Format PC, Xbox Series Developer Tango Gameworks Publisher Bethesda Softworks Origin Japan Release 2023
The rhythms of the triple-A videogame hype cycle are now so firmly established that anything that disrupts them is bound to stand out. But even if not for the remarkable nature of its arrival – revealed and launched at January 2023’s Xbox Developer Direct – Hi-Fi Rush would surely have made a splash. Here was a game that applied blockbuster production values to something other than photorealism; a character-action game that was also a rhythm-action game; and a Tango Gameworks release that seemed a world apart from the most famous works of its soon-to-be-former CEO, Shinji Mikami.
But then Hi-Fi Rush was born from a desire to do something different. Very different. John Johanas had graduated from designer on 2014’s The Evil Within to director on its sequel, having also helmed the first game’s two downloadable expansions. By the end of 2017, in other words, he’d just come off four horror projects in a row – and the prospect of another, in the form of the in-development Ghostwire: Tokyo, was not wildly appealing.
Fortunately, his mentor had already asked him for new ideas, and invited him to pitch them internally. “For a long time, I’d had this idea for a musical action game in my mind,” Johanas recalls. Mikami hadn’t specifically requested something outside the horror genre, but Johanas decided it was time for a change. He presented a pitch which, he notes, is remarkably close to the finished product: “A game where everything syncs to the music. It’s colourful, it’s funny, it’s over the top. Andaction game.” Johanas was not confident that his idea would be accepted. “The first thing I said was, ‘This is probably not going to make it past this table. But if I have one shot to do this, I’m gonna do it now’.”
