Tiny Q&A: Gaijin Games’ Chris Osborn (BIT.TRIP:BEAT)
Chris Osborn from Gaijin Games was kind enough to answer some questions about the developer’s upcoming WiiWare retro rhythm-Pong game BIT.TRIP:BEAT, which I’m pretty dang excited to get to play sometime this month. The first part of the interview appears below, and the rest will go up tomorrow!
Tiny Cartridge: First off, is there any news on the release date? Is it still slated for this month? How much can we expect to pay for it?
Chris Osborn: Onto the juicy bits right out of the gate! I admire your gumption. Unfortunately, there’s no firm release date. The game is in the final testing stages as we speak, so it’s not far off from being released into the wild. With a little luck, it should be out by the end of the month. As for the cash monies, it will be less than 1000 points.
Are there any specific vintage influences? It looks very 2600-esque, but did any one game inform the gameplay or aesthetic?
Yep, we are definitely under the influence. The first installment of BIT.TRIP harkens back to the era of paddle-based Atari games. Pong is obviously the primary inspiration, specifically Ultra Pong and Video Olympics. Breakout played a close second fiddle in the Influence Orchestra.
Was Nintendo/Skip’s Bit Generations series an influence?
Hell yeah! Everyone here has been a fan of the bitGenerations games for quite some time. dotstream is my personal fav. What a rockin’ soundtrack on the GBA! Even the menu system is all kinds of awesomeness.
When we first got the idea for BIT.TRIP a while back (waaaay before we started Gaijin Games) it was basically a marriage of the bitGenerations aesthetic with “modern” retro chiptune music. Over time, we moved a bit away from the minimalistic art style the Art Style games and towards a more in-your-face Geometry Wars sort of thing.
Early on during the development of BEAT we were super stoked to see the first Art Style game on WiiWare, which of course are ports of the bitGenerations games. From a business perspective, that showed us there definitely was a market for tight, retro-inspired games on WiiWare.
The video recently posted on Joystiq looked really frenetic and difficult. Does the video show a later level, or is that roughly indicative of BIT.TRIP: BEAT’s difficulty throughout?
Dude, you have no idea. The recent video from Joystiq showed a bit from Level 2. However, the difficulty you see there is nothing compared to what you get later in that level, not to mention Level 3.
From the start, we designed BEAT to be a very hard game. Games these days are just too easy. They are meant to be “content experiences” rather than challenges, and that’s all fine, but damnit, gamers need their ass kicked once in a while too.
Back in the day, there just wasn’t enough memory in the game systems to push a lot of content, so the designers had to rely on difficulty to keep the players playing. For BEAT, we wanted to stick with that old-school approach.
Come back tomorrow for part 2!
tags / gaijin games / wiiware / rhythm / retro / bit trip beat / tiny q&a / jc
