockford, skating down a winding road with her friends, lazily pulling kick moves and hailing oncoming cars in the golden hour before twilight, a fitting beginning for a game about the final days before adulthood.

From what I’ve seen, there’s little overlap with other nostalgic narrative games about growing up as teenagers, like Studio Don’t Nod’s Life is strange Series or last year’s lost records: bloom and fury. But Mixtape eschews the plot drama of those games in favor of celebrating the humble wonder of teenagers killing time. And it does so in style, with kinetic editing and needle drops that immerse players in the lives of MTV-filled kids whose rebellious days are numbered. It is different in tone, and reflects memories of Galvatron as a serious teenager, who loved music and expressed strong opinions.

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

Galvatron’s serious adolescence was in Australia, but the game’s setting there may have been a little too close to home. In addition, his favorite music and culture came from America. He said that although he did not come to the United States until he was 32, he saw America every day of his life. 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 selected song. They all come together for the titular mixtape, a swan song for a group of dear friends, a final rocker on tunes that speak to the moment. Galvatron told me that it was those songs that prompted the creation of the Mixtape’s emotional sequence. While most games start development by creating a “vertical slice” that represents the basic loop of the game, Beethoven and Dinosaur made a “real bad version of the whole game” and switched songs to see the different stories the compositions told.

“We were playing with this soundtrack so it seemed to have this cinematic flow, like a really beautiful story that ties these songs together,” Galvatron said. “Once we got that right, we could put the story and the characters in.”

Choosing the songs was a delicate process to find the right tone (and to ensure variety, as Galvatron joked, he kept wanting more Devo songs, which the team objected to and limited him to one song). There’s a pivotal moment in the game where the main character Rockford is betrayed by her friend, and despite searching for the saddest songs they can think of, none of them work. So they turned the sentiment around, tried happy-go-lucky tunes like Stuck In The Middle With You, and went with PJ Miller songs from the 1960s, “and that seemed to make it more devastating,” Galvatron said.

I saw parts of 4-5 song chapters from what Galvatron told me would be 26 or 27 total. But each one felt like a great snippet (in Pixar parlance, a memory core) that the player could control, from the ornate shopping cart evading the cops to the first kiss of awkward tongues to the swaying in the car on the way to the party. It may seem mundane, but these joyful moments evoke a time in everyone’s life when the people and songs around you elevate the simple to an unforgettable level.

“We don’t have skill trees, we don’t have (game) loops. We have moments where mechanics and music and dialogue and narrative come together and hit these crescendos,” Galvatron said, stressing the importance of their brevity. “Come in, hand over the mechanic, make it beautiful, make it a great experience. Don’t overstay your welcome.”

It’s undeniable that Mixtape harkens back to the past to evoke a sense of place and time, specifically this moment in the American 90s where music was coming from cassette tapes and CDs. Galvatron noted that there is a warmth to this equipment and the music it produces. What’s more, the sense of touch lends itself well to touch, rotation and tapping movements on game controllers, giving gamers a real feel for the music they’re playing on screen.

However, when I asked him how he felt the game fit into our current era of nostalgia — which media outlets like Stranger Things have built IP empires on with period-appropriate references, costumes, and songs — Galvatron emphasized that the game had a different goal than getting viewers to remember specific songs, CD players, and Tamagotchis. “What I want people to remember is when you define yourself by the singles you like, by your art, and I think that’s a naive and sweet thing,” he said.

If the rest of the game lives up to the standards set by the demo I saw, players will be blown away by the polished electrical delivery of moments from one scene to the next. The Mixtape feels deliberately designed, and likely meticulously shot, to create moments with camera angles and timing that make you feel like you’re along for the ride.

Galvatron said that the strengths of Beethoven and the Dinosaurs lie in the greatness of the cinema and the music. “So I remember when I was a teenager, it was something theatrical and fast, and everything meant the end of the world or the beginning of the world,” he said.