Mixtape boldly asks its players to make memories to good music, mixing its coming-of-age story with a head-banging soundtrack filled with the likes of Devo, The Smashing Pumpkins, and The Jesus and Mary Chain. It’s the sophomore release from Beethoven & Dinosaur, an Australian developer known for The Artful Escape, a psychedelic exploration of a musician wanting to create his stage persona.
Mixtape is a little more down to earth, following music lovers Stacey, Cass, and Slater on Stacey’s final night in their small town before she follows her dreams and moves to New York. Our reviewer Mark Delaney gave it a 9/10, praising how the game pairs “its heartfelt, often hilarious moments with a sweeping soundtrack to create a coming-of-age story I’ll never forget.” GameSpot caught up with Mixtape’s director Johnny Galvatron earlier this year to discuss Beethoven & Dinosaur’s approach to making the game.
GameSpot: Do you always think in songs?
Johnny Galvatron: Yeah. I think the first medium you learn is how you build your lexicon and your language around whatever art you’re making. I’m always using music metaphors and am always like, you know, we need to crescendo here or this is the middle eight here, we need to have a different feeling here. And so I think once your brain is wired in the way of chords and song structure, you see everything in that, through that lens. I’m sure it’s the same for photographers who would make a film or a photographer who would make music. You know there are these weird, different angles to come in from.
One of my favorite films is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and I found out years after liking it that it was the only film that Spielberg cut to the music. Usually, he makes a film and then they put the music to it, but he cut it the other way, and that film always just felt like it flowed the right way to me.
So, yeah, that’s the lens I look through.
How can you do that in game development when you have the variable of the player who could just, you know, piss off and do something else?
I think you can come at it from narrative, you can come at it from mechanics. You can come at it in several ways.
For us, we started out with this horizontal slice of the whole game where we put down every single song, rearranged them, and saw what stories they made. So really, the game was built on that foundation of looking at it through a musical lens and built up the little structures from there.
What was the specific moment that led to Mixtape? Was it a song? Was it an old mixtape you found?
I think just years of watching coming-of-age films and loving the music of that era and trying to make music myself of that era, which, because I love Devo and Van Halen and that sort of stuff. And then the idea of having a coming-of-age story where we can have this incredible backbone of licensed music, which is such a privilege to be able to have someone hand you That’s Good by Devo, you know what I mean? And now you are allowed to build upon that. And that’s like, what a privilege, but like also how much fun is that going to be? Yeah, it was a love of music and a love of film.
And then I also love the idea of, like, how do you show regret as a mechanic? How do you show betrayal as a mechanic? And, you know, I think, you’ve seen there’s a level where [Stacey’s] betrayed by her friend and she floats back through town. I just feel that deep in my guts, that level. It’s mechanically simple, but I think it’s emotional and an interesting way to use the medium.
Yeah, I definitely wanted to touch on those because I think those moments perfectly encapsulate what it’s like being a teenager, where everything around you feels so much bigger than it is. What other ideas did you have to get those feelings across and translate them into gameplay?
I think Beethoven and Dinosaur naturally has this musical grandeur that we try and put into everything. There’s a lot of opera in this stuff we do, so I think it’s very fun to come at a coming-of-age story about a cool bunch of kids who love music. And then once the music can take them where the music takes me, you know, which is in the lofty fields or floating through streets or flying through the sky, or two horrendous tongues coming at each other.
So, to me, I think The Artful Escape’s very much about what it’s like to be a performer, and this game is very much like what it’s about to be a listener. And how music makes you feel in this kind of sensory way.
Do you think we still have that sensory relationship to music? It feels like, certainly growing up in the ’90s and early 2000s, like my life was based around albums. Whereas now I’m algorithm-focused, based on whatever it thinks that I want to listen to. How’s your relationship with music changed?
I think everyone’s relationship with music has changed. It is definitely not the torchbearer of cultural populism. It used to be the forefront, and now it is devalued in a way that it is pretty much free to everyone, artists don’t get paid very much. It’s hard to be a musician, and I see a lot of people who would have been musicians going off to do other mediums.
But you can’t be a musician without also having a certain amount of followers on TikTok.
Exactly. The Artful Escape talks about how you cannot have a core medium. You must surround it with the visual, the narrative, the image: All of these things come together.
And now that is every artist, and it’s hard to know sometimes what an artist’s core medium is. People become these amalgamations of different mediums. That’s not a negative; it’s very interesting. It’s also the burgeoning era of how we see people make themselves into art pieces. And the kind of loss of that monoculture where music did have a huge part and it was presented to you by these beautiful album covers in stores and it ran on TV.
Now, music obviously is more fractured, and you can find your exact niche of ’80s chill synthwave, nighttime bedtime mix, you know.
And now you can do it by putting in a prompt.
I mean that’s the next thing, isn’t it?
It’s already here, Spotify already does it.
And half their artists are AI now, hey?
Yeah, it’s fucked. How did you go about capturing the very specific NorCal/Portland feeling for the game’s setting?
Australia is a weird mix of British and American culture. And we have a raised, kind of indigenous identity, and we are in the wind, trying to come up with our own voices.
You had (soap opera) Neighbours!
I will acknowledge that we did have Neighbours. And we did give the world Kylie.
