Across Mixtape's four-hour runtime, you 'skateboard, mash tongues together during a kiss, TP a house, ride a dinosaur and learn to fly'. This new Australian indie video game from Melbourne-based studio Beethoven and Dinosaur is a blast of nostalgia, drawing heavily on 80s and 90s pop culture.
A Night of Youthful Excess
In Mixtape, you play as Stacy Rockford, a teenage girl in the fictional 90s American suburban town of Blue Moon Lagoon. The game is set over a single day; tomorrow, Stacy will leave her best friends, Slater and Cassandra, and fly to New York as part of a reckless plan to hand a mixtape to a superstar music supervisor. Tonight, the three friends want to drink, party, and enjoy themselves, a plan complicated by messy feelings and parental authority.
The game's soundtrack is Stacy's mixtape, which she explains and dissects with direct-to-camera addresses. This work of magical realism mixes disparate gameplay elements and storytelling devices to explore a night of youthful excess as Stacy and her friends try to craft a perfect celebration.
Gameplay and Soundtrack
Mixtape jumps between the mundane and the fantastical. 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. It is 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.
The soundtrack features Roxy Music, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Portishead, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and more than 20 other bands. Johnny Galvatron, the game's creator, was inspired by the soundtrack to the 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko: 'It's not all these bands' No 1 songs, it's their deeper cuts.'
Inspiration and Development
Mixtape is deeply rooted in nostalgia for 80s and 90s US pop culture, despite being made by a 12-person team in Australia. The biggest touchpoints are movies and music Galvatron enjoyed in his youth: Dazed and Confused, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, High Fidelity, Wayne's World. Galvatron says, 'I think one day we'll make a game set in Australia. But sometimes the game just tells you what it needs to be. The story drags you in one direction, and that's where it took us.'
But the game still reflects the team's lives and experiences. A sequence where you escape from the police in a shopping trolley is pulled from producer Dean 'Woody' Woodward's life. The soundtrack contains a 'disproportionate' number of Australian tracks, including Silverchair and Mondo Rock. One sequence is set to Yesterday's Hero by John Paul Young.
Stacy even wears an ABC Rage shirt. Galvatron notes, 'That had to go to the board of the ABC. And 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.'
Personal Connections
Galvatron was inspired by his own musical history. His self-titled band, the Galvatrons, formed in 2007 in Geelong and released one album. He says Stacy is an 'amalgamation' of the kids he used to see at gigs. 'I 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.'
There is some of himself in Stacy too. Galvatron once skipped his year 12 maths exam to take a background role in a music video for Shihad; another time, he spent a day trying to track Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns around Melbourne to get his copy of Neon Ballroom signed. Stacy's plan to move to New York is 'a terrible idea', he says, but it is not so far from what he would have done at that age. 'Sometimes you make up a character and they don't stop talking to you. And that's Stacy Rockford.'
Mixtape is available on 7 May for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2.
