One of the biggest lessons of working on stop-motion video games? Rolling up your sleeves — literally.

“It’s such a nightmare,” Talha & Jack Co developer Jack King-Spooner told me over a video call. “You spend maybe half an hour doing one of the cutscenes. The cutscenes are the most precarious things because you have to have everything in the scene exactly the same. And then your sleeve catches something and you’re like ah, Jesus, and I have to do everything again.”

King-Spooner worked with Talha Kaya on 2024’s Judero, an action-adventure game based on the folklore of the Scottish Borders. Now, the creative duo is running a Kickstarter campaign for its new project, Mashina, centered around a cute robot who has to drill. It’s a stop-motion game again, but this time, the team is facing the laborious process with some hard-learned lessons.

The seemingly innocuous gesture of rolling up your sleeves is one of many considerations that studios need to keep in mind when experimenting with handmade characters, objects, and scenes for their games. Stop-motion games aren’t new — the likes of The Neverhood, The Dark Eye, and Skullmonkeys have been toying with this physical-meets-digital marriage since the ’90s. But there’s been a resurgence in recent years due to projects with prominent Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns, such as Vokabulantis, and smaller teams keeping the momentum going, resulting in a sparse but steady presence thanks to games like Hylics and its sequel to The Dream Machine.

To Talha & Jack Co, there are a few reasons behind the popularity of this art style. Aside from the clear promotional aspect of standing out in an ever-increasing crowd, the team is fond of the playful and physical nostalgia of action figures. When I spoke to them, they’d occasionally open drawers to grab figures and individual pieces, from small feet to mountains made of clay, proudly showing them to the webcam and fiddling with them while they spoke.

“Gaming has been for a long time just an extremely digital thing that you do only by sitting at your computer and changing pixels or programming,” Kaya said. “Now we are in this age where anything can go into a video game, and when you put a lot of literally and metaphorically interesting textures, it just becomes a more interesting work. Stop-motion is a great way to do that.”

For the team behind the point-and-click adventure Harold Halibut, the reason was more simple: it’s what they knew. The developers didn’t have experience with 3D or drawing, but they knew how to build physical things. That philosophy was the foundation of a development period that spanned over a decade. When it came to animating these handcrafted creations, however, they decided on a different approach.

Initially, Harold Halibut was supposed to be animated in traditional stop-motion. The proof is in Slow Bros. cofounder and CEO Onat Hekimoglu’s shelf behind him, the namesake character standing inside a display case with his arms pointing down. Hekimoglu tells me that you can actually move his arms and legs, as opposed to the other characters alongside him, which are T-posing.

“In the beginning, we were using actual stop-motion animation, but it all felt too static, and also too much like a Photoshop collage, and we wanted to have a modern-looking feel that fits the time we are in, right?” Hekimoglu said. “Dynamic lighting, dynamic camera work, and all that stuff.”

Eventually, the developer diverged from the original idea to embrace “the best of both worlds,” according to Hekimoglu, taking handcrafted assets and scanning them in a process called photogrammetry. Instead of photographing every animation from different angles, the process involved taking pictures of objects and characters to create digital 3D models.

“I think actual stop-motion is not very suitable for games,” he adds. “When you are working on a film, everything that happens is inside that one image, that’s why everything feels consistent. You can never have that situation in a video game unless you do a full-motion video game.”

Hekimoglu’s point of view resonates with some obstacles that studio Wooly Games is encountering. Development for Feltopia started in the summer of 2023, and the four-person team has been experimenting with an array of handcrafted felt objects in stop-motion fashion since. Feltopia is a shoot-’em-up, traditionally a fast-paced genre, which clashes with the slower nature of stop-motion.

“I animate at 12 frames a second, and when you have your game going at 60 frames a second, there’s sort of a little bit of mixing and matching that goes along there,” creative director Andrea Love tells me. “So we are exploring some slower types of gameplay, more like 2D platformers, and we’ll see how that goes.”

Love has been working on stop-motion animation for over a decade, but doing so for a video game is “very different.” Usually, she would build the puppets and sets and put them all together for a composed scene. For Feltopia, everything has to be an isolated sprite or piece of scenery, so she photographs and animates objects as individual assets. “It’s like taking all these different little things and making a felted interactive collage,” Love says.

Stop-motion requires patience. A little blob that undulates in Feltopia takes around 15 to 20 minutes to make. The animation cycles of the Skyrider, the main hooded character who flies on a pegasus, took around a day, while a boss fight scene unfolded between two to three days. Love also has to create the puppets using wire armatures to rig them up and then remove the wires in postproduction.

But things get easier with experience. During the first animation tests of Judero, it would take King-Spooner around 10 hours to do one animation. As he became faster and more practical in his workflow, the team was able to increase the scope of the game, adding cutscenes and more elaborate characters. Still, considering that each frame involved at least eight photographs, the total count was in the hundreds.

“When you’ve taken 200 photos and then you sit back and press play and all of a sudden it’s actually animated, and then it’s even got an extra step when I throw it over to Talha and we get it in the game, and not only is it moving, we’re controlling it, it’s so fun,” King-Spooner said. “It’s kind of magic.”

Upcoming games like Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight and MoonHood’s The Midnight Walk are taking cues from games like Harold Halibut. They blur the line between stop-motion and the technical or visual expectations of modern games, keeping traditional art style without restricting movement or animations. But for those who are sticking with the craft of stop-motion — whether it’s trying to adjust the lighting of a scene due to different weather affecting photographs across multiple days or figuring out the exact density of felt so puppets don’t fall apart — they’re finding joy in the process, while embracing the work involved.

“That’s usually people’s first reaction,” Wooly Games project manager Michelle Hagewood says. “Why in the world are you doing this to yourself?”

“Busco a un policía, vino aquí?” says Leon S. Kennedy to the first villager he meets in the Resident Evil 4 remake. This marks a subtle yet meaningful change compared to the original from 2005. Even without perfect pronunciation or a more natural way to phrase the question, the protagonist makes an effort to speak the local language. A sentiment that the game itself tries — and almost succeeds — to echo during the story.

Resident Evil 4 has always been unapologetic about putting Spanish front and center. While the location in which Leon’s rescue search for Ashley Graham is fictitious, its inhabitants — aside from a few key characters — stick to their linguistic roots. The original didn’t go down in history as an exemplary use of the language, featuring lines with vocal or grammatical mistakes and voice actors speaking Latin American Spanish instead. Yet, unless you already knew the language beforehand enough to understand, you were as clueless as Leon himself.

