Interview with John Johanas – Game Director of Hi-Fi Rush
Feature
Hooked Gamers:
HiFi Rush was released as a bit of a surprise during the Bethesda Developer Direct event at the start of the year. Was there a reason behind the surprise release?
John Johanas:
Most people saw it, they were probably saying that it was something totally different than we've done before, right? And so we knew that when we wanted to show it off. And we kind of wanted to figure out a way so that people wouldn't judge it too harshly or think negatively about the fact that it was so different, an interesting new idea.
Were they going to say stuff like “They've never made something like this. Can they pull it off?” So, I always had this idea for a short campaign. But the window for announcing it - especially if you're going and launching in January - was tough, because at the end of the year it's so hard to find a place to stand out with all new games.
So, I forget when the planning started, but then the idea of this Developer Direct event that they were doing along with Microsoft, going in depth about new games. And the team said well, what if we announced it there and then launched it. And then it just kind of condensed into “What if we announced it and launched it into one moment?” And so that's kind of how the whole thing happened.
I read that the game was in development for five years prior to the surprise release. What was the creative process like during that time?
So, the reason I think it took so long is because, you know, we were developing at that point Ghostwire Tokyo and it was our main thing we were developing. We had a very small team working on this game (HiFi Rush) for a long time, which is really good because it allowed us to try something new. We're testing things out, and the small team allowed us to kind of make sure that we weren't trying to juggle so many tasks at once. We could focus on one thing and finish it and make it really tight.
And bringing two projects in tandem is just difficult for any studio. So we wanted to take our time and not rush it in general. But also, there was a realistic angle for most of the team. And so, by the time they were actually finished with the project (Ghostwire Tokyo), we were pretty much actually done with our development. Because we kind of did this slow burn of development. It was also helpful for them once they finished up with Ghostwire. Some of the members came up and just kind of helped us finish the tail end of it. So it wasn't really like a rush in that sense - despite the name of the game. But it was a chance for us to really spend the time and get the mechanics down right and get everything exactly how we want it. It's not like we had infinite time but it's just how it works.
The game really took off, despite the limited advertising/marketing. Did this come as a bit of a surprise to you and the team?
Yeah (sarcastically). We totally thought it would take off.
Well, I mean a little bit, yes and no, because as we're getting to the end of the game and it was in a very good place. We were working for so long on such an assignment that we were very proud of it and we thought that it was probably the strongest thing that we had done so far. So the trepidation was more about, "Will it be received in the way that we hope it will be?"
But, the biggest surprise to us was, when it was released and people just immediately started playing it, they kind of saw it in the same way that we saw it. We wanted people to play and say "I don't play rhythm games, but I can play this game". And we’d watch people and everyone was experiencing it at the same time and we'd hear them saying "I don't play rhythm games, but you can play this one. It's weird. It's like you don't need to be good at rhythm games to play this game."
Yeah, that's one of the benefits of HiFi Rush, although it is a rhythm game. You don't need to be 100% really good at rhythm.
Yeah, and that could be something that, you know, theoretically if there's a long marketing campaign, people can get confused. Is it a rhythm game? Is it a matching game? And then you can kind of just play it and see and try it and then or these people would immediately would have told you that "No, it's like it's an action game that has these good rhythms, but you don't really need to focus on that."
Where did the idea originate? A rhythm based action/fighting game?
It was something that I had personally been just kicking around my head for a long time, but I really didn't know how to make it from a game design perspective until much later after I had more experience in games and I understood actually how to use the middleware that we use. We got sound data and things like that, and I was like “well, if you use that like this” So, then we have this general idea of fighting to the music, it just kind of naturally works.
It was always based around the idea of how you love it in a movie trailer when they synchronise the music, music videos in general obviously do that, and sometimes there are movie scenes that do as well. And I always love that, but I never felt like a game captured that quickly.
I was like, “There's got to be some way to do it.” And then when I finally thought of the way that it could realistically be done from a technical perspective, and not just a broad concept perspective - that's when I felt confident enough to pitch it as an idea.
And how did that pitch go originally?
It was an interesting meeting because I do remember after we finished Evil Within II we went into a meeting and my boss came in and he was like “You got any ideas?” And I didn’t want to pitch it at the time because I didn't think it was going to get okayed. So actually I pitched two things, where one was like a safe option, and so I pitched this one first and saved up the next, and then immediately he was like “You want to do that one, don’t you?”
And so he was like “Well, I think it's cool.”
So, from a developer standpoint he had also said that he had heard pitches like that before. A lot of people had this idea about combining action and music, but no one had been able to pull it off. And I think maybe he saw that I had pitched it in a way that I had a very strong idea of how it could be pulled off. So that was great.
