Following the recent announcement of their presence in the Venice Immersive 2023 lineup as one of the 10 immersive experiences selected for the “Best of” section, we bring you XRMust’s interview with the Pixel Ripped 1978 team.
Find out how their extraordinary collaboration with Atari came about, and how it influenced the creation of this third installment of a video game series that has made nostalgia its signature and in which we can all relive our childhood memories.
And in the end… a tasty easter egg for all of you VR gaming fans out there!
Pixel Ripped 1978 is the newest game in the Pixel Ripped series. Our hero, Dot, has to once again fight against the evil Cyblin Lord, who has a nefarious plan to hack into the game creator’s past and to make himself the protagonist! Dot isn’t alone in this crazy endeavor through time – she has the help of Bug, Pixel Ripped creator herself, as they join forces to dispel the Cyblin Lord and launch the game.
PIXEL RIPPED 1978
Connecting with the audience… and your inner fan
AGNESE – I’ll start from the end: fandom is fundamental to the Pixel Ripped series. Both the fandom revolving around past games and the fandom created around this series. You, Ana, even started your own Dot cosplay, which is fantastic! So I have to ask you: what kind of relationship do you have with the fans and how did it influence the creation of this game?
ANA RIBEIRO – Some people have been following us since the beginning of this journey! It’s amazing. We have a Discord channel where we can interact with them and maintain close contact with the community. One of the best things we’ve always tried to do is to make them part of the game development even in the early stages: we opened up testing of all the Pixel Ripped episodes, including Pixel Ripped 1978, to the community to get their feedback. But we have also added nods to the community in the games, such as the comic book you find, full of fanart made by fans, or the collectibles we put on the front page of magazines. We are currently planning an event on Discord where the team will join fans to discuss development and play together. We’ll also share with them early versions of the game to show them more of the development process of a product they have cared so much about for the past years.
A. – To create this kind of participation around a product is always a great idea. Both for distribution and for the people who are part of that community and perceive it as something relevant to their lives. What about you? Have you always been a fan of video games? How has your relationship with them defined the way you developed Pixel Ripped?
A. R. – We all grew up playing video games, and my passion for video games was definitely a big influence for this series. But there’s more. To have grown up in the 1980s is to have witnessed first hand the incredible evolution of the video game industry and a series of changes that are unlikely to happen again- the design, the characters, the transition from 2D to 3D… It was all so big and intense! That was actually the biggest inspiration for Pixel Ripped and the story it tells.
It all came from a dream, actually, it was the initial spark. I often have dreams, very vivid ones, that I remember when I wake up, and in this one I was playing a video game, and while I was playing it, it went from 2D to 3D. That was what triggered the memory in me of witnessing this kind of evolution, of being there in my childhood and seeing the games change; from there it did not take me long to realize that VR could be, for us, a great way to create a time machine to revisit those days.
Since then we have released three games and each one is so different from the other, but they all carry with them our common memories of this experience and those years.
RICARDO JUSTUS – This is where the nostalgia that many people associate with Pixel Ripped comes from. This is a story about our childhood and upbringing, and in each Pixel Ripped there is a little bit of each of us. In Pixel Ripped 1995, for example, there’s a level where your mother asks you to go to bed and you keep playing the game trying to hide from her. That’s a very vivid memory for me- hearing my mother coming into the room and turning off the television, waiting for her to go so I could start playing again but careful of not being heard…. I think it’s something common to so many of us!
And then there’s what Ana was mentioning, the technological generational leaps that we’ve witnessed and will probably never witness again. Today you can have a game that’s a little sharper or has better graphics than the previous one, but it’s not the same experience that we had, the way we saw the medium evolve. From that point of view, VR for Arvore presents itself as a fantastic way to bring people inside these imaginary worlds, because it gives you the opportunity to do more than just play a game: it allows you to travel back in your imagination and memories of those years and relive them. I think this is the greatest strength of the Pixel Ripped series as a whole.
To have grown up in the 1980s is to have witnessed first hand the incredible evolution of the video game industry and a series of changes that are unlikely to happen again- the design, the characters, the transition from 2D to 3D… It was all so big and intense! That was actually the biggest inspiration for Pixel Ripped and the story it tells.
Ana Ribeiro
A. – What about the younger audience, who did not live those years? How do you balance the need to evoke nostalgia but also get the interest of people for whom this is all new?
