It's not every day a band has one of their songs cherry-picked and made into a FULLY FUNCTIONING VIDEO GAME, but that's exactly what happened with Swiss Lips and their song "Carolyn" as it was transformed into a remixable retro game. One play in and it'll have you wishing you could spend the next week playing Nintendo instead of, y'know, going to work.After a good few hours spent staring into it, we eventually caught up with the brains behind the project, developers Chris and Mike plus the band's sound producer Phil, to ask how they managed to marry the mechanics of gameplay and music in one happy union.First things first, how did this all come about?Chris: We were really high. I'm kidding…we wanted to come up with a digital experience where people could interact with music and we hadn't yet heard of a video game that remixes a song. Once we got Swiss Lips involved it was just a case of making the music work with the gameplay. Overall it took about eight months to complete.Damn.C: Yup, like a real life baby!And how about making the sound work with the graphics, what were the mechanics?C: Luckily we had Rick on board with us who did the track. So he worked with the direction company to basically create the sound but also tell them how they could work it and where they should work it.Rick : Obviously I worked with the band on the record, and when they discovered they needed the track remixed in an 80s sound machine for some kind of beat section for some reason I was the first person they thought of. But then I ended up getting quite involved with the guys at the production company in terms of doing the sound effects and working out how everything should be designed on the level, so you can hit objects and have musical things happen and stuff like that. It was great fun, a new experience for me. I'm used to being in the studio and working with bands, so suddenly being in a room and working with a group of programmers was different but really good fun.Mike: It was great for us too because, just from a creative standpoint and an audio standpoint, the sound effects couldn't just be lifted from an old video game they needed to be from music, so working with Rick allowed us to do that. When you hit something in the game and it sounds like a drum it actually is a drum.What kind of obstacles did that throw up along the way?R: There are sections of the game where you're moving along and you pick up a member of the band who starts shooting, all of the sound of the weapons were taken from the actual sounds of the guys playing, like, Nick the drummer hitting the flare drum was used as the machine gun. Every sound had duality.So everything is original content. Was that really time-consuming? How did you guys work together to streamline that?R: It was time consuming, there were some bits where I did remixes for them, like, the funny Miami sound machine bits, and the city level which sounds like it has a kind of Blade Runner vibe about it. But a lot was from the band; Luke does an amazing super evil guitar to represent the bad boss in the animation that introduces the game.Ha. There must have been quite a lot of geeking out, right?R: Oh completely, the whole game is about that, it's just so much fun taking a song and making so many different versions of it. Versions that sound like the beach or moon or a city…it never gets boring.Between all of you, were there any particular references you used, I know you mentioned Blade Runner?M: Its the typical racing games that we all really loved, we definitely took inspiration from games like Cruis'n USA.C: We all grew up playing video games and Nintendo, but then it also references movies and stuff like that. It's sort of a video game story but it's also cinematic in the ways it's done because we wanted it to be a really cool music video too, so its kinda finding the balance between those two things.M: With any video game I've played, there are multiple story lines and endings, so it's not that linear. So it made sense to have a song change depending on what you do but also allow the actual video to give you a completely different story lineYeah, obviously you want it to be playable but then there's keeping the music in mind as well. Was it one of the harder projects you've worked on?C: It was definitely a difficult project but I mean any project you do where you don't know the answer right from the offset is a hard one.M: Whenever you're working on something and the final answer…the solution isn't obvious at the beginning means it hasn't been done a million times. And that's a great thingTrue. You talked about sound effects already, how did incorporating the song into gameplay go?R: I guess that's something that came right from the start, because the original song already had a kind of car motif. The guys were playing synths that sounded like video game car engines anyway, the whole thing had that driving feel.So you were already halfway there.R: Yeah, things like having the car engine starting up using their drum filter to introduce the song, it just felt like a natural extension.M: Yup, and there's a break down too which sounds quite different from the rest of the song. It sounds quite mysterious and dreamy so we put the gameplay up in the clouds, and for a couple of levels you're actually able to go up into the sky, like, in one you're inside of a whale and you go outside of the whale's blowhole, then you drive over a rainbow in the clouds, and I'm not gonna say that the song exactly dictated that, but it guided us a lot.Rainbows! So do you think you could do that for any musician, or do you think it only worked with a certain type of genre or, like, their sound was just perfect for it?C: I think you probably could do it with anyone, but I don't think it would necessarily work as well. The reason it just clicked so well with these guys was because the idea came from the music a little bit. You could probably force fit anyone into it, but this definitely came a lot more naturally.The guys must have been pretty stoked to have a video game of themselves…C: Totally, Sam said when he saw it "this is the best fucking thing I've ever seen in my entire life" so, yeah, more than stoked.M: I think Sam tweeted something like 'Playing a video game of yourself never gets old.'Amazing. Any final thoughts on what you learned from the whole experience?M: You can never have too much zombie.Sweet. Thanks guys!Game coming soon on youneedtohearthis.com
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