HI-FI RUSH

IGN: One of the things I want to touch on is that Hi-Fi RUSH is not small. I've been playing through it, and you can tell see every cutscene matches that rhythm. How difficult was it, to time both the cutscenes and the in-game action to a rhythm?

John Johanas: The short answer is extremely, extremely, extremely difficult.

The long answer is basically, we need to tweak how our animation system works so that every animation you do, whether it's a little bit early or late, it'll always, basically, interpolate it so that it'll land on the beat. We have to create this new animation flow and people would make these cool animations, but we'd find it didn't feel like — hit the beat or things like that. It was constantly trial and error. Luckily, as we got further into development, most of us got the hang of what was necessary to do this, so that helped out.

The cutscenes were an immense undertaking. Our cutscene director, Jun Watanabe, and I spoke at length about how we can do this, how we can do it in the stylized stuff. We had a script and we had a BPM and we would put everything to a click track and we animated. I would estimate it took about three times as long as it would take to make a normal cut scene.

IGN: Let's talk about the music. Do the music choices in the game reflect the preference of the team? Is Mikami-san also a Nine Inch Nails fan?

John Johanas: Surprisingly, very early on, the team was like, "John, you can select the music." There are tons of people's conflicting opinions on music and I know sharing a playlist is almost the most embarrassing thing that you can possibly do. It's a weird “open your diary” kind of thing.

But I felt we were going for a very certain direction, and like I said, it was a weird personal project for me, so I wanted to pick music that I grew up listening to or reminded me of an era where I really just had fun playing games or things that stuck with me.

I wanted something that felt almost late 90s, early 2000s, if that makes sense, because that's that time that I was talking about, that Dreamcast, PlayStation to Xbox era. A little bit of a throwback there, but also kind of an exposure to maybe some artists that maybe even younger generations don't listen to.