But obviously the scary thing was probably pitching it to Bethesda, because it's the most un-Bethesda title and that's why I said at first, there's no way that Bethesda greenlights the title. But one of our executive producers in that meeting also thought it was a good idea, but also knew that it would be challenging. So that's how we kind of went about developing it with a prototype first, so they could play it and see that it was a cool idea.
So the prototype was made specifically for the Bethesda meeting?
Yeah, you get kind of a remit for full production, you know. A lot of games can do it with just concept art and a kind of a PowerPoint presentation because a lot of the stuff is easily understandable - it's a third person shooter, but this is the setting. “Oh, that sounds cool. I get it.”
But if it's a rhythm action game, but you're saying it's not like a rhythm game, they will be asking “So how am I playing this thing?” And that's when we realised that we should make this into something tangible that they can understand. And then there'll be less fear of “Are we going to give these people money to make the game?”
Is there a bit of yourself in the main character?
Chai. Yeah. Next question.
It was funny, when the script was done in English first and we couldn't do it in Japanese for a little bit because of COVID and we're recording and getting the handling done. And then finally the Japanese came in and they were like. “Ohh, so Chai is you.”
But yeah, I hope I'm not an abrasive of a character as he is. I grew up playing in rock bands and like wanting to be a rock star in some sense. But then you realise maybe it's not really possible and then you find something in your own life that you are really good at, and you can do. And it works in English - like the term Rock star doesn't always mean literally Rock star for music, but we actually learned that didn't translate into a lot of languages so it kind of gets lost. But I wanted to show that you can still be kind of like a rock star in your own way in whatever you do. It doesn’t need to be specifically music.
I’ve read somewhere that you are a fan of Nine Inch Nails and there are a couple of NIN tracks included in HiFi Rush. How did you choose the tracks featured in the game?
So the first track that we actually kind of used as a test was the first track in the game ‘1,000,000’.
And that was only because we didn't have any chance to actually licence music and we didn't know who to get approval from to get these songs, but we needed a proof of concept using the licenced music in the game. And when they released that album ‘The Slip’, I think was 2007 or 2008, Trent Reznor released this album with the Stems and said “Hey, remix this. I'd love to hear you remix this. Just upload it here.I don't care.” And I had them like on a USB drive, basically forever and I thought one day I'm going to do something like these.
And then I was like, OK, this is exactly what we need to do. It’s like 140 BPM, the drum is just like a constant beat, if fits perfectly with the vibe with what we're doing. But, we don't have the right to use this yet but we may have to remake this if we don't get the rights to it, but let's try it out. And we did it and it worked great. It played great, it sounded great and then lucky enough we got the OK to use that song, which I was super thrilled about.
And then the last track in the actual game, the final boss is ‘The Perfect Drug’, which is also weird because it was a soundtrack for another movie and I'm using it as a soundtrack for the game. And we used that track as an example to say how sound effects can be used to feel like their music. So that band in general is so good at mixing actual instrumentation and electronic instrumentation, but it's still feeling this sort of visceral, raw feel.
And I always reuse their tracks as an example of, “OK, you can combine this rock natural actual guitar sound with these electronic sounds without making it like an electronic song.” And so that's almost constantly coming up with an example. And I was like, “Well, what if we can’t get the licence for that as well?” And we assumed we wouldn't because the licence was super hard because it’s being used in the soundtrack already. But surprisingly, we got it and so we said we have to make it count, make it like the coolest boss ever.
You alluded to it earlier, but the bright colour scheme and the more upbeat nature of Hi-Fi Rush is somewhat of an about face from other Tango Softworks games (The Evil Within and even Ghostwire Tokyo). Was this a conscious decision?
Yes, it definitely was. It's not that we don't like horror, but I think we had been working on it, or at least I had, for seven years at that point and there's a little bit of burnout. You need sort of like a palette cleanser.
But you're making those games, you just generally think of these fun, gamey things to do, but you always kind of feel like you're restricted by the horror genres. Like, you can't do that, it wouldn't fit the mood and stuff like that. So the initial pitch, well the story and the setting was pretty much exactly what the game was. The whole thing was that it was important for this game to be absolutely ridiculous, it knows it's ridiculous and - I didn't write it in the document - but as I was explaining it, it was like this is really good for us developers, because it lets us not feel constrained in thinking of ideas. Like, you’ve got something crazy in this world, we'll figure out a way to make it work. Yeah, I’m not saying everything worked, but it was good for tests, especially for younger members on the team to really kind of just try out ideas and try things out.