As a native speaker, I was constantly surprised by the embellishments around the use of Spanish in the remake. For both key characters and the villagers that you stylishly kick and shoot at, the language is expanded with interesting voice lines, proper grammar, and even literary references that didn’t exist in the original. The remake didn’t just involve expanding the game and painting it with modern strokes. It also improved the Spanish foundation from the original. But the uneven use of captions seems unwilling to tell the player the whole story.

The opening sequence starts off with the right ideas. Leon’s question to the villager, in which he asks if he had seen a policeman come through the house, is translated to English in the captions, prefixed by “(In Spanish)” at the beginning of the sentence. The pronunciation is clearly one of a non-native speaker who didn’t get to practice much beforehand. But it gets the point across for a simple and direct question.

Minutes before you enter the house, there is another dialogue exchange between the police officers who give Leon a lift to the village. They stick to English during the ride, but once one of them hops out of the car to take a leak, he promptly complains about how cold it is outside. His partner then mocks him and asks if he drank the whole bar. This is all done in Spanish with the right captions.

Much like the darker ambiance of the village or the subtle differences around Leon’s first of many uninvited house entries, it doesn’t take long for the remake to showcase that Spanish will also have an even more prominent presence. At the same time, it’s a natural representation of what two native speakers would usually do in the presence of a foreigner: make themselves understood when speaking directly and then switch back to their own language for conversations with each other or to themselves.

From that moment on, the sense of going through a bilingual experience is recaptured, but the captions do an odd job of selecting what to translate. The same officer who tells the joke in the car isn’t translated when he asks Leon for help later on, as he asks for someone to answer the radio call because he needs support. Even if it’s a short line that doesn’t affect the story much, it’s more than just an isolated scream.

Other phrases are more relevant. Luis Serra, a mysterious character who helps Leon in the original and becomes more of an intermittent sidekick in the remake, refers to Ashley as “señorita” when asking Leon what he’s looking for. The translation here is positively natural, as he responds with “a little girl?” to confirm that his hours spent with Duolingo on his flight to Spain weren’t in vain. In general, however, Luis’ ongoing quips and cusses don’t get the same treatment, with captions showcasing “mierda” and “amigo” as is, as opposed to “shit” and “friend,” or similar variations.

This is a shame, as the character is far more akin to a Spanish person in the remake. Similarly to the officers, he speaks in English most of the time to Leon but is unafraid to take some liberties, such as calling him “Sancho” as a reference to Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote. Ashley is nicknamed “Princess Dulcinea” in a similar vein, and Luis commits to the recurring joke throughout his ventures with you. Once more, Leon repays it with recognition, calling Luis a “fine knight” and, ultimately, “Don Quixote” to bring the joke full circle.

There are multiple examples like these in the RE4 remake. But there is a certain care for cutscenes that is amiss outside of them. As you’re confronting enemies, captions don’t provide translations for either the new dialogue or the lines that have been rerecorded from the original. Sure, it’s pleasant to finally hear accents more akin to Spanish folks than Latin American ones, but there was a missed opportunity here to actually translate them for non-Spanish players.

Throughout the years, the community has provided translations for the original, and it was quick to jump into the remake to keep up with tradition, drawing comparisons between the two to see if mispronunciations and accents had been tweaked. As it stands, history is bound to repeat itself, with players forced to search for meaning behind what they constantly hear in the game from outside sources.

Little details such as enemies rightfully switching callouts from singular to plural when Leon is accompanied by a character are gentle but show that there wasn’t a lack of attention in terms of writing and recordings. The iconic “detrás de ti, imbécil” (behind you, imbecile) line turns to “detrás de vosotros, imbéciles” (behind all of you, imbeciles) in the remake. Other lines are surprisingly thorough, a long cultist-style chant around the castle area of the game being a personal standout. Yet, it was disappointing to see additions like this silenced with a dismissive “[ominous mumbling in Spanish]” caption.

In the original, you could make the argument that the game was purposefully portraying Leon’s own lack of knowledge of the language itself. In the remake, however, he’s quick to showcase his broad understanding of Spanish, as well as a basic sense of local literary references. If you’re in the same position, the experience will be much richer as a result, increasing the tension of already frantic combat sequences by hearing enemies alerting others of your presence, setting up traps, or pinpointing that you’re hurt after being attacked. If not, aside from a few exceptions, it will be largely the same experience as the original 18 years ago.

As cheesy and campy as the dialogue in Resident Evil 4 has always been, the commitment to Spanish sets an interesting prospect for native speakers. We don’t have to be knowledgeable of a foreign language in order to understand what is often lost in translation. Considering English’s hegemony over video games, it makes for an enticing change of pace, turning the tables in a way that not many other stories set in predominantly Spanish regions often do. Yet, it falls into the same problem by not translating itself to a wider audience.

As a result, the Resident Evil 4 remake is an ironic showcase of language barriers that Spanish speakers often find in video games. I was optimistic when I saw Leon recognizing the missed opportunities of almost two decades ago in the opening sequence, making an effort to do things differently this time around. It’s unfortunate that the rest of the world won’t be able to understand the valiant endeavors that follow afterward.

The much-anticipated Steam and Itch.io version of Dwarf Fortress was announced in 2019, and brothers Tarn and Zach Adams kept working on the game until its release last December. But it was exactly two years after the original announcement that Putnam — a developer who has been involved in the community for around 10 years now working on popular mods and reverse engineering the game — sent Tarn a decisive email.

“We knew just from our Steam wish list numbers that our game was going to do pretty well,” says Tarn in a Zoom call as he searches for Putnam’s email in his inbox. “Then we asked ourselves: ‘do we want to bring someone else?’ It wasn’t even something we could consider before in a normal capacity.”

Around the beginning of 2022, the team started to publicly discuss the possibility of hiring a new programmer during interviews. Before then, Tarn says that one option was to open source the game. But after seeing the wish list numbers increase over time — culminating in over a million during the month of release — they thought they could keep the source code closed up and share it with a new team member instead.

Read next: Dwarf Fortress is no longer PC’s most inscrutable game

“I was having a bad day or something and just rambled about how having another programmer might take time away from the game or even make it less their product,” Putnam says, “and that seemed unfortunate to me. I rambled about that for a while, and then I thought, but also, if you’re going to hire a programmer, I’m an option. Huh. That’s how I ended that, and that part seemed to have stuck, so that’s good,” she adds in laughter.

One of Putnam’s biggest early goals was to make it as painless as possible for her to be working on this game out of respect for what Dwarf Fortress is, both as a game and as the result of the peculiar work dynamic of the Adams brothers over so many years. Yet, she was confident that she would be up to the task. After all, she discovered the project back in her high school years as she searched for something that wasn’t immediately recognizable as a game and which could fit on a thumbnail for her to slack off after she finished her math and typing class assignments. The ASCII graphics of the classic version were perfect for this.