R. J. – There’s a section of the audience that was there in those days and for them Pixel Ripped really resonates on a personal level. And there’s another section who simply likes retro games in general. What’s interesting about Pixel Ripped is that it lets you understand the retro games in the context of their time. It’s very different from loading up Centipede on your TV today: graphics would be bad, so would be the pacing. The game wouldn’t make much sense, all in all. But being transported back to that period activates a curiosity factor that’s very relevant to your experience.
On top of that, in Pixel Ripped 1978 we expanded a bit on the exploration factor. You end up playing the main character in first person, inside the videogame itself, which is something we’ve always wanted to show more in our series, so to make those retro games more compelling today. There were always segments like that in previous episodes, but they were more cutscenes or entry level introductions, while now you actively have to look for Dot in this pixelated world.
What’s interesting, however, is that if you look at reviews, what people like about Pixel Ripped are still the parts where you’re playing the classic 2D games in the classic way… Sometimes they like it even more than the 3D exploration!
Atari and Pixel Ripped 1978: the creative freedom to be yourself
A. – Why the Atari console, this time?
A. R. – My brother and I, like many other people in Brazil, grew up with an Atari console because Brazil had a very closed government that would not allow Nintendo to reach us until several years later. That is why we chose to dedicate Pixel Ripped 1978 to this specific console. When we started working on it, however, we came up with a list of pillars for the video game to lean on. One of them was nostalgia and nostalgic memories… which actually come from many things, not just the video game itself: holding a controller in your hand, the 2D game screen, sitting in the living room where there is a level that you keep coming back to… You don’t have to have an Atari console to feel this kind of nostalgia; it is shared by everyone who has ever played a game. It is a nostalgia that is present in many acts, not just in the console itself.
And with that choice also came the choice to do something different from a historical report on Atari. We took some creative liberties in the way we recreated the console and the games. This is because what’s beautiful is the memory you have of the game, not necessarily the game itself: playing it today is not as fun as you remember it being in the 80s. We tried to merge the good games of today with the good feelings that those memories evoke. So it’s an Atari game, but not a regular Atari game.
R. J. – It’s like referring to an era. If you want a history lesson, you can pick up Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, which will teach you all there is to know about that time. Our video game works more on sensations, even though, of course, the game is legitimate, you’re playing with that specific console. It’s more like… an alternative history! A world where Pixel Ripped existed and Atari published it.
A. R. – On Discord we met a teacher who is an expert in history. I immediately explained to him that we had taken some creative liberties, for example the joystick has two buttons and we had to add music. In spite of this he became very passionate about our work. And with him many people who see their memories in those scenes. That was the most important thing for us, because we were really worried about this aspect, but we felt it was right to go in this direction.
It’s as if Pixel Ripped offered us rose-tinted glasses to look at the past, but as creators we had to balance modern sensibilities with what the past really was
Ricardo Justus
A. – Can you tell us more about the creative choices you made in this regard?
A. R. – Music is the most effective example. In Atari, games had no music because of a memory problem. We tried to keep to that style, adding short tracks at the beginning of chapters and sound effects rather than music in a loop. But this undermined the important connection that the user must mentally make between the game and the first-person scenes, when they reach that point. If you hear music looping while you are playing the game and continue to hear it when you enter the first-person 3D game, you immediately understand you’re inside the game itself. But if you don’t, you may not immediately realise what’s happened and lose some immersivity.
R. J. – The joystick issue was also relevant. The Atari joysticks only had one button but we wanted to have two, so we used the narrative excuse that you are holding a prototype joystick.
We worked on the graphics too: both in Pixel Ripped 1978 and in the previous games the graphics of the games themselves are much more advanced than what the original games had. In the end, we are talking to a modern audience that expects a certain level of graphic quality. It’s as if Pixel Ripped offered us rose-tinted glasses to look at the past, but as creators we had to balance modern sensibilities with what the past really was, in order to make our video games really fun and effective.
R. J. – To pick up on the sound talk Ana referred to, the Atari games had blips and blops but repeating the same thing in Pixel Ripped 1978 would have bored people quickly, so we had to take this artistic licence as well. Our fear when we signed the contract with Atari was that they would block this creative freedom… Instead, they left us a huge margin! We could literally do anything we wanted within the titles!
For example, a big concern of the team was about Atari’s 1983 bankruptcy. Focusing on this console it was obvious that we had to deal with it. Caused by the game E.T. in real life, in our version the crash was caused by Pixel Ripped, so it’s an important narrative moment in our story that we wondered if they would let us show. And not only did they: they also gave us more information about what had happened! Howard Scott Warshaw, the iconic Atari developer behind E.T., who’s also in the trailer of our work, gave us access to so many information because “That’s our history and we’re not shy about it”. That was very positive. Usually, when working with intellectual property owners, they have much more restrictive approaches, but Atari realised early on that Pixel Ripped needed more freedom to be what it is.
