‘It's such a heavy hammer to wield’: Mixtape director talks crafting the game’s nostalgic narrative

‘Remember when you defined yourself by music and art, and that's how you judged everyone else?’

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

That’s what Johnny Galvatron, the creative director of Beethoven & Dinosaur’s Mixtape, said when I told him I had been listening to his old band’s music. Before making video games, Galvatron was the vocalist and guitar player for the Australian rock band The Galvatrons. (Yes, named after the Transformer you’re thinking of.)

Preparing for our video call while Galvatron was in Las Vegas for the recent DICE Summit, I listened to a few tracks from the band’s album Laser Graffiti, including one called “When We Were Kids.” Mentioning that prompted Galvatron’s somewhat embarrassed response, with him saying he was a kid when he recorded it.

His kneejerk apology is a universal feeling; we all cringe a bit when reflecting on our youths, our high school haircuts and the pop-punk bands that defined our early years. But those experiences are foundational to who we become. They’re jumping off points for the next stages in our lives. With Mixtape, Galvatron and the team at Beethoven & Dinosaur explore youthful moments through a very nostalgic lens, just like The Galvatrons’ “When We Were Kids,” as it follows teens on the precipice of adulthood.

For its second game, Beethoven & Dinosaur set out to tell a coming-of-age story, with Dazed and Confused and Ferris Bueller's Day Off serving as clear inspirations. “John Hughes films have this lynchpin, which is, ‘From this point, things will never be the same.’ I think that's a really wonderful thing to write around,” Galvatron told Polygon. “It's such a heavy hammer to wield narratively, that things are going to change forever.”

Turning points are crucial in any story, but, to Galvatron, they’re much more earnest and real when kids are going through them. Mixtape stars a group of friends during their last night of high school as they reflect on their past — the very definition of a “From this point, things will never be the same” turning point.

Mixtape began like, well, a mixtape. “I just basically put out all of my favorite songs and we would arrange them in different ways,” Galvatron said. “You see what story it can tell. Where are the crescendos? Where are the lulls? How are you going to get it to fit within the narrative structure?”

The music informed the game’s story, and vice versa. The team made a horizontal slice — a barebones version of the entire game with its music selections — to get a feel for how its story would play out. They would search for new songs for moments that may have been lacking an emotional punch, or design a moment in the game to support a song choice.

“I think [it’s] really important when you're doing a narrative game that everything is really tight before you [start],” Galvatron said. Once Beethoven & Dinosaur had the structure of Mixtape down, it was off to the races.

With Mixtape being such a personal story, Galvatron and his colleagues would be hard-pressed not to draw from their own experiences for the game. “Did I get up to this stuff? Yes, and worse,” Galvatron said. “I've definitely hit a shopping trolley down a hill and ran away from the police and all that.”

Beethoven & Dinosaur made a list of their best teenage hijinks that the developers would then pull from for the game. They’d mix those antics with what Galvatron called “the suck,” or the idleness of teenage life. “If you get the mix between running from the cops and having nothing to do and make that flow well and good [...] then you're winning.”

Galvatron sees himself in Mixtape’s cast of teens. He remembered being a kid dancing at a concert with his eyes closed and selling T-shirts at the merch booth for bands he liked. When he became a rock-and-roller later in life, he found himself on the flipside of those interactions, meeting a generation of kids who would volunteer to sell his band’s merch.

“It's such a pure, kind of innocent thing. Kids who are into art and live by it are the best, and they're great to write about,” Galvatron said. “I guess I still am kind of one of those kids, but just quite old.”

If not done well, nostalgia can come across as very shallow or cheap. “It can't be ‘Remember the Tamagotchi?’ or ‘Remember when things were pixel art?’” Galvatron said. “You want to avoid that at all costs.”

The nostalgic lens through which the game is told has to be rooted in how the characters feel and how the player relates to those characters. “Our main angle was, ‘Remember when you defined yourself by what you enjoyed? Remember when you defined yourself by music and art, and that's how you judged everyone else?’” Galvatron said. “There's something kind of naive and pure and gatekeep-y and kind of horrible [about that].”

Conveying those formative experiences doesn’t just come from the stories and characters, but from game mechanics as well. While Mixtape is more grounded than the studio’s previous game, the colorful and psychedelic The Artful Escape, it’ll still be surreal, with scenes of characters floating through the sky. “I love fucking around with the medium and being like, ‘How can you express teenage freedom in a mechanic? How can you do a friend betraying you as haptic feedback?’”

Galvatron had as formative of a high school experience as anyone — he met his wife when they were teens. “I’ve made a million mixtapes and she's made me a million,” he said. He’d make mixtapes for other people as well, showing them “what’s cool” if they were trying to get into a band or genre. That connection to music has persisted throughout his life, and is evident in the games he makes. And, of course, the music he made.

In “When We Were Kids,” Galvatron sings, “I always thought we would be that young forever.” Now a seasoned musician and game developer, he knows that, no, we won’t always be that young. And that’s a lesson the teens of Mixtape are set to learn.

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Mixtape will be released in 2026 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.