The programmer, who is almost 28 years old now, first began playing Adventure mode. Over time, she began toying with the modding system, which seemed a bit limited for some of the ideas she had in mind. Using external tools allowed her to hack the memory of the game and opened the room to more possibilities.

“It stopped being ‘how can I do what I want to in this system?’ and more ‘how can I do what nobody else has done yet in this system?’” Putnam says. She had around a year or two of programming experience by the time she started doing mods, and it has become her career since. “I kept trying to find: ‘can I do this? Yeah, turns out I can.’ And it kept happening over and over again. And I got really into that, and in the process, I happened to learn a lot more about the game than most people ever learned.”

It’s been around a month since the second programmer joined Bay 12 Games. For Tarn, this is an unprecedented event, breaking a 16-year-old tradition of being the sole person working in the Dwarf Fortress code. It comes as the game is now more popular than ever — it sold almost half a million copies in December, and it’s currently sitting at an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on Steam, with over 17,000 reviews by the time of publication.

“Overwhelming is about the right word, I guess, because I am technically overwhelmed,” Tarn tells me. “We haven’t fixed as much as I would have liked by now, and that’s not anybody’s fault. There’s just too much going on. Having me as the person that’s doing all this media stuff, and also doing the programming up until three weeks ago, it wasn’t something that was going to lead to a lot of patches. That’s just not how it was going to be. But now, I got a lot of nice fixes coming up, and that’s all Putnam.”

There hasn’t been much of an onboarding process. Contrary to what I initially thought, Putnam didn’t receive a beginner’s guide to understanding Tarn’s code — she picked most of it up from disassembling the game during her modding years. Before Tarn knew it, Putnam was already taking care of what he says is a long to-do list of bugs to tackle.

Now, Putnam has access to the source code and is able to go through stuff on her own. The team has set up a version control system — which allows programmers to easily set up different branches to record changes separately from each other — and is currently working on Simple DirectMedia Layer 2, which is an upgrade to the current version in preparation for the Linux and Mac ports.

Tarn admits that while Putnam hasn’t had many problems understanding the code, there definitely are some bits and pieces that will require time to parse through. “I haven’t seen some things for 10 years. So I have some remarks in there that are now helpful for the other person as well. But there are some really gnarly things that we haven’t had to go through yet. We haven’t got into some of the map generation code that is just kind of disgusting,” he laughs. “But of the things that [Putnam has] looked at so far, there hasn’t been a lot of trouble.”

Getting to the point of understanding Dwarf Fortress’ logic, especially with how many intertwining calculations are running in the background at all times, was a process that took Putnam a long time. Even as an active member of the community, she doesn’t think that anyone really knows how everything interacts. But if someone fragments the game into small pieces, learning how those individual parts work is a good method to not be completely overwhelmed. In a way, not really being able to know everything is the reason why it’s still fun to play the game, even if you know a lot about it.

Putnam says that it’s common for open-source projects to opt for using a standardized code format. Even if that’s not the case for Dwarf Fortress, she still finds it easy enough. “It’s just one guy’s code. It’s very consistent. People ask me how bad the code is, and I don’t know what they mean by this,” she laughs. Algorithmically, the game is “pretty well optimized” and she doesn’t seem to think there are big changes that could be done. “Dwarf Fortress just does more calculations than the vast majority of games. It’s a miracle that it runs better than The Sims 3.” 

If anything, having access to the source code has allowed the new programmer to update the game’s extensive wiki with more accurate information about some of the clues from the community, one of which is a list of methods to maximize frame rate and improve performance. While the wiki entry is pretty damning against pathfinding as the main factor, Putnam says that there are other elements involved, such as dwarves looking at each other and doing the calculation to figure out if they’re friends or foes.

“Pathfinding is slow,” she explains. “And if it’s happening a lot, your game will slow down into a crawl. But it doesn’t happen a lot. That’s the thing. Pathfinding isn’t even a third as important as just everyone looking around and seeing if there’s anyone nearby for them to beat up or hug.” The community figured out that building star-shaped staircases improved performance, but as Putnam says, it’s because the walls break the line of sight, so characters can’t see dwarves that are 20 steps down and aren’t forced to run the calculation to figure out whether they’re their mom or a rival.

A recent optimization update attempted to make it so that dwarves who are dead, caged, offside, or a ghost aren’t involved in any of these checks. But the checks were still happening, as the game had to figure out whether the dwarves fit into any of those four categories either way. “That’s the kind of thing you want to minimize, it turns out, and the trick to minimize that is completely alien stuff that the community never picked up on,” she says.

Tarn says that he’s always been afraid of somebody looking at the game’s code and finding something horrifying in there. Even though he’s not so worried about it now, he thinks he was more touchy about the idea some time ago — not just because of the prospect of dealing with different programming styles, an aspect in which, fortunately, he and Putnam have a lot in common, but also because of how argumentative people can be online.

“People can be nasty generally about those things, and I just didn’t want to deal with that,” he says. “But that’s not the vibe here, so it’s fine. It’s just going to be funny when we find stuff that Putnam doesn’t want to deal with … We already hit something like that — there was this gnarly line, and I was just like, ‘Yeah, I must have been tired.’ I mean, you can’t be programming for a long time and expect everything to be nice-looking. It’s just not how it works. That’s why we have so many bugs in so many games, right? We’re all human.”

Even before the addition of Putnam, Bay 12 Games had stopped being the duo’s exclusive project years ago thanks to the involvement of artists, music composers, Kitfox Games as a publisher, and most recently, the content creator SalfordSal.

Future steps involve adding Arena mode soon as well as continuing to tackle bugs and finishing the Linux and Mac ports. From there, Adventure mode is the big focus, for which the team is bringing on more people for graphics, audio, and so on. Tarn is hoping to have the mode up and running this year but remains unsure for the time being. He also mentions that hiring a QA tester wouldn’t exactly work due to the nature of the game, as one small change would require them to test everything related to it, and there wouldn’t be enough time. However, the team is envisioning options that other games have done, such as setting up a public experimental branch for people to provide feedback before the update officially rolls in. “I think Dwarf Fortress is still going to go forward at about the same rate and have the same kind of features added,” Tarn says. “Every step just involves more people.”

He explains that while the Steam and Itch version was a big launch, and there is a sense that the team could continue to grow, the release was a one-time event. There won’t be sequels or DLC. The momentum that took place in December is the foundation to support plans that span across years in the future, which include features such as villains, armies, and magic. “We just have to be careful about shedding off the launch lump because that’s all we get. We don’t want to be one of these tech companies this month [saying] we’re now laying off 8, 10, 12 percent of our workforce because we couldn’t manage our numbers correctly or some shareholder said some nonsense or whatever. So we’re just being careful.”