The game is also far more humorous than other Tango Softworks games, with Chai in particular having some great dialogue. Was this to coincide with the comic book style visuals?
Yeah, we were definitely looking for something that felt like that. It was tricky because we wanted to be actually like a comedy game pitch. There's the idea that it was supposed to be funny, but comedies are also really difficult to write.
And we're like, well, what type of comedy? Is it going to be this meme-esque humour or more just general humour. And it went through a lot of phases. And we realised, like, hey, it shouldn’t have reference to any natural pop books or things, except if they're kind of classical things. So we specifically put it in this like 90’s feel. So if we were referencing something theoretically - for example we have this reference to SquareSoft - or something like that, it feels OK for that time, but it doesn't date the game. It's like a key point when we were always thinking of ideas.
But yeah, I just think when the characters are more lighthearted and funny, players feel more attachment to them. And that was key. That was one of our key pillars. Moreso than the story, it's all about the characters and when you have these fun, memorable characters that stick with you, it's like “I want to see them on another adventure. I want to know what they're doing off camera” and things like that. And it also just let us again play around with silly situations. So that was a lot of fun. We thought that if the team was laughing about it we just know we're having fun here.
So the comedy was initially written in English, did the comedy translate well to Japanese and other languages?
That is honestly one of the scary things because I had written it. And so when I wrote the script I knew that for some languages, obviously English, it would work. Some jokes that I already knew worked. But some of those in the game, the Japanese team were like “What is going on here? Like I don't get it.” I was like what's happening and why don't they get it and. It was like “Oh my God, this is not working.” So that's why we went to the localization phase.
I was super scared, but I completely annotated the entire script, almost every line. Saying that this is supposed to be funny because he's talking about this, and this is about this. And I passed it over to the localization team and I said “Use this for reference, write whatever you want, you can just change the script, but don't just change the characters - you can't make this character mean or something like that.” And in a funny way, I don't know how it works in the other languages and I ask on Twitter sometimes “Is it funny in Spanish, please tell me it's funny in Spanish” and I would get some responses like it's really, really funny. But that's not my writing, it's, you know, localization who did a fantastic job with it.
You sort of alluded to 90’s references - the mega corporation in the game is Vandelay Technologies…was this a Seinfeld reference?
There are a lot of references to 90’s things. So I can't specifically say one in particular was the main influence, but who knows. I breathe in that culture.
With the game being highly rated by both critics and general gamers (our reviewer Camrin gave it 8.9 which seems to be the average on Metacritic), are there plans for a sequel?
Well, we just released, like a big content update (the Arcade Challenge) which is really fun for our team to do and you know we're thinking about future projects. I obviously can't announce anything but I think anything, all the projects that we make, we never think “OK, we're done with those forever.” You know, we always leave them open. We'll have to see.
You, yourself, have been living in Japan. How have you found that experience compared to growing up in the US?
That's interesting because I've been living there for 15 years now, and I'm 37, so that's not quite half of my life but it's scarily getting there. So I was growing up in the US - I don't even know how it compares to Australia - but it just felt very normal. I mean, most of the media you see is American high school dramas and stuff like that. I guess people know what that's like. But when you live in Japan, it's obvious there's a huge cultural difference there. But I always just really enjoyed any time I visited there. And I studied Japanese there and I studied abroad there. It's just a very respectful culture, sort of safe, very clean and lots of systems that just work. Like the classic thing that everyone says, there's the subways and the trains are just amazing, and it's like and you really get used to that. And so you go back to visit my family in New York or something and I'm just like “Ooh, It's pretty rough.” There’s just garbage all over the streets and stuff like that.
The cultural sensibilities are also very different and I find it pleasant to live in. But I also think that there's a merit to, for example when I was in New York people will just say things as it is. They'll sometimes be cold, but truthful. For Japan, it would be the opposite, where they would often hold off on what they really want to say to be polite.
And how does that go with regards to the creative aspect? Do they hold back the criticism?
Well, early on, our studio culture was founded on the basis of “Just like say it straight.” But you know, just general Japanese mannerisms naturally come through. People are kind of afraid to say certain things, but we always try to keep it as being like, we're doing something creative, you need to tell us if you don't agree with it. Or if you’re really passionate about it, just show that. And so, I think our studio has always been about as open as possible, but even still there I think there's a little bit of a language barrier in there - not like we don't understand each other, but the natural spoken language does not tend to express yourself as flavourful as an American can be.
On behalf of the Hooked Gamers team and our readers, I'd like to thank you for your time today. Enjoy Melbourne, and soak in everything that PAX AUS has to offer. Enjoy the Fireside chat...I hope to see you there.
Thank you