And INXS!
Yes. And George Miller, we’ve got a few. To me, this is a fantasy story. And to me, America is as real as Middle-earth. I didn’t come here till I was like 32 or something. So by the time I came here, to me the whole thing was a film set.
Is that why the car scene is on a film set in the game?
Yeah, that’s part of it, absolutely. So, to me, I’m just writing a fantasy story based on, you know, all of the media that I’ve imbibed over my time. And so where do you set your fantasy stories? You set them in places like California.
What did you pull from when it came to the characters? Did you have a Cass? Did you have a Slater?
I remember just seeing this photo of a girl, she’s the inspiration for Stacey Rockford, and seeing a photo of this girl dancing at a concert with her eyes closed. And I just remembered, like, when I was that kid…
Wait, were you that kid?
Insufferable. I would follow the bands around … Australian bands like Shihad and Grinspoon. No, they’re from New Zealand (Shihad). I’m so sorry.
And I would sell the t-shirts for those bands, and like, you would make posters for their shows, and they would use the posters, and like, just being super fans. And that’s what you lived for. And it’s just so positive, so innocent. And that’s why it’s horrible when bands take advantage of that because of how innocent it is.
Then, you know, seeing those kids and being those kids. I wagged my year-12 maths exam to be in a Shihad film clip and my dad found out about it and he was furious. I remember he was like, “No good will ever come of this.” It was my final maths exam of high school, and I wagged it. I went and I was in the Shihad film, and dad saw it on TV because I’m in it quite a bit. I’m just in the crowd and he’s like–and I’ve got a good relationship with my dad–he’s like, “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” And he’s like, “What did you wag to go to this?'”
That situation in itself is like something from a coming-of-age movie, the fact that he saw it on TV.
It gets better. So he’s like, no good will come of this.
And then on our MTV, which is Channel V in Australia, they were like, “Ring up and tell us what’s the best thing you did when you wagged school?” So I rang up, and that’s how I got my PlayStation 2, because I won the competition.
And then when I signed to Warner Brothers, they go, “All right, we’ve got your first tour hooked up, and it’s with Shihad.” And then yeah, I’m still friends with them and toured with them around Australia and New Zealand.
I don’t have any story as good as that. You say you felt at the time like you were a bit insufferable. I think every teenager is in their own way.
It’s interesting when writing teenagers and stuff because I remember us all being very confident. But I just remember us thinking that we knew everything about music and we would judge people by what bands they liked. So there’s definitely a lot of me and my friends in Stacey Rockford, but also that innocence and that the joy that is in those kids that follow around bands.
And then, it’s funny when you get in a band and then you meet that next group of kids, they sell your t-shirts and stuff, and they’re always just the purest kids.
Game development is obviously what you’re doing right now, do you ever feel like you would dip your toe back into music? How’s your relationship changed with it as you explore different mediums?
Oh, I’m very bitter about the industry. But I mean I’m very biased, but no, I get to make music all the time. My musical partner, Josh Abrahams, I’ve worked with since I was like 15, 16. And we get to just hang out in his studio all the time and do stuff. That’s the great thing about indie gaming, isn’t it? Like one day you’re in the studio, the next doing some cinematography. The next day you’re like, having to do silly stuff so your animator can record it as animation [reference]. If all my animation ref ever leaked …
You’ll be done for. Which song from the game means the most to you?
Devo, That’s Good.
[That’s Good] is my number-one favorite song of all time. I love it so much. That song means a lot to me because when I signed the deal for Artful Escape, I was very poor and my jeans were so torn I couldn’t get into pubs. And then I got my first check from Annapurna to start making the game, I bought a new computer and I bought a new desk and everything, and I just sat there for a bit, played that song, and just kind of soaked in it for a bit.
So it means when I hear it, I just, I get that feeling from it again.
Do you ever get fed up hearing songs in the game over and over?
It’s a great question because it’s like starting a business with your friends. You know what I mean? You’re like, this is good.
I love everything about you …
Yeah. Let me ruin it. And it hasn’t happened at all. If anything, I love the music more. Every day I hear Devo, I’m like, “Fuck yes, I love Devo. I love this song!” It means that these songs mean so much to me now because, like, when you play the game back, you’ve made it with all these people and you go, oh, see where that distant tower’s placed just so it’s there between those trees? That’s Harry. Harry put that there. And then you see this illustrated thing that only a couple of players are going to see, this beautiful illustrated picture, and you go that’s Arden, Arden put that there. And so now with these songs, I’ll just think of the time that we had making this game and, you know, it was a joy.
The ending: do you have a canonized version of it in your head, or does it change?
Of where they go after?
Yeah.
I’ve only written one for Slater.
Slater potters around Blue Moon Lagoon for a little while longer. He gets more into synthesizers and joins a band, and he ends up becoming the second keyboard player for Nine Inch Nails. And he’s always really chill about it, doesn’t really like touring or anything. He likes going back to Blue Moon Lagoon and hanging out. But he tours with them as one of their touring synth players, that’s it.
How do you feel about people comparing Mixtape to Life is Strange?
I think there’s just maybe so little content in that area that people can draw from, because, I mean, you played it, it’s very much not like that. But I love those games, but yeah, Mixtape’s very different.