Putnam is clear about everything she brings to the table, from her focus on optimization with modern CPUs in mind to ways in which she can increase productivity for the team in general. Yet, at least at the moment, she tries not to step on anyone’s toes.

“If I had to go through the interview question ‘why do you think you’re the best fit for this role?’ I would have said it’s because I already know how to do all this stuff,” she says. “My main concern here is to see how painless I can make including another programmer in the development process while increasing productivity in terms of bug fixes and optimization. That has been, and still is, my priority. Getting to work happened faster than I could have expected, which is good, and there has been productive work on all sides now, and I haven’t gotten in the way. I hope I haven’t gotten in the way that much,” Putnam laughs.

“I think having someone who understands and is very protective of the nature of the game, that’s just going to be as good as it can be, right?” Tarn adds. “And I don’t know if there’s ever going to be trouble with the tone of the game. We’ll get to that as we go through it, but I think we’re in the best hands we could be.”

I’ve been chatting with Suda51 for the past hour. The conversation hasn’t been about any of his past works but, instead, his favorite game. Among the many anecdotes Goichi Suda told me about meeting Dennis Wedin and Jonatan Söderström, creators of Hotline Miami, one in particular stood out. While the developers were on a press tour in Japan, Wedin asked him to sign his arm — then didn’t wash his arm for a couple of days until his tattoo artist could fill it in.

As the interview is coming to a close, Suda says that he’s got something to show me and asks if I can wait. It’s 11PM in Argentina and 11AM in Japan, and I’m watching the Grasshopper office on a Zoom call. Suda comes back wearing the jacket of Hotline Miami’s protagonist, which was a gift from publisher Devolver Digital, and shows me a framed drawing that Wedin did for him, putting it close to the webcam. In it, you can see Travis Touchdown, the face of No More Heroes, dressed as the protagonist of Dennaton Games’ debut game. There is a phrase at the top that says “No More Hotline Miami.”

I ask Suda if he plans to return Wedin the favor by getting a tattoo of his drawing. He laughs and turns around while patting his back, signaling it as the place for the tattoo. “Unfortunately in Japan if I had a big tattoo like that I wouldn’t be able to get in pools and saunas and stuff like that, so probably not,” Suda says.

October 23rd marked the 10th anniversary of the release of Hotline Miami. Back in 2012, people came into contact with the game’s three masked figures for the first time. They fought through gritty apartments, bashing and slashing in circles and restarting over and over until everyone in the room was dead. And then they did it again, all while the soundtrack kept them in a trance. After a few levels, beating down enemies became second nature. It was fun and gruesome in equal manner, sparking conversations about violence in video games that still echo to this day. It was an important moment in the industry — one that influenced other developers, inspiring them to start their careers regardless of team size or resources.

“Hotline Miami came out seven or eight months before I decided I would try making indie games,” says Gabe Cuzzillo, a developer who worked on Ape Out alongside Matt Boch and Bennett Foddy. He and a few friends stayed up until 5AM eating a giant artichoke pizza and drinking beers while hot seating the game; whenever someone died, they’d pass the controller to the person next to them. “I think we got all the way to the end that night,” he says. “That was just really a peak experience for me.”

At the time, Cuzzillo was a sophomore in college and had been attending film school for some time. While he felt that making a movie was a 50-person project minimum, he was surprised to find out that Dennaton was a two-person team. That realization influenced him to learn GameMaker, the engine that Hotline Miami uses, and start making his way into a different career altogether. “It made game development feel like something I could do as a person who had never programmed or never really knew how computers work,” Cuzzillo adds.

Luc Wolthers, a designer and artist at Free Lives who’s worked on Gorn and is currently part of the development of Anger Foot, didn’t see video games as a viable venue in South Africa at the time. He recalls playing a demo of Hotline Miami during the A MAZE festival in Berlin and being enchanted. “I didn’t even think that I could have such a visceral experience to a game that felt so [approachable] to make,” he says.

Before this, Wolthers knew he wanted to be an animator but was aware of just a few companies making games in South Africa. The idea of indie games felt brand-new, with examples such as Braid and Fez leading the movement. “Braid and Fez felt very thoughtful,” he says, “and very kind of hard to make. But Hotline Miami felt really [approachable] and kind of cool-driven, and I thought, ‘This is something that I can get into way more easily and just sort of work my way through.’”

Back then, he only had access to GameMaker and couldn’t believe that some people had actually made a game with it. “It used to come on little CDs from a local magazine called Nag Magazine, so seeing that Hotline Miami was an actual full product honestly felt absurd. I was like no, people don’t make games in GameMaker and publish them; it’s like a toy,” Wolthers laughs.

During the same festival, five years before he got hired at Free Lives, he also got to play Broforce for the first time. Back then, the studio came into contact with Devolver Digital after seeing it was the publisher working with Dennaton. While Free Lives had considered other partners, it was the tone of Devolver and its growing portfolio that made it seem like it’d be a good fit brand-wise.

In some cases, word of mouth helped to establish the long relationships that Devolver still has with certain studios to this day, including Free Lives. It was Jan Willem Nijman of Vlambeer who told the publisher about Cactus, the alias of Söderström, and the prototype for this game called Cocaine Cowboys (in reference to a documentary about the early ’80s drug scene in Miami). Ever since, Dennaton has returned the favor, as was the case with Le Cartel Studio, the makers of Mother Russia Bleeds and Heave Ho.

After playing Hotline Miami, Frédéric Coispeau and Alexandre Muttoni got together to blend a similar artistic style with a beat-’em-up game. They worked on the prototype for six months and then made a Twitter account and shared a trailer with the world. People kept mentioning the clear influences, and the social media buzz eventually got the attention of Dennaton.

“They liked the game, tweeted at us, and after that talked to Devolver and Devolver contacted us, so we owe Dennis big time,” Coispeau says. After signing with the publisher, Wedin stayed in touch during development, with the studio sharing builds and showing him backgrounds and character designs. Muttoni met him in person a few times as well, including at a concert in which Wedin played with his band, called Fucking Werewolf Asso, in France. “Le Cartel doesn’t really exist without Hotline Miami.”

One More Level, the studio behind God’s Trigger and Ghostrunner, shares a similar sentiment. Radosław Ratusznik and Marcin Kluzek originally met at game studio Bloober Team while working on a title for the launch of the PlayStation Vita. Ratusznik then started at One More Level in 2014, with Kluzek joining a year later. During that time, the studio began working on God’s Trigger, a project born from the desire to make its own take on a Hotline Miami-style game.

