Mixtape is a deeply nostalgic game, even for those who didn’t grow up skating the streets of 90s America listening to Devo.
There’s a moment in the Mixtape preview build where Stacy Rockford – the game’s teen protagonist – has to rewind a cassette tape. She sticks a pencil into the roller, and before the game has even told me what to do I instinctively start spinning the stick to rewind back to the beginning. Roman, the game’s technical director, leaned in. “We’ve had a lot of younger people come in to check out this demo, and some of them had no idea what they were supposed to be doing here,” he says.
I do not immediately turn to dust at this comment, because already the opening minutes of Mixtape had made me appreciate the perspective that being in my late 30s had afforded me. So far, the teens had skateboarded, hung out, and planned for Stacey’s last night in their allegedly sleepy suburb before she boards a plane at 6am the next morning to pursue her dream job as a music supervisor. Because Stacey is a confident teenager, her entire plan is to track down a personal hero of hers and shove a mixtape into their hand, believing that the evidence of her genius will be undeniable.
Mixtape is a game about playing through the life moments and memories tied to the tracks on that tape. It’s the second game from Melbourne-based studio Beethoven & Dinosaur, whose first game, The Artful Escape was an excellent, galaxy-hopping odyssey, a look straight into the mind of studio director Johnny Galvatron (formerly of the band The Galvatrons, and a bonafide rockstar).
Mixtape is more grounded, but no less ambitious in scope and intent. It’s a game about how big the world can feel when you’re young, how exciting each possibility can feel, but also about the point in your life where the bonds you’re forming feel both serious and fleeting – the growing awareness that the relationship that you and your best friends have is about to change.
I felt an immediate, powerful twinge of nostalgia in the game’s opening moments, as Stacey and her friends skateboard down a long, winding road, pulling off cool tricks, listening to Devo’s ‘That’s Good’ (occasionally clapping in time with the beat) and dodging cars over a backdrop of vast mountain ranges. That feeling continued throughout the whole demo, which is interesting, because my own life as a teenager looked nothing like this one. I did not skateboard, or listen to Devo, or live in America.
I asked Roman, as well as Woody, the game’s producer, why the Australian development team had set such a deeply nostalgic game in American suburbia. “One of the things we were hoping to capture was that experience of being a teenager, that all of us can relate to,” Roman tells me. “We’ve heard that from a bunch of different people across different ages, like, ‘hey, this is not the music I grew up with, but I really relate to some of the stuff that’s happening.'”
“It was always going to be US, mainly because we’re referencing a lot of films with this game,” Woody continues. “A lot of them, films like Dazed and Confused, Empire Records, we were served growing up. I think it’s weirdly relatable that we can watch those films and we can kind of understand that experience. Whereas we just had weird stuff here in Australia, like Round the Twist, which would be hard to make games out of.” It’s nostalgia as mediated through pop culture, and it’s very effective – I can’t imagine how hard it’ll hit for 90s American skate kids.
The opening 20 minutes of Mixtape jumps back and forth between a lot of different experiences. The kids hang out in Stacey’s room, and you can wander around inspecting and commenting on objects like a Life is Strange game. At one point you jump into a scene where Stacey relives her first kiss – set to Alice Coltrane’s epic song ‘Galaxy in Turiya’, which will not make it onto her mixtape, she decides – and I found myself controlling two tongues as they wrestled each other. Other moments worked in scratchy, era-authentic live-action footage.
In one standout sequence in Mixtape, the teens reminisce about driving through town, listening to Silverchair’s ‘Freak’. You can press a button to headbang to the music, but I soon realised I didn’t have to stick to the beat – I could make them go as hard as I wanted. When they pull into a drive-through, press the same button makes Stacey wail for a cheeseburger, which you can do as much or as little as you see fit.
“A lot of these moments, when we first implemented them, we had them more mechanical,” Woody tells me. “You really had to time the button presses. But we found we’d implement things like that, then take them away, because people were having the most fun just jamming out or doing their own things.” By the end of the demo, I was guiding a shopping trolley down a highway following a drunken escape from a cop-raided party – it’s fun to be an irresponsible teen sometimes.
Music is, naturally, a huge part of the game, and the team isn’t willing to discuss the full soundtrack just yet. Getting the rights to all of the songs in the game was a challenge, but thankfully, Woody tells me, their real-life music supervisor is excellent. “It really helps when you can say, ‘hey, we’re making a game about a kid who wants to be a music supervisor; do you want to be our music supervisor?’ We couldn’t get some tracks because they were crazy expensive, or they never got back to us, or the artist said ‘yes’ but then the label said ‘no’, or vice versa… I can’t imagine trying to do this by ourselves.”
Mixtape is, the team says, a short, sweet experience, with a “play the hits” philosophy – all killer, no filler, the perfect set-list for a studio run by a rockstar. It’s the sort of game where I’m already looking forward to the second time I play it a few years after launch, my nostalgia now compounded because I’m also remembering how much I loved it the first time.
Mixtape is coming soon to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
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