How it all began: the origins of the Atari/Pixel Ripped collaboration
A. – Tell us the story of how this collaboration started!
R. J. – It’s a really funny story! Last year I was at the D.I.C.E. Awards because YUKI, our previous game, had been nominated for an award. There was also the D.I.C.E. Summit, which is a b2b and networking event. At lunch I sat at a table with some people wearing Atari T-shirts. By then, we were already developing Pixel Ripped, but like the other titles in the series, ours was just an homage – we had created a fake console and fake games. So I immediately asked them if they were from Atari… and one of them was Weight Rosen, the CEO!
I told him, ‘I absolutely must show you what we are working on!’- at that time we already had a trailer, because we were originally going to launch the game last year. He saw the video and said, ‘We have to do it‘. So we set up a meeting and my idea was to ask for a licence so to use the Atari 2600 and a series of Atari games in Pixel Ripped 1978. And he told me that that was an easy thing and what he wanted was actually to publish the game. That’s where the deal started! Atari invested in the game, doubling our budget, and took care of all the marketing aspects. We postponed the announcement, of course, and added almost a year of development to what we already had, resulting in the version you see now. It was a really serendipitous meeting!
A. – Something that doesn’t happen every day, absolutely! And what is the best thing this collaboration with Atari has brought to your game?
R. J. – The first thing was to be able to move legitimately in the world of Atari… Having a real Atari joystick in your hand, and an Atari 2600 console in front of you, with a real Atari cartridge. The games we’re referring to all exist, and I think that validates even more the kind of operation we’ve done with Pixel Ripped. I would have liked to do the same with Nintendo, Sega, Sony! The partnership was great, because they helped us a lot with marketing, and to unite Pixel Ripped fans with Atari fans. And of course the investment in the game was crucial for us.
A. R. – We had the structure of the game, but we were able to go back and not only add a number of well-known Atari games, but also interesting and charismatic characters, such as Bentley Bear from Crystal Castles. We even discovered games we hadn’t played before and brought them to people who were not familiar with them either. That was nice. We didn’t just use those ideas, we wanted to have fun with the big world of those characters.
Meeting the characters of Pixel Ripped 1978
A. – Ricardo (Laganaro), you had a collateral role in the production of this game, but I’m curious about your perspective on it as a player.
RICARDO LAGANARO – I had the Atari 2600 as my first console, for about four or five years, and the thing I liked most about Pixel Ripped 1978 is the feeling of reliving something I loved as a child, which emerges so clearly from that crazy environment with the pixels and all those slightly unexpected elements Ana has created. We don’t always know what to expect from the game and playing it ends up being quite special, especially when you switch from 2D to 3D gameplay. I love this kind of structure, but what I love most are the characters, which is something I worked a bit on together with our narrative designer, Luisa Paes.
Every project we start brings with it specific challenges, particularly the ones related to the medium we use, which must be understood technologically and in its narrative potential, before proceeding with the rest.
Ricardo Laganaro
A. – Speaking of characters, in Pixel Ripped 1978 we meet Bug, Pixel Ripped creator herself. Who is she and why did you develop her in this way?
A. R. – When we created Barbara “Bug” Rivers we wanted her to be a normal developer. We didn’t want a figure that was too feminine or drew too much attention or became a gender emblem. We simply wanted the audience to perceive her as a credible Atari developer and that it wasn’t a problem that she was a woman. She’s just… badass at her work and great at fixing bugs and that’s why she wasn’t fired.
She was designed by Luisa and her name is a tribute to Bárbara Framil, the narrative designer of our previous games. But her surname, Rivers, is English for Ribeiro, which is my surname, and it was meant to be a surprise for me!
Comparing the challenges of Arvore’s productions
A. – Is it more challenging to create a piece like The Line, which in a short space of time has to develop effective interactive dynamics, immerse the user in the story and get them to connect emotionally with the characters, or is it more challenging to develop a large work like Pixel Ripped, where there is more time to shape the story but also more complex elements to put in?