Ratusznik recalls a thorough examination of Hotline’s level design, studying what made those apartment hallways and corners work so well with a fast-paced gameplay loop in mind. “I played both of the games a couple times and I screenshotted every level and analyzed every layout to get what makes those games tick and try to apply it to God’s Trigger,” Kluzek says. “That was a really engaging experience.”

Early on in development, the team decided that it wanted to make a game that felt more approachable than Hotline Miami. For this, the presence of checkpoints, powers, and special abilities for the characters as well as a co-op mode played a big part. For the latter, Ratusznik thought that Hotline Miami 2 was going to have co-op based on the first trailer of the game. But since it didn’t, the studio took matters into its own hands.

“We thought, well, we’re gonna have to produce the Hotline Miami co-op ourselves,” he says. “It was a huge challenge to be honest; now I know why they didn’t decide to do co-op for the game. When you have this game and you can die so fast with one single mistake even in co-op, it’s a problem, but there are some benefits from that.” In the end, this led to the addition of a revive mechanic to put your co-op partner back on their feet, which helped to alleviate the newly found frustration.

Alongside the aforementioned games, many other studios took inspiration from Hotline Miami to varying degrees. Ruiner, My Friend Pedro, Katana Zero, Furi, and Superhot are a few that iterated on that foundation. Whether it was the popularity of synthwave (both in terms of soundtracks and aesthetics), faster gameplay loops where restarting takes a microsecond, or the pressure of dying in one hit, these elements lingered and evolved over time.

“It’s cool to see that a lot of people are inspired,“ Wedin says. “We had a lot of people writing to us that started doing video games through that level editor of Hotline Miami 2. It’s cool to help them out in those first steps and help them move on and maybe go to school or move on to GameMaker or stuff like that.”

The team mentions that it’s been busy working on its new game, which has been a mystery since the release of the sequel aside from some background teasers and, thus, hasn’t had the time to play many of the games that it inspired. Wedin is particularly proud of the influence on The Last of Us Part II.

“They created these puzzles [around] the enemies, which felt a bit like the apartments of Hotline Miami 1 in a sense, and how they’re doing the violence, how they have bursts of really gory stuff and do calm cutscenes [afterward],” he explains. “It just felt like there’s something there that kinda came from them playing Hotline Miami. And that was really cool to see. We inspired a AAA game. Because I feel like indies always inspire other indies, and you can see influences from game to game, but it’s not that often that you can see it in a AAA game I think.”

While some games added Easter eggs referencing Hotline Miami, The Last of Us Part II was much more overt. During a PlayStation State of Play showcase, Naughty Dog showed a scene where protagonist Ellie sneaks up on a guard who is playing Dennaton’s game on a PlayStation Vita. The particularity is that the player can’t see the screen until the sequence is over, but the song coming out from the console — the emblematic “Hydrogen” by M.O.O.N. — clearly pinpoints where the soundtrack is from.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Naughty Dog’s co-president Neil Druckmann, who worked as creative director on the game, said that he saw the cameo as an opportunity to do a “meta-statement about the kind of narrative we’re after.” Naughty Dog worked with Dennaton on the Easter egg, which led to that moment in the game.

The Last of Us Part II and Hotline Miami also share similarities when it comes to gameplay. Shortly after TLOU launched, it was common to see users such as SunhiLegend on Twitter sharing killing montages set in the game, clearing entire rooms of enemies in a fashion that seemed akin to completing levels in Hotline Miami while maintaining a combo, a trademark of the game’s score system.

“I had the same thing when I started playing,” Wedin tells me. “After a while, when you get to the first bigger area, it felt like I could play it kind of like Hotline Miami, which was really cool — trying to figure out the pattern that enemies were moving in and just trying to kill them quickly and in one swift move.” I reached out to Naughty Dog to hear its thoughts on the similarities between the games, both thematically and mechanically, but it declined to participate in this piece.

A year before The Last of Us Part II’s release, there was another peculiar cameo in Travis Strikes Again from Grasshopper. As Suda tells me, it was the culmination of years of getting to meet not only Dennaton but also Devolver.

Suda took interest in Hotline Miami after seeing footage of it on social media and immediately felt that there was something special about it. During that time, Grasshopper was collaborating on projects with companies such as EA and Warner Bros. for games like Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw. In a way, Hotline Miami rekindled a spark for Suda, reminding him of the importance and value of working with just a handful of people. “When I first started up Grasshopper, I always had a preference and sort of a tendency to work with smaller teams, so even if we’re working with bigger companies on a bigger project, I’ve always felt more comfortable on smaller teams. So that was sort of an extra little piece of stimulation for me,” he says.

Over time, he found out that the team was a fan of Grasshopper’s work as well, and after a number of failed attempts, he finally got a chance to talk to them during a promotional tour in Japan for the release of Hotline Miami Collected Edition.

“After that, we met up at other game events in the United States and stuff. I went to go meet them in Gothenburg in Sweden where they live and work. We just got along really well, talking about each other’s games, kinda just complimenting each other on stuff and having similar interests and whatnot. Ever since we met for the first time in Japan, we’ve had a really good relationship, basically just full-on friends at this point,” Suda tells me.

For anyone who’s been following Devolver closely during the past few years, this relationship isn’t exactly a surprise. In the first trailer for Travis Strikes Again, the protagonist is playing Hotline Miami inside a van. That same year, Suda himself appeared for a few seconds during Devolver’s E3 2017 press conference. Ever since, he’s had other cameos in subsequent conferences, showing himself playing No More Heroes III prior to release and gaining a much more starring role in 2022’s showcase.

This friendship resulted in the in-game collaboration in Travis Strikes Again where Travis interacts with a Hotline Miami arcade cabinet and gets to chat with some familiar characters. Originally, Grasshopper wanted Travis to go into the world of Hotline Miami, creating a “full-on level” with the same art style for the occasion. But due to budgetary and scheduling reasons, it felt it wouldn’t be able to do the game justice and ended up scaling it back.

Ten years later, the developers I spoke to remember Hotline Miami fondly as a game that inspired them as individual creators. Whether it is because of a particular element that stood out to them or the success of a two-person team, they all had plenty to share about how the industry is now compared to that time — reflecting on their past works and looking at what comes next.

Free Lives’ Evan Greenwood recalls the quiet moments and the way the game chose to show instead of tell its story. A particular example is the woman that the player rescues in one of the early levels who then shows up in the apartment of the protagonist. There isn’t a message or conversation about it. From that moment on, you can see her sleeping on the couch or taking a bath. “No one has ever managed to do it like Hotline Miami,” Greenwood says. “I think the influence of it extends from just games. There’s a lot of things I see today and think the people behind this must have played and taken notes from Hotline Miami.”

