When Johnny Galvatron was 14, his cousin gave him a copy of the Smashing Pumpkins\u2019 seminal 1995 album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. For Galvatron, a rambunctious teenager in Geelong who defined himself by his musical taste, it was love at first spin. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a track like Tonight, Tonight from any other band,\u201d he reminisces.<\/p>\n
A song from the album plays at a critical moment in Mixtape, the second game from Galvatron\u2019s Melbourne-based studio, Beethoven and Dinosaur. It\u2019s a narrative adventure game about Stacy Rockford, a teenage girl in the fictional 90s American suburban town of Blue Moon Lagoon.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Mixtape is set over a single day; tomorrow, Stacy will be leaving her best friends, Slater and Cassandra, and flying to New York as part of a reckless plan to shove a mixtape into the hands of a superstar music supervisor who will, she believes, be so convinced of Stacy\u2019s genius that she\u2019ll offer her a job. Tonight, though, the three friends want to drink, party and enjoy themselves, a plan complicated by messy feelings and the spectre of parental authority.<\/p>\n
The game\u2019s soundtrack is Stacy\u2019s mixtape, which she explains and dissects with direct-to-camera addresses throughout the game. This is a work of magical realism, mixing together disparate gameplay elements and storytelling devices to explore a night of youthful excess as Stacy and her friends try to craft a perfect celebration.<\/p>\n
Johnny Galvatron, who was inspired by his own music tastes \u2013 as well as his history playing in a band \u2013 for his new game, Mixtape. Photograph: Eugene Hyland\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Mixtape jumps between the mundane and the fantastical throughout its four-hour runtime: across different playable sequences you skateboard, mash tongues together during a kiss, TP a house, ride a dinosaur, learn to fly, make a perfect slushie and rent a video while stoned out of your mind. It\u2019s brilliant, strange, creative and offers a beautifully moving snapshot of late adolescence. The game expertly shifts between different styles and tones, like a good mixtape should.<\/p>\n
The soundtrack features Roxy Music, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Portishead, the Jesus and Mary Chain and more than 20 other bands. Galvatron was inspired by the soundtrack to the 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko: \u201cIt\u2019s not all these bands\u2019 No 1 songs, it\u2019s their deeper cuts.\u201d<\/p>\n
The opening track of Stacy\u2019s mixtape (and thus the game) is Devo\u2019s 1982 minor hit That\u2019s Good, which was Galvatron\u2019s starting point for the whole project. \u201cThat has been the No 1 song on my playlist every year for as long as I\u2019ve had a way of tracking it,\u201d he says. \u201cEvery single day I hear that song, and every day I love it more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both mundane and fantastical: Mixtape traverses the emotional terrain of a teenager\u2019s last day at home before a big move.<\/p>\n
Mixtape is deeply rooted in a nostalgia for 80s and 90s US pop culture, despite being made by a 12-person team in Australia. The biggest touchpoints are the movies and music Galvatron enjoyed in his youth: Dazed and Confused, Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off, High Fidelity, Wayne\u2019s World. \u201cI think one day we\u2019ll make a game set in Australia,\u201d Galvatron says. \u201cBut sometimes the game just tells you what it needs to be. The story drags you in one direction, and that\u2019s where it took us.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the game still reflects the team\u2019s lives and experiences. A sequence where you escape from the police in a shopping trolley is pulled right from producer Dean \u201cWoody\u201d Woodward\u2019s life (albeit significantly heightened) and, as Galvatron points out, the soundtrack contains a \u201cdisproportionate\u201d number of Australian tracks, including Silverchair and Mondo Rock. One sequence is set to Yesterday\u2019s Hero by John Paul Young: \u201cthe best hidden classic,\u201d Galvatron says.<\/p>\n
Beethoven and Dinosaur\u2019s team drew from their own teenage memories.<\/p>\n
Stacy even wears an ABC Rage shirt. \u201cThat had to go to the board of the ABC,\u201d Galvatron says. \u201cAnd then we had to send them all the details of where it was in the game. It was way easier to get a song by the Cure than to get the Rage logo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Galvatron was also inspired by his own musical history: his self-titled band, the Galvatrons, formed in 2007 in Geelong and in 2009 released their only album to date, Laser Graffiti. The band was able to tour extensively but Galvatron wanted to explore other artistic pursuits \u2013 such as video games. He says that Stacy is an \u201camalgamation\u201d of the kids he used to see at gigs. \u201cI was one of those kids and then later, when I was playing on stage, it felt like those same scene kids were coming up to me. I just have tremendous respect for those kids.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s some of himself in Stacy too. Galvatron once skipped his year 12 maths exam to take on a background role in a music video for the New Zealand rock band Shihad; another time, he spent a day trying to track Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns around Melbourne in the hope of getting his copy of Neon Ballroom signed. Stacy\u2019s plan to move to New York is \u201ca terrible idea\u201d, he says, but it\u2019s not so far from what he would have done at that age. \u201cSometimes you make up a character and they don\u2019t stop talking to you. And that\u2019s Stacy Rockford.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Johnny Galvatron was 14, his cousin gave him a copy of the Smashing Pumpkins\u2019 seminal 1995 album,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":782247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[171,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-782246","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116539746497252731","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}