When Johnny Galvatron was 14, his cousin gave him a copy of the Smashing Pumpkins’ seminal 1995 album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. For Galvatron, a rambunctious teenager in Geelong who defined himself by his musical taste, it was love at first spin. “I don’t think there’s a track like Tonight, Tonight from any other band,” he reminisces.
A song from the album plays at a critical moment in Mixtape, the second game from Galvatron’s Melbourne-based studio, Beethoven and Dinosaur. It’s a narrative adventure game about Stacy Rockford, a teenage girl in the fictional 90s American suburban town of Blue Moon Lagoon.
Mixtape is set over a single day; tomorrow, Stacy will be leaving her best friends, Slater and Cassandra, and flying to New York as part of a reckless plan to shove a mixtape into the hands of a superstar music supervisor who will, she believes, be so convinced of Stacy’s genius that she’ll offer her a job. Tonight, though, the three friends want to drink, party and enjoy themselves, a plan complicated by messy feelings and the spectre of parental authority.
The game’s soundtrack is Stacy’s mixtape, which she explains and dissects with direct-to-camera addresses throughout the game. This is a work of magical realism, mixing together disparate gameplay elements and storytelling devices to explore a night of youthful excess as Stacy and her friends try to craft a perfect celebration.
Mixtape jumps between the mundane and the fantastical throughout its four-hour runtime: 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 out of your mind. It’s 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. Galvatron 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.”
The opening track of Stacy’s mixtape (and thus the game) is Devo’s 1982 minor hit That’s Good, which was Galvatron’s starting point for the whole project. “That has been the No 1 song on my playlist every year for as long as I’ve had a way of tracking it,” he says. “Every single day I hear that song, and every day I love it more.”
Mixtape is deeply rooted in a nostalgia for 80s and 90s US pop culture, despite being made by a 12-person team in Australia. The biggest touchpoints are the movies and music Galvatron enjoyed in his youth: Dazed and Confused, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, High Fidelity, Wayne’s World. “I think one day we’ll make a game set in Australia,” Galvatron says. “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 right from producer Dean “Woody” Woodward’s life (albeit significantly heightened) and, as Galvatron points out, 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: “the best hidden classic,” Galvatron says.
Stacy even wears an ABC Rage shirt. “That had to go to the board of the ABC,” Galvatron says. “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.”
Galvatron was also inspired by his own musical history: his self-titled band, the Galvatrons, formed in 2007 in Geelong and in 2009 released their only album to date, Laser Graffiti. The band was able to tour extensively but Galvatron wanted to explore other artistic pursuits – such as video games. He says that 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’s some of himself in Stacy too. Galvatron once skipped his year 12 maths exam to take on a background role in a music video for the New Zealand rock band Shihad; another time, he spent a day trying to track Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns around Melbourne in the hope of getting his copy of Neon Ballroom signed. Stacy’s plan to move to New York is “a terrible idea”, he says, but it’s 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