Anger Foot comes from a place of influence as well (to the point where the developers called it “Hotline Amsterdam” at first), aiming for the same kind of intensity and grunginess. Almost a year and a half later, the project has gained its own identity, but “a lot of it just got that original inspiration still in it,” Wolthers says.

A clear difference is wanting to portray violence as frivolous fun as opposed to trying to make a statement on it, as Hotline Miami did back then. To Wolthers, the game invited some serious reflections on violence and who is participating in it, whereas Anger Foot wants you to play with a toy box. Having characters designed as abstract representations of human beings, like a walking middle finger or someone with a mushroom head, also helps with the distinction in identity.  

“Since then, we’ve had games like The Last of Us Part II and the new God of War, games that want you to take a moment and think about all the violence while encouraging and promoting it,” Wolthers says. The problem, as he argues, is that when that same violence is fun for the player, the implicitness of trying to make the player feel guilty falls flat. “You’re giving me a hammer and a nail, and then you’re kinda like, ‘I can’t believe you put that nail into that plank of wood.’ And it’s like, well, what else was I supposed to do? You’ve given me everything I needed to perform this task and then you’re, after the fact, saying ‘ah, what a lamentable thing.’ [In Anger Foot] we don’t wanna punish people for participating in the exact systems we designed people to play within.”

To Le Cartel, Hotline Miami gave the team an idea of how much violence and gore it could put in Mother Russia Bleeds, realizing that there was an audience for that. “It was always a good example of how you could put some deep ambiance without being realistic,” says Muttoni. Looking back, he says that sometimes he really wants to make a new Mother Russia Bleeds because he “evolved a lot from that time and I can’t watch it anymore,” referring to the art style, saying that he’d like to show people what he can do now.

For the team at One More Level, Hotline Miami’s influence can be seen in the mechanical side of games like God’s Trigger and Ghostrunner. It had to find ways to not break a player’s flow — especially while working on a game with a first-person view following one with a top-down perspective. Legibility as well as elements such as the instant restart were crucial.

“You’re in this dance of death with the enemies with a rain of bullets and you have to survive because one single shot can kill you,” Ratusznik says. “And it’s amazing that it builds so much tension in the gameplay, and I think that’s why so many people love this kind of game.”

Cuzzillo, on the other hand, is following up Ape Out with a completely different project, with an eye on cultivating a healthier way of approaching the job. “It’s impossible to look at that game as divorced from that period of my life, which was really tumultuous and like me trying to figure out how to be an adult, graduate college, and figure out what being a person meant,” he tells me. “I feel like I was so identified with the game, what everybody said about the game they were saying about me, which is obviously unhealthy. I guess I look back at it fondly in a certain way, and I like it, but it’s a very complicated relationship.”

Cuzzillo’s lesson is one that Dennaton has been following during the development of its new game. “It’s hard to focus when the world is falling apart,” Wedin says. “I mean we’ve been doing good. We try not to work as much as we did in Hotline Miami 1 and 2, trying to have more normal working hours.”

“I think we’re doing more focused work now that we have an office,” Söderström says. “Even if we spend less time each day, we get a lot more done. And the game is quite big and more ambitious than Hotline Miami 2.” Wedin adds that, back then, they could work 10 to 12 hours daily on Hotline Miami, but maybe two or three of those hours were actually work being done, and the rest were slow and unfocused.

Not having internet in the office also helps, as Dennaton is off the grid. The reception is bad, so the team stays fairly offline most of the time. “We have a small USB stick that I pass graphics to Jonatan with,” Wedin tells me. “We used to have a Dropbox, but it got hacked. It had a bunch of new graphics of the new game and the person was trying to sell them on Reddit, and people got really, really upset and were slamming them, so they eventually vanished.”

The dynamic between the team, however, remains pretty much the same. The biggest difference is that, since the game is much bigger, the team is always busy with something, so they’re not discussing the project quite as much as they did with Hotline Miami. “Where we’re at right now, a lot of the gameplay is kinda set in stone, so it’s more finishing the levels and finishing the story and fleshing out everything,” Wedin says.

Even though Dennaton has been working on the game for a while, the success of Hotline Miami has led to a more relaxed work routine. They even took a month off in which Wedin played through all Dark Souls games for the first time, creating the same character in each so it felt like the same person going on an adventure, while Söderström gave him directions when needed.

The current artistic freedom of Dennaton is something that Nigel Lowrie, co-founder of Devolver Digital, takes pride in. “The fact that with that success they can now kind of sit back for years and slowly work with no kind of commercial or artistic pressure on them and make whatever they want, I think it’s really cool. I think that’s one of my favorite things about this job.” Lowrie mentions that Devolver doesn’t have formal arrangements with the studio — their timeline is dictated by whenever Dennaton is ready to share something. “They don’t feel the pressure to beat that, and now, they’re just making art for art’s sake in a lot of ways,” he says.

In that vein, I ask if this is something that resonates with indie developers that don’t have Hotline Miami’s success. “No, it doesn’t, right? Everyone out there wants to just get to that point [where] they can take a little bit of pressure off. What’s there is that is possible — for two people in Valencia, or South Africa, or wherever, it’s not out of the realm of possibility.”

Even though success on the scale of Hotline Miami is far from guaranteed when making an indie game, it’s the developer’s spirit that still resonates with most. Regardless of how much the industry has and continues to change over time, Dennaton is still remembered as a two-person team that left an outsized impact on the industry.

“[Nowadays indie games] are much bigger undertakings; they’re much more ambitious, and I think all of that is amazing. But Hotline Miami really had this garage band feeling to it, and that’s what I fell in love with,” Wolthers says. “I hope that other people had that experience with this — that anyone can do it as long as you have an idea and some ambition.”

While the team continues to work on their new project, the developers I spoke to shared sentiments about their wish to see Hotline Miami 3 one day. Dennaton has said that the series was a chapter closed, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change anytime soon. That said, despite having the phrase framed in his office, Suda likes to remain hopeful that “No More Hotline Miami” isn’t the last word.

“Recently, even stuff like The Matrix and Top Gun, after like 30-something years, came back, and I don’t think anybody expected Tom Cruise to return and make another movie, but here we are,” he says. “I myself said that No More Heroes 3 would be the end of the series and we were finished there. But to be honest, even I don’t know if that’s gonna end up being true. At some point, I might go back and do another one. I’m thinking the guys at Dennaton, they’re probably thinking the same thing.”

“It’s always nice to hear that someone was inspired to create something,” Söderström says.