R. L. – There are complications in both situations. One of Arvore’s main goals is to create something that works with VR… it’s actually the biggest goal and the biggest challenge at the same time! In some respects The Line was easier because it is a shorter story. But then you have to put a lot of production value and effort into such a short piece for it to really work. If it doesn’t in five minutes, it’s over, you’ve missed your chance. So you have less time to get people into the story and make them feel that emotional curve that goes from high to low and then high again in just 20 minutes. It’s not easy. But of course developing a big game like Pixel Ripped is an even toughest challenge, because there are so many elements to take into account! There are several games within what appears to be a single game. There are so many systems interacting and the team necessarily has to be much bigger. There are, in short, different challenges, although it is true that some of the main ones, such as making the interactions in VR good and effective, but also unique and engaging, are similar.
With other media some difficulties have already been overcome because their language is so well defined. With Pixel Ripped there was nothing that was taken for granted. The narrative exposition is a challenge in itself. The story is really crazy, travelling through time and different dimensions, in and out of the game. Every project we start brings with it specific challenges, particularly the ones related to the medium we use, which must be understood technologically and in its narrative potential, before proceeding with the rest.
A. – Especially considering the rapidly changing curve of technology! What was the most difficult thing to do in Pixel Ripped 1978 in comparison to the previous games?
R. J. – From a production point of view, this was a much more ambitious title. We have evolved a lot as a company. We are much bigger in terms of the number of people who work at Arvore and this project involved a much larger team of people. Managing a bigger team is much more challenging, especially considering the ambitious budget and the bigger goals. But I also think we grew a lot in our processes: we became much better at making games and definitely more efficient. That has also been very positive.
Even publishing the game with an external publisher (the previous ones we managed internally) entailed a number of new challenges. In the end, as mentioned, each project has a number of different variants… Never a dull moment! (laughs)
A. R. – The game was already complex in the previous episodes, but both Pixel Ripped 1989 and Pixel Ripped 1995 were more linear, they didn’t give a lot of freedom to the players. As said, in Pixel Ripped 1978 we had the idea of a game within the game, the 2D one and the 3D one, with the possibility of entering the game in first person. This was by far the biggest challenge for me.
We had several more elements to consider, for example teleportation and with it the need to make the experience comfortable for our users. Our audience has always been enthusiastic about how Pixel Ripped presented high levels of comfort. One guy even told us that it was the only video game he could play while he had Covid! So, we worried a lot about this aspect. Among other things, we had to ask ourselves how we could achieve combat in a first-person game but without too much movement. And, alongside that, how to handle a VR work in which you had to switch from a ‘sitting’ game (the one in ‘real life’ like Bug) to a standing game, which is what happens when you are in first person. Normally you find either one thing or the other. We had to consider what would be the most effective ways to deal with all these aspects and keep the game enjoyable on a physical side as well.
A look at the future, the one we are imagining and the one that is coming
A. – So, let’s imagine the future: ten or twenty years from now you are working on Pixel Ripped 2023. What do you imagine this game might be like? What ‘technical’ and nostalgia aspects do you imagine it could contain?
R. J. – We always had the idea to close the circle and bring Pixel Ripped back to the beginnings of VR in 2013-2014! The audience would play VR within VR within VR…
A. R. – We’re always making retro games and VR is getting retro too!
R. J. – Yes, I think in the end our games will always maintain this classic, nostalgic tone. So one day it’s going to have to be done!
A. R. – We’re still at the beginning of the VR industry at the moment, but I imagine one day there will be a lot of nostalgia for these moments. We’ll look back and say ‘do you remember what it was like? We still felt motion sickness, we still had vertigo and the headsets were so heavy!”.
R. J. – My son will probably think those devices are ancient already…
A. R. – Even the headsets we used a few years ago look ancient, actually. We’ve been hand-tracking and head-tracking for a decade now!
A. – There have been several interesting news on Pixel Ripped 1978… The collaboration with Demeo, for starters! …and then a big new festival coming up…
R. J. – We are friends with the great folks at Resolution games, as well as fans of Demeo, so we thought it would be fun to do a collaboration between Demeo and Pixel Ripped 1978, considering both games touch the 70s/80s nostalgia and both have aspects of playing RPGs with your friends. So we have some Demeo easter eggs in our game and soon you will find some Pixel Ripped easter eggs in theirs!
As for the festivals, we went two years without attending any events because of COVID, and then the first time I go to a convention after two years of absence I sit down at a table and make the deal of a lifetime! I’d say I’d better keep going to events if that’s the premise! (laughs).
Pixel Ripped 1978 is available on the PlayStation store, Steam and Oculus Store. To find out more about the production visit Arvore Immersive and Atari websites or come and play it at Venice Immersive 2023, from August 30 to September 9. The immersive island of Lazzaretto Vecchio awaits you!
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