The design, gameplay, and pure beauty of Monument Valley basically threw down the gauntlet for mobile gaming experiences. But as we recently noted, game designers Maciek Strychalski and Sean Wright, alongside Mode7 and Smac Games, are answering in kind with Tokyo 42, a technicolor cyberpunk game that fuses Blade Runner, Moebius and Jodorowsky’s The Incal, and the densely packed structures of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City into what should be a gloriously complex and fun game experience. If Monumental Valley inspired players, then Tokyo 42 should astonish them.
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On July 4th, Mode7 released a behind-the-scene video in which Strychalski and Wright detail the work that went into Tokyo 42. Viewers learn that while Strychalski does all of the art, including the modeling, animation, texture, and user interface design, Wright handles the coding and system building.
“To begin with it was more like a little passion project,” Wright explains. “Maciek had done a bit of work with Unity before, and we got together and we decided to figure out how to make a game.”“My first memories of playing games is is probably… Rainbow Islands,” he says later in the video. “We’ve seen all of these great mechanics and the way they work and we’ve taken bits of them here and there… We’ve got Assassin’s Creed’s mechanics, we’ve got Worms and Cannon Fodder.”
“There’s elements of Syndicate in there and then obviously Grand Theft Auto is a great cornerstone,” Strychalski adds. “This has been my life in this world, this alternate reality where I’ve just been modeling this full open world, and it gets pretty mental. One of my favorite things to do is to isolate myself in this building particularly when I’m working on it—I kind of lose all sense of perspective because I don’t know what’s up and what’s down or what’s in and what’s out.”While Strychalski had previously worked in social media gaming, by his own admission he wanted to make a game where he could “just go in and blow things up.” The explosions certainly seem part of the game, but judging by the cityscape, colors and movement, Tokyo 42 looks to be so much more than gleeful animated destruction.
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