Hi-Fi Rush’s director, John Johanas, explained to IGN that Tango Gameworks knew how fans were going to react to the game.
That’s because it’s similar to how they experienced the game inside the studio and with the people at Bethesda. This is how he described it:
“If you’re going to ask someone to purchase something in a shadow drop (Hi-Fi Rush was released the same day it was announced), you probably get a lot of skepticism, but the fact that Game Pass exists allows people to basically almost, what you would say is a demo theoretically. But it’s not a demo, it’s the full game. They can just play in and they can almost naturally talk about the game, talk to their friends, tell them how cool it is. That’s what we were kind of hoping for because internally, we knew it was something special.
Internally, people wouldn’t just stop talking about it. Actually, that’s how it built up within Bethesda. I think that’s a whole another story of how a game like this could come out from Bethesda is because internally, some people had played it and they spoke about it to each other… They’re like, “Did you see that game that they’re making there?” There’s this weird sort of viral positivity to just playing this game and Game Pass just felt like an excellent opportunity to let something that maybe the onboarding is a little bit tricky or maybe people can be skeptical about, lose that skepticism immediately by just playing it.”
As we know, Hi-Fi Rush was an immediate breakout hit. We ourselves covered how it got a 99 percent rating in Steam’s user reviews. It does seem that their decision to shadow drop the game, AKA, to release it without prior announcement or hype, has worked out for the game. The fact that it impresses almost immediately is not something that can be easily replicated by even the best of AAAs, and should not be something smaller or indie game developers try with their games. At least they should consider if they were sure it would get the same reaction.
But hold on. Whose decision was it exactly to shadow drop the game? Actually, Johanas wanted to make it clear it wasn’t Tango Gameworks who decided it:
“Tango will not take credit for this, it’ll be the marketing team’s idea. They pushed it through. We knew Hi-Fi RUSH was a very big departure from what we have done before, but we also knew that we had something very special early on.
It’s not a horror game from a horror studio, so there can be some initial “maybe” questions. When going through the idea of a shadow drop we thought about just letting people decide for themselves and play the game, basically. Because we got a lot of reports the first time people saw the game internally they’re like, “That looks fun. I want to play that now.”
We weren’t trying to maybe give people the wrong idea, make people think, “Oh, it’s a lower quality thing,” or something like that. We could show them right away. We were very confident about the product that we had. I think that worked for our title.”
Hi-Fi Rush is available to play now on PC via Steam, Xbox Series X|S, and Game Pass.
