One of the biggest games announced last week on the Xbox Developer Direct stream was Hi-Fi RUSH, the action and rhythm game from Tango Gameworks. Released the same day as the event, the stunning title became an overnight hit thanks to its colorful visual effects and satisfying rhythm-based combat.
IGN spoke with Hi-Fi RUSH director John Johanasabout why Tango, a studio known for horror games like The Evil Within and Ghostwire: Tokyo, this time opted for a more colorful path, and how it managed to become one of the biggest surprises of the year in the world of video games.
IGN: All my Twitter is talking about Hi-Fi RUSH. I’m curious, when did the development of Hi-Fi RUSH start?
John Johan: It was actually right after The Evil Within 2. I directed it, and as we were wrapping up, we found out that Ghostwire [Tokyo] it was the next game that the studio had already started working on in pre-production. Just from a personal point of view, I felt like it needed a palate cleansing.
And when you develop a game with the other team members, you talk about other games that people like. When we play games in our spare time, we talk about action games. I had this idea in my head for a while, but with this studio being known for horror, in my mind I was like, “Oh, this will never get approved.”
I wrote a very quick pitch on the idea of how good it feels in trailers and movies when the beats drop to the beat and it feels like the action is much more satisfying. What if we could do the same in an action game? And then just the idea of the rhythm action (and everything being in sync with the music, but not a rhythm game) sparked the meeting.
It’s the least Bethesda game you can imagine, because we showed ideas where the visual effects were like a throwback to the cel-shaded aesthetic of the days of PS2, Dreamcast and early Xbox. I was like, “You probably won’t buy it, but I think it’s a great idea and I have a pretty good idea of how it could work.”
My boss [Shinji] Mikami was saying, “Sounds great. It sounds really hard and I don’t know if it will work, but why don’t we try to make a prototype?” In fact, that’s when it started at the end of 2017.
With this studio being known for horror, in my mind I was like, “Oh, this will never get approved.”
IGN: Tango is known primarily, I think to most people, as a horror game studio. There were a lot of rumors about what your next game might be, and when the project was finally revealed, it was about this bright and colorful rhythm action brawler. What does it mean for a studio like yours that you have entered this new direction?
John Johan: Well, I would say that, in a way, that was always the intention.
If we look at the original vision of the studio, it wasn’t created just to make horror games, but to encourage new ideas and support new developers. But we didn’t team up to make the ultimate horror game. Like Mikami himself, he made action games. He also has a history of going out of bounds. We didn’t think we had to be constrained by that image we have of being a horror-first studio.
I think it was important to show that we can do something more and do it well, I think it was the most important thing because it is something we are very firm on.
If we’re going to do it, we’ve got to show people that we can do it and do it well, because we can’t go off and leave our first attempt at doing something different halfway. It has to be good. We have invested a lot of time and effort. I see some people call it an indie release or something, or a small project, and from my point of view, I spent five years on it, so it wasn’t small.
IGN: One of the things I want to comment on is that Hi-Fi RUSH isn’t small. I’ve been playing it and it shows that all the scenes have rhythm. Has it been difficult to adapt the scenes and the action to the rhythm of the game?
John Johan: The short answer is very, very, very difficult.
The long answer is basically that we have to tune how our animation system works so that every animation you do, whether it’s a little ahead or a little behind, is always interpolated to match the beat. It was constant trial and error. Luckily, as development progressed, most of us understood what needed to be done, and that helped us.
The cinematics were an immense task. Our stage director Jun Watanabe and I talked at length about how to do this, how to do it stylized. We had a script and a BPM and we would put it all on one track and animate. I estimate that we take three times as long as doing a normal scene.
IGN: You mentioned the cel-shade art style, the return to old platforming. When looking at a game like Hi-Fi Rush, one immediately thinks of other classic cel-shading games, like Jet Set Radio. Why this style?
John Johan: It actually came from the idea of making it look like a retro game, retro but not retro. We also wanted people to remember that games are fun. I said to myself, whatever we do, we want it to stand out and be remembered like those games you mentioned.
Internally [en Bethesda]some people had played it and were talking about it… They were like, “Have you seen that game they’re making there?”
IGN: Let’s talk about the music. Do the musical choices in the game reflect the preferences of the team? Is Mikami-san also a fan of Nine Inch Nails?
John Johan: Amazingly, very early on, the team said, “John, you can select the music.” There are tons of mixed opinions on music and I know that sharing a playlist is just about the most embarrassing thing you can do. It’s something like “open your diary”.
But I felt like we were going in a very specific direction, and as I said, it was a weird personal project for me, so I wanted to pick music that I had heard growing up or that reminded me of a time when I had fun playing games or stuff. that will stay with me.
I wanted something that would remind me of the late 90s, early 2000s, if that makes sense, because that’s the era I was talking about, the Dreamcast, PlayStation and Xbox era. A bit of a throwback, but also a kind of exposure to some artists that maybe the younger generations don’t listen to.
IGN: We posted an interview with Phil Spencer and one of the cool things he said was that the surprise release of the game was Tango’s idea.
John Johan: Tango will not take the credit, it will be the marketing team’s idea. They pushed it. We knew Hi-Fi RUSH was a far cry from what we’d done before, but we also knew from the start that we had something very special.
It’s not a horror game from a horror studio, so there may be some initial doubts. When we came up with the idea of a surprise release, we thought about letting people decide for themselves and play the game, basically. Because we got a lot of reports that the first time people saw the game internally they were like, “It looks like fun. I want to play it now.”
We weren’t trying to give people the wrong idea, to make them think, “Oh, it’s a lower quality thing,” or something like that. We could show it right away. We were very confident in the product we had. I think that worked for our title.”
I think it was important to show that we can do more than just horror and do it well.”
IGN: I think one of the benefits is Xbox Game Pass, which allows users to sign up directly. Has that also been taken into account?
John Johan: Oh yes, that was quite a part of it. Again, if you’re going to ask someone to buy something in a surprise release, you’re probably going to get a lot of skepticism, but the fact that Game Pass exists allows people to play what is almost a demo in theory. But it’s not a demo, it’s the complete game. They can play and naturally talk about the game, talk to their friends, tell them how great it is. That’s what we expected, because internally we knew it was something special.
Internally, people wouldn’t stop talking about him. In fact, this is how he was built within Bethesda. I think that’s another story of how a game like this can come out of Bethesda, because internally, some people had played it and were talking about it among themselves… “Have you seen the game they’re making?” There’s a kind of viral positivity to just playing this game, and I thought Game Pass was a great opportunity for something that might be a little tricky or people might be skeptical about to immediately lose that skepticism just by playing it. .
So far, from the feedback we’ve seen, people seem to have understood what we were trying to do. We even saw some skepticism in the launch trailer. People said: “I don’t know…”. And then people were like, “No, wait. I just downloaded this. You have to try it, you have to see it.” That’s exactly what we expected, but credit to the marketing and PR team, they’ve delivered.
Here you can read our review of Hi-Fi Rush.
