“I am so incredibly sorry!”
That was the immediate, sheepish reaction from Johnny Galvatron—the creative visionary behind Beethoven & Dinosaur’s upcoming title Mixtape—when I mentioned I’d been revisiting his musical past. Long before he pivoted to game development, Galvatron fronted the Australian rock outfit The Galvatrons (a name inspired, naturally, by the iconic Transformer).
In anticipation of our conversation during his recent visit to the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, I had immersed myself in Laser Graffiti, the band’s high-energy album. When I brought up the track “When We Were Kids,” Galvatron winced with the kind of nostalgic embarrassment we all feel when looking back at our younger selves. He noted, quite simply, that he was little more than a child himself when those songs were recorded.
That instinctive apology touches on something universal: the collective cringe we feel for our high school aesthetics and the subcultural obsessions of our youth. Yet, these formative years are the bedrock of our identities. They represent the volatile jumping-off points for everything that follows. With Mixtape, the team at Beethoven & Dinosaur isn’t just looking back; they are dissecting those pivotal teenage moments through a lens of profound nostalgia, capturing a group of friends standing on the jagged edge of adulthood.
For their sophomore effort, the studio aimed to craft a quintessential coming-of-age narrative, drawing heavy atmospheric influence from classics like Dazed and Confused and the works of John Hughes. “There’s a specific gravity to Hughes’ films—the idea that from this exact moment onward, life will be fundamentally different,” Galvatron explained. “As a storyteller, that’s a powerful hammer to wield. The weight of irreversible change is a compelling narrative engine.”
While life is full of transitions, Galvatron believes they possess a unique earnestness when experienced through the eyes of a teenager. Mixtape centers on a close-knit group navigating their final night of high school, a temporal boundary where the past is reflected upon and the future looms large.
The development process mirrored its namesake. Galvatron began by curating a personal playlist of his favorite tracks, experimenting with their sequence to see what kind of story emerged. “We looked for the natural crescendos and the quiet lulls,” he said. “It was about finding how a musical rhythm could dictate a narrative structure.”
This symbiosis between sound and story became the game’s pulse. The developers created a ‘horizontal slice’—a streamlined version of the experience—to test the emotional resonance of their song choices. If a scene felt flat, they’d hunt for a song with more bite; if a track was too good to lose, they’d build a gameplay moment specifically to elevate it.
“In narrative-driven games, you need that structural tightness before you commit to full production,” Galvatron noted. Once the skeletal framework of Mixtape was solidified, the creative momentum took over.
Given the intimate nature of the project, Galvatron and his team found it impossible not to mine their own histories for inspiration. “Did I participate in these kinds of shenanigans? Absolutely, and likely worse,” Galvatron admitted with a laugh. “I’ve definitely piloted a shopping cart down a steep hill and dodged the authorities in my time.”
The studio compiled a ‘greatest hits’ list of their own adolescent mischief to populate the game. However, they were careful to balance the adrenaline with what Galvatron calls “the suck”—those long, aimless stretches of teenage boredom. “If you can capture the flow between running from the police and having absolutely nothing to do, you’ve found the truth of that age.”
There is a piece of Galvatron in every member of the cast. He recalls the purity of being a kid at a show, eyes squeezed shut in the front row, or volunteering to sell merchandise for bands he worshipped. Years later, as a touring musician, he saw the cycle continue as a new generation of fans offered to help him.
“There is something so sincere about kids who live and breathe art. They make for incredible subjects,” Galvatron said. “I suppose I’m still one of those kids at heart—I’ve just gathered a few more years.”
Nostalgia is a double-edged sword; if handled poorly, it can feel like cheap pandering. “We didn’t want it to be a checklist of ‘Remember this toy?’ or ‘Remember pixel art?’” Galvatron emphasized. “That’s what we wanted to avoid at all costs.”
Instead, the game’s retro focus is anchored in character identity. “The core question was: Do you remember when you defined yourself entirely by your taste? When music and art were the only metrics by which you judged the world?” Galvatron reflected. “It’s a mindset that is simultaneously naive, pure, exclusionary, and slightly terrible.”
Translating these formative feelings required more than just dialogue—it required creative mechanics. While Mixtape is a more grounded affair than the psychedelic The Artful Escape, it retains a surrealist streak, featuring sequences where characters drift through the ether. “I love pushing the medium to its limits,” Galvatron said. “How do you turn the feeling of teenage freedom into a game mechanic? How do you translate the sting of a friend’s betrayal through haptic feedback?”
Galvatron’s own youth was punctuated by the ultimate high school trope: he met his future wife during those teenage years. “We’ve exchanged countless mixtapes over the years,” he shared. Beyond his personal life, he often used tapes to act as a cultural guide for others. That profound connection to music has remained the constant thread through his career as both a rocker and a developer.
In the lyrics of “When We Were Kids,” Galvatron once sang about the illusion of eternal youth. Now, with the benefit of experience, he recognizes that while we can’t stay young forever, we can certainly capture that lightning in a bottle. That is the lesson waiting for the teenagers of Mixtape.
Mixtape is scheduled for a 2026 release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Source: Polygon