“Yeah, it’s really hard to discuss this because we’re Swedish. We’re taught from a very young age to not be proud of our work and talk about it,” Wedin laughs. “It just makes me happy where we’re at now after 10 years. It’s really cool. And seeing that all of this positive stuff came out of it, both for us as people and our lives but also stuff that we inspired others to do and gave them energy or like the idea that they could do this as well, yeah, trying to put some positive in all of this.”

Correction October 26th, 4:00PM ET: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of Nag Magazine. We regret the error.

Latin America isn’t a common destination in video games. In the few instances where digital landscapes have taken place in the region, results have been mixed. Characters often fall into the trope of saying random Spanish words during conversations to remind us of their nationality. Local socio-political issues are rarely handled with the proper nuance, while cultural portrayals can be hit or miss. Far Cry 6, the latest installment in the open-world series by Ubisoft, doesn’t do much to evade these problems. But interestingly enough, it’s the first AAA game set in Latin America that gets close to putting Spanish front and center.

Taking place in the Cuba-inspired region of Yara, Far Cry 6 is set amidst a clash of conflicts. The leader in power, Antón Castillo, who is voiced by Afro-Italian actor Giancarlo Esposito, rules over the citizens with a dictatorship. As everyone below the upper class is suffering under an abusive regime, protagonist Dani Rojas is tasked with uniting guerrilla groups to fight back.

Much like Far Cry 5’s elusive attempt at tackling white supremacy in the United States, it’s difficult to digest such heavy topics at face value in the context of the Far Cry formula. The games aren’t exactly known for their seriousness, as the core gameplay tends to lean on weapon experimentation and highly flammable objects in every corner to create your own The A-Team set pieces. Sadly, the Latin American culture that the game wants to evoke is intertwined with this, making it harder to ignore the dissonance of calling “Amigos” to help you in battle while you plan the next step to take down a dictator.

None of this took me by surprise, as I had arrived at the game expecting to see this conflicting clash of ideas. But I was willing to give Yara the benefit of the doubt. We hadn’t seen an open world setting in Latin America since Ghost Recon Wildlands in 2017, also from Ubisoft, which presented such a hurtful depiction of Bolivia that led the government to issue a formal complaint to the developer. I was curious to see, then, if any lessons had been learned at all.

Right off the bat, the characters I met throughout the story did not provide me with hopeful signs. While often charismatic (if not overly cliche at times), it was hard to digest the uneven back and forth between English and Spanish during conversations. Dialogue is mostly spoken in the former, but characters are constantly replacing words without much coherence. Examples like president, dad, and revolution seem nonexistent in their vocabulary, replaced by presidente, papá, and revolución in 90 percent of the cases instead. This adds a certain welcoming touch, but when they frequently appear out of nowhere across conversations in English, it stands out.

Some cases are even more abrupt, where instead of one or two words, it’s half of a sentence. In a few rare moments, some exchanges are completely in Spanish, and the game goes as far as translating them in the captions. Now, it’s worth mentioning that Spanglish (in a lesser or higher frequency) is not uncommon. Latinx folks born in the US are a good example of a demographic that makes use of it, but each and every case varies. I’ve met people who, for a myriad of reasons, knew very little Spanish. Meanwhile, a friend of mine would constantly switch between both languages without realizing it, which felt surprisingly natural and easy to follow in person.

In Far Cry 6, however, it lacks authenticity. As of 2020, the only reported Latin American country with English as the official language is Guyana. This doesn’t mean that it’s nonexistent everywhere else, but in the majority of countries, Spanish is the leading language. This is the case of Cuba as well, which makes for a confusing presentation considering how the language is showcased.

One of the first standouts I noticed while navigating Yara is that every sign is in Spanish. Not just for transit purposes while you’re driving your car but also in stores; they have Spanish names and sell Spanish goods. Most of the graffiti carries that spirit on, too. This was enough of a surprise, but it went further from there. At any time, you’re able to grab your smartphone to take pictures or investigate reference images during missions. While not fully interactive, I found the phone’s UI to be entirely in Spanish as well.

These decisions help to create subtle, yet meaningful moments as one traverses the region. I was taken aback when I heard the protagonist singing over songs on the radio in perfect Spanish. Interestingly enough, this happened again on several occasions, but it also included songs in English. Moments like these are a great showcase of the plurality of cultures that intersect every day with the media we consume, and it’s extremely common for music in particular.

Sadly, the overall dialogue between characters is more uneven. There were some occasions during cutscenes where people spoke in full Spanish for a few seconds, but they all defaulted to the often exaggerated Spanglish I mentioned before. Screens scattered across the world often show speeches from Castillo on national TV, but while the presenter introduces him in Spanish, the speeches are always in English instead. Halfway through the main story, I couldn’t stop thinking about the missed opportunity to have the local characters speak their local language freely instead.

Max Payne 3 is one of the rare instances where this idea was presented, with the townsfolk of São Paulo, Brazil speaking Portuguese around Max. The writing wasn’t stellar, considering that characters relied a bit too much on cursing to express themselves, but it was still a bold choice. Brazilians didn’t need a translation, but English-speaking folks have been on a mission to translate everything from dialogue to other environmental objects, such as TV shows and newspapers. When part of the background interactions and imagery aren’t translated, it leads to a particular sense of authenticity that wouldn’t be present otherwise. 

In one particular sequence in Far Cry 6, two characters broadcast a song live as you defend both audio and light equipment surrounding the stage. Interestingly enough, this set piece begins with a cutscene focused on the singer, and the song lyrics are fully captioned in English. The song is then repeated on loop without captions as you play the mission, but the context is established early. Whereas the lack of captions in Max Payne 3 toys with the idea of seeing the protagonist in a foreign country without knowledge of the primary language, there is no narrative to back this up in Far Cry 6.

As a writer from Argentina who works for international outlets, I always play games in English. Pretty much all I’ve learned over the years has been from pure practice and exposition, whether it is from games, movies, music, or my work itself. Unlike Rojas, my phone isn’t in Spanish, but this comes from a place of being used to living through my second language on a daily basis. As I navigated Yara and encountered signs to read or dialogue exchanges that weren’t captioned, however, I was able to be on the opposite side for once, understanding the world and the people around me without the need for captions or a quick Google search.

Games that prioritize Spanish over English are few and far between, even when their settings are inspired by local cultures and regions. For small studios trying to break through internationally, this can vary greatly. The Game Kitchen, a team based in Seville, Spain, initially wrote the script for Blasphemous in Spanish. As the developers mentioned in an interview, months prior to the end of development, they decided to release the game in English. Budget constraints couldn’t justify having both languages, so they opted for the “right commercial choice” between the two. But these budgetary concerns aren’t the same for a conglomerate of studios as big as Ubisoft.

