Usually when you tell someone that something in a video game grossed you out, it’s something gory or nasty. Mixtape‘s big gross-out moment, however, doesn’t come from violence or illness, though it might give you a violent illness if you’re sensitive to slimy sounds and the awkwardness of inexperienced makeouts.
Early on in Beethoven & Dinosaur’s new music-driven narrative adventure, music curator and soon-to-be New Yorker Stacey Rockford is reminiscing with her friends about high school. Stacey likes to tie moments to songs, and when she finds a mixtape given to her by an old “flame” named Colin, she remembers how he was her first kiss. Mixtape shifts here from its standard stuttery, Spider-Verse-esque art style to something more graphic—something the game does periodically for comedic effect—and in one of its smoothest moments, you suddenly find yourself in control of this flashback, manipulating both teens’ tongues as they try to figure out what the hell kissing even is, actually.
Naturally, when I sat down with creative director Johnny Galvatron and producer Woody Woodward, I had to ask who the hell was responsible for this.
“I think it’s sad to say that everyone as a team [was responsible],” Galvatron said. “I mean, I came up with the idea, but the reason it’s so disgusting is because of other people on the team.”
Woodward said the team wanted the “gross-out, Ren and Stimpy kind of vibe” that you only get by getting up close and personal with things that tend to be viewed at a distance, especially in video games. Even something like a God of War sex minigame doesn’t get into the finer details the way Mixtape’s makeout scene does, leaving no detail unrendered.
“We were talking about ways of using the medium to feel things that you wouldn’t usually feel in a video game, like being grossed out and awkward and embarrassed,” Galvatron said. “It’s a really teenage experience. The first kiss, and it goes for too long, and it’s just foul, and we spent ages getting like the ropes of saliva to work in a particle system and stuff like that. And I really feel like we got across what we were trying to convey.”
Funnily enough, the developers at Beethoven & Dinosaur were also grossed out by the scene while working on it, so much so that some of them had to use placeholder audio instead of constantly hearing all the slurpy and slimy sounds of a terrible makeout session.
“When Roman [Maksymshyn, technical director] was working on the scene, he would turn the horrible tongue sounds to bird and nature sounds so he could get it to all work, and then at the end he would, like, flick the switch on to make it go back to the tongues, check and be like, ‘Oh, jeez!’”
“He was like, ‘yeah, I can’t hear mouth sounds for another two hours,’” Woodward added.
Though the makeout minigame is the game’s standout gross moment, Mixtape also has some of the type of crude humor you’d expect in a teenage coming-of-age story, which may or may not be your cup of tea. If the makeout minigame sounds particularly off-putting, though, don’t worry, as the game is broken up into songs, each with an accompanying set piece with its own specific mechanics, and they don’t repeat themselves. So once you do the horrible awful thing once, you won’t have to do it again.