At a record store in northern Los Angeles, I walked past racks of albums, a DJ spinning records and a stack of Dunkaroos, a cookies and icing snack that was all the rage in ’90s America. It felt like stepping back into an earlier era, the same one backdropping the upcoming game Mixtape, a story about a group of self-mythologizing teens hanging out before life pulls them away from their suburban American town.
In an amusing twist of fate, the main brain behind the game is an Australian rocker who didn’t step foot in the US until his 30s. Johnny Galvatron (a stage name and lead singer of the band The Galvatrons), creative director at studio Beethoven & Dinosaur, dreamed up Mixtape based on a blend of American youth culture that was broadcast worldwide, along with his own upbringing loving music of the period and playing in bands.
In a recording room behind the record store, I chatted with Galvatron about why a man from the Antipodes would tackle American youth, nostalgia through the lens of music and analog audio tech, the earnest wrongness of being a teenager and why the US is like Middle-earth.
I also got to play a short slice of Mixtape ahead of the conversation, a demo I originally saw at Summer Game Fest last year (but with a couple extra scenes exclusive to this event). It opened up with the game’s older teen heroine, Stacy Rockford, skateboarding down a winding road with her friends, lazily pulling kickflips and calling out oncoming cars in the golden hour before twilight, a fitting start for a game about the last days before adulthood knocks.
From what I saw, there’s a bit of overlap with other nostalgia-laden narrative games about teens growing up, such as studio Don’t Nod’s Life is Strange series or last year’s Lost Records: Bloom and Rage. But Mixtape avoids the plotty drama of those games in favor of lionizing the humble wonder of teens killing time. And it does it in style, with kinetic editing and needle drops that immerse players in the MTV-drenched lives of kids whose rebellious days are numbered. It’s tonally different, reflecting Galvatron’s memories of being an earnest teen, liking music and tossing out strong opinions.
“There’s a lot of stories about teenagers where they’re portrayed as very shy and not confident. And that’s not really my experience of being a teenager,” Galvatron said. “I was very confident and wrong about things and about how I felt about music.”
A 90s style polaroid photo of Mixtape creative director Johnny Galvatron at the preview event for the game at Licorice Pizza Records in Studio City, Los Angeles.
Galvatron’s earnest teenagehood was in Australia, but setting the game there might have been too close to home. Plus, his favorite music and culture came from America. Despite not coming to the US until he was 32, he’s watched America every single day of his life, he said. Seeing it in person is like coming to a theme park, or a fantasy land: “To people who live in Western cultures, America is Middle-earth,” Galvatron said.
The game is split into chapters, each patterned after a carefully-chosen song. They all come together in the titular mixtape, the swan song of a cherished friend group, one last rock-out to tunes that speak to the moment. It was those songs that drove the creation of the emotional sequencing of Mixtape, Galvatron told me. Whereas most games start development by creating a “vertical slice” that represents the core loop of the game, Beethoven & Dinosaur made “a real shitty version of the whole game” and swapped around the songs to see what different stories the configurations told.
Stacy Rockford (center) hangs out in her room with her friends, killing time.
“We would play with that soundtrack until it seemed to have this cinematic flow to it, like a really lovely narrative that chained these songs together,” Galvatron said. “Once we had that right, we could put the story and the characters in.”
Picking 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 vetoed and limited him to one). There’s a pivotal moment in the game where the main character Rockford is betrayed by her friend, and despite digging up the saddest songs they could think of, none worked. So they flipped the emotions to the other extreme, trying tunes evoking over-the-top happiness like Stuck In The Middle With You, and went with songs from the artist BJ Miller from the 1960s, “and that seemed to make it just all the more devastating,” Galvatron said.
I saw parts of 4-5 song chapters out of what Galvatron told me will be a total of 26 or 27. But each felt like a sublime snippet (in Pixar parlance, a core memory) that the player gets to control, from an embellished shopping cart escape from the cops to a flailing first kiss of awkward tongues to rocking out in the car on the way to a party. It sounds mundane, but these delightful moments hearken to a time in everyone’s lives when the people and the songs around you elevated the simple into the unforgettable.
“We don’t have skill trees, we don’t have (gameplay) loops. We have moments where mechanics, music, dialogue, narrative all meet and hit these crescendos,” Galvatron said, and emphasized the importance of their brevity. “Get in, deliver the mechanic, make it beautiful, make it a great experience. Don’t overstay your welcome.”
In the preview, Stacy Rockford and her friends escape a cop-busted party by barreling down the street in a shopping cart, threatening life and limb at great speed. Yeah, that’s probably how it happened…
It’s undeniable that Mixtape reaches back into the past to evoke a feeling of place and time, specifically this moment in the American 90s where music was blasting from cassette tapes and CDs. There’s a warmth to this equipment, Galvatron noted, and to the music it produces. Moreover, the tactility lends itself very well to touching, spinning and clicking motions on game controllers, giving players a real feel for the music they’re playing on screen.
Yet when I asked how he felt the game fit amid our current era of nostalgia — which media like Stranger Things have built IP empires upon with period-appropriate references, fashion and songs — Galvatron asserts that the game has a different aim than prompting viewers to remember specific songs, CD players and Tamagotchis. “What I want people to remember is when you defined yourself by the singles you liked, by art, and I think that’s something naive and sweet,” he said.
The demo (and perhaps the final game) opens up to Stacy Rockford and her friends rolling down a tree-lined street, not a care in the world.
If the rest of the game meets the bar set by the demo I saw, players will be pretty awestruck by the polished, electric delivery of moments from scene to scene. Mixtape feels intentionally designed, likely meticulously storyboarded, to land moments with camera angles and timing that make you feel along for the ride.
Beethoven & Dinosaur’s strengths are leaning into the grandness of cinematics and music, Galvatron said. “That’s how I remember being a teenager,” he said, “[it’s] something theatrical and fast, and everything meant the end of the world or the start of the world.”