Did you get the feeling that Tango Gameworks had something they wanted to prove when they made Hi-Fi Rush? If you felt so, that would be exactly right.
Hi-Fi Rush’s director, John Johanas, revealed to IGN what some of us may have already guessed. Yes, Tango Gameworks made Hi-Fi Rush to demonstrate that they could make more than just horror games. But in fact, they didn’t set out to become a horror video game studio to begin with.
This is how Johanas explained it:
“ It was actually right after The Evil Within 2. I directed that and as we were winding up, we knew that Ghostwire [Tokyo] was the next game that the studio already had begun working on pre-production. Just from a personal standpoint, I felt like I needed a palate cleanser.
And when you develop a game with the other team members, you talk about other games people like. When we’re playing games in our downtime, we talk about action games. I had this idea kind of brewing in my head for a while, but being this studio known for horror, in my mind I’m like, “Oh, this, this’ll never get approved.”
I kind of wrote up this very quick pitch about this idea about how good it feels in trailers and movies when hits land to the beat and it just feels like the action just feels so much more satisfying. What if we can do that in an action game? And then, just the idea of rhythm action — and everything is synced to the music, but it’s not a rhythm game — led to a spark in the meeting.
This is the most un-Bethesda game you can possibly imagine because we’re showing the ideas where the visuals would be like a throwback to the cel-shaded look of the PS2, Dreamcast, and early Xbox era. I was like, “You’re probably not going to accept this, but I just think this is a really cool idea and have a really strong idea of how this could work.”
My boss [Shinji] Mikami-san was like, “It sounds really cool. It all sounds really hard and I don’t know if it’ll work, but why don’t we try prototyping it.” That’s actually when it started at the end of 2017.
If you look at the original vision of the studio, it was not made to make just horror games, it was made to foster new ideas and support new developers. But we didn’t assemble a team to make the ultimate horror game. Just like Mikami-san himself, he made action games. He has a history of going outside those boundaries as well. We didn’t feel that we should be limited or had to be limited by that image that we have of being a horror-first studio.
I think it was important to just show that we can do something more than [horror] and do it well, I think it was the most important thing because that’s something we’re super adamant on.
If we’re going to do it we got to show people that we can do it and do it well because we can’t come out and half-assing our first attempt at something different. It has to be good. A lot of time and effort was put into this. I see some people calling it an indie release or something, or a small project and from my perspective, I spent five years on it, so it was not small.”
Johanas also talked about the game’s cel-shaded aesthetic, a style popularized by games like Jet Set Radio, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and of course, Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color. Those games did emerge in a particular console generation, and Tango was deliberately evoking the nostalgia for that era:
“It really stemmed from that idea that it kind of feels like a throwback game — throwback but not retro. We also just wanted people to be reminded of games as being fun. I was like, whatever we make, we want it to pop and be remembered like those games that you mentioned.”
Hi-Fi Rush is available to play now on PC via Steam, Xbox Series X|S, and Game Pass.
