I’m controlling two slimy, pink tongues as they plunge into each other’s mouths. They dance around in languid circles, like a load of sopping wet clothing in a front loader, as I rotate the left and right sticks on the controller. I yank them apart abruptly and then force them back in as far as they’ll go, creating a darting motion. I move the tongue on the left on top, then give the tongue on the right a turn in the command position. This torturous tango is the epitome of the teenage experience. This is Mixtape.
From Beethoven & Dinosaur, the Melbourne-based developer behind BAFTA-winning psychedelic platformer The Artful Escape, Mixtape is a retrospective on the pivotal time in your life where you go from teen to adult – the last night of high school. To the partially-developed frontal lobe, the stakes are at an all-time high. Everything has led to this night, to this final party.
As Mixtape’s protagonist Stacey Rockford and her friends prepare for one last rager, we can catch a glimpse of their adolescent escapades and relive that intoxicating era in our own lives once more. The game is still firmly under wraps, with no confirmed release date, but we paid a visit to the Beethoven & Dinosaur studio space during Melbourne International Games Week for a quick hands-on with the game and a chat with the team – which means we have juicy details to share.
Much like any teen staring down the barrel of the rest of their life, Rockford is contemplative – though she’s probably too cool to tell you that. Her masterwork of a mixtape is a safe way to lead herself and her friends on a trip down memory lane. One that includes tonsil hockey and stolen shopping trolleys.
“It’s a dual narrative…they’re going through their day, getting ready for this party together, and then you’re playing their memories as you go along,” said Woody, Producer at Beethoven & Dinosaur.
In our preview the story starts with Rockford and her friends, Slater and Cassandra, skateboarding down a long, winding road. You can practically feel the wind ruffling your hair as you coast down to the bottom of the mountain with That’s Good by DEVO blasting from your Walkman.
“[Music is] always a big part of our games, and [it’s] such an important part of growing up because you don’t know who you are, so you just attach yourself to things you like and things you have. Like, ‘Oh look at my sick shirt’ or ‘Look at this cool band that I like’.”
This rings true when the group head back to Rockford’s bedroom to talk about their favourite bands, their plans for the future and just how generally cool they are. Every object is imbued with memory and meaning, from the polaroids stuck on the wardrobe door to the box of cassette tapes on the desk. These teenage delinquents are very much caught up in what their taste in music says about them.
A new song delineates each scene in the story, with Just Like Honey by The Jesus and Mary Chain, Freak by Silverchair and Sensitive to Light by Rainbow making appearances in our playthrough. As the voyeur, it genuinely feels like Rockford made this playlist of important songs to capture the exact feelings she had at the time of each story beat. They invite you in.
“We want to do nostalgia not in the way [of] like, ‘Look here’s a Tamagotchi – look here’s a Nintendo.’ More like, what did it feel like?,” Woody tells us.
Despite being proudly Australian made, Mixtape doesn’t show a hint of its Aussie roots. This was an intentional decision to highlight what most would consider to be the quintessential teenage experience – even if our reality was much less glamorous than what we imagined it to be, and now romanticise in hindsight.
“I think, weirdly, the American coming-of-age kind of movie/film experience – like Ferris Bueller, Dazed and Confused, Empire Records, that kind of stuff – [is] more relatable because we got served all that [growing up]…at least from a media standpoint,” Woody admits. “[Mixtape is] paying homage to those films.”
We want to do nostalgia not in the way [of] like, ‘Look here’s a Tamagotchi – look here’s a Nintendo.’ More like, what did it feel like?
Either by default or design, the development of Mixtape seems to closely mirror the creation of these 90s hangout movies, right down to details like the choice of voice actors. “We did the classic thing of like, they’re obviously older than teenagers but playing teenagers, much as how all these films should be done”, says Woody.
Circling back to the oh-so-enticing visual at the start of this preview, I found myself wishing it would come to an end more and more with each passing second, but it just kept going. That seemed to be the point. Mixtape’s story plays out through a series of vignettes – perhaps not all as visceral as these, but who’s to say – as opposed to something grounded entirely in reality. We asked what was behind this decision:
“I think we just like to make weird stuff, so we kind of wanted to have that [distinction of] ‘Here’s reality [and] here’s stuff that happened in memory.’ Over time, memory gets a bit fuzzy and changes a bit. It’s more about how the memory felt [versus] how it actually was. And that lets us do weird, more creative stuff.”
The remainder of our preview entailed a group headbanging sesh in the car à la Wayne’s World and escaping the police while riding on a shopping trolley. Overall, the experience carried all the hallmarks of the 90s teen movie genre, but with the added intensity of having you be an active participant.
This brief taste of Mixtape made me even more excited for the full release than I already was, if that’s even possible. It promises a tightly-packed experience that’ll fire up the neural pathways to your best adolescent memories. Or, if high school wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, maybe you can learn to apply a vignette or two to your own experiences.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.
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