As I played through Lost Judgment during the past few weeks, a spin-off that comes from a series of games that have always been predominantly in Japanese, I realized how accustomed I’ve become to subtitles. Both Lost Judgment and Yakuza: Like a Dragon are recent examples of localization with optional English voice over as well. And I believe that option should be present for various reasons. But it’s strange to see a game set in Cuba with the option to select Latin American Spanish voice-over when it should be the opposite case.

During the latter half of the main story, Far Cry 6 introduces a Canadian antagonist who fails to pronounce Spanish properly during an interview with a local news channel. Then, after an encounter with Rojas, he mocks the protagonist by saying that there’s “surely a fiesta” waiting for them “with a piñata and everything.” It’s supposed to showcase an English-speaking person from the first world who is only interested in exploiting Yara for his personal gain and can’t be bothered to say the right verbs during a short conference. But it doesn’t come across that way because every Yaran character in the game talks like this.

I had multiple issues with the ways Yara and its inhabitants are presented in Far Cry 6. But what hurt the most was seeing the many ways the game could have put Spanish in the spotlight, defying the predominance of English in Latin American settings. Ultimately, that promise goes unfulfilled. Unlike Max Payne, we shouldn’t be tourists in our own countries.

“I hopped into the lounge, with myself, and was baffled to see that this dumb idea actually worked.”

One day during the testing of Dance Central VR in the Harmonix office, Robbie Russell was struggling with a very particular problem. They were running a multiplayer check of a social hub feature where up to four players can hang out in a private visual space and take part in dances, play mini-games, or just chat. But everyone else in quality assurance (QA) was busy at the time. So Russell came up with a workaround.

“You can’t just log someone in and then take the headset off because eventually it’ll time out,” they say. “So me, in my infinite dumbassery, put two headsets on, one Oculus Quest and one Oculus Rift, and strapped two sets of controllers to my wrist. The Rift controllers had holes big enough that I could slip my hands through them and wear them like very stupid bracelets while the Quest controllers fit in my hand normally. That became my go-to way to check multiplayer stuff for the rest of the project.”

Finding ways to cheat video game features and mechanics is not uncommon in QA. Testers are expected to dive into each corner of the experience in a thorough manner, often multiple times, to ensure that everything is working as intended. DIY solutions and shortcuts are bound to happen to optimize time. When it comes to QA testing for music and fitness games, however, these hacks aren’t just a way to save time — they’re a necessity.

The physical component of these genres, all the way from Dance Dance Revolution to Ring Fit Adventure, has always made them unique. Breaking a sweat with a drum kit in Rock Band or strapping a Joy-Con around your leg to go for a jog in Nintendo’s fitness RPG are not experiences you find in most games. But while players can pause or take breaks at any time, testers have to juggle these activities on a 9-5 routine. All of a sudden, the prospect of doing hundreds of jumping jacks or dancing to “What Does The Fox Say” a dozen times per day isn’t as enticing.

The development of EA Sports Active 2 is a prime example of this complexity and differences from traditional testing. The first in the series was released as a Wii exclusive in May 2009, offering body workouts that required wearing a strappable pouch to hold the Nunchuck controller, alongside a resistance band depending on the exercise. Its sequel, released in November 2010, was multiplatform. This meant that PlayStation 3 players used Move controllers, while Xbox 360 players had the just-released Kinect scanning their full body instead.

A contract QA tester with Volt Media Consulting working at EA Vancouver at the time, who we’ll be calling Kyle upon his request for anonymity, recalls the project as a nightmare. “It was kinda like one of those Benny Hill sketches where everyone is running around,” he says over a Discord call.

QA was divided into three groups, one per platform, and Kyle was part of the Xbox 360 team. For both him and his co-workers, this meant learning the ins and outs of Kinect’s first iteration. There was no training manual available. Aside from the availability of an engineer (who was also learning on the fly) to verify whether certain bugs came from the game or the Kinect itself, understanding how the hardware worked came purely from trial and error.

Due to the sensor-tracking nature of the device, the entire office floor had to be adapted. Testers taped off and fragmented the room into triangle-shaped spaces after finding out exactly where the limits of the Kinect’s sensor started and ended, marking the perfect spot — an imaginary box that doesn’t exist for anyone except the hardware. 

Everyone was sharing desks to avoid moving their own all the time — as that would ruin the invisible spot — while being extra careful during walks around the office to prevent being read in somebody else’s triangle. Even jackets hanging on the walls had to be carefully placed. But the worst moments were when the device couldn’t read people at all, whether that was because they were using dark colors or wearing baggy clothes like a hoodie. Figuring out what to wear at work became part of the learning process.

“The Kinect used infrared,” Kyle continues. “In the summer, when it can get over [80 degrees Fahrenheit] in Vancouver, the air conditioner ran through the entire building. If you by chance had one of the massive air vents in your triangle with cold air blowing on you, you would lose your body being read.” Since the Kinect could only read a person by their body temperature, the team had to make covers or lids to block the air conditioning vents. 

According to interviews with eight current and former QA workers in AAA studios and outsource companies, not all offices offered the proper accommodation to cover the basic needs of this kind of testing. Elements such as showers, proper ventilation, hydration at hand, and sound-proof spaces varied greatly.

An anonymous source who worked on Just Dance for Ubisoft Reflections says the office was well-equipped, including showers and gym mats to dance on. There were around 10 testers on Just Dance 4, with more at other Ubisoft studios due to co-development. “We had a lot of space and the way they’d set up the consoles and PCs made it easy to test and input bugs quickly,” they add.

While working on Xbox Fitness at an outsource studio, one former QA recalls the company commissioning a purpose-built gym to be constructed above a kitchen and bathroom stalls, providing ventilation and preventing noise disturbances. In addition, the team was also able to expense appropriate clothing after requesting a budget for it.

The inclusion of properly equipped, separated spaces for QA that work on these types of games is crucial. Not just to keep singing or loud noises at a minimum, but also to divide such different work environments. When daily tasks demand physical activity in the way these tests do, it becomes the equivalent of putting an office and a gym under the same roof.

A former QA on Rock Band 4 and the expansion Rock Band Rivals, as part of the outsourcing studio Keywords, originally worked in a noise-proof room located within the main floor. The company later had it torn down to expand the space, so QA (composed of around 16 testers) was relocated with everybody else. “I tested mainly drums and vocals which is an obvious distraction for everybody,” they mention. “Couldn’t do much about it.”

At the Harmonix office, Russell (who is currently a senior QA at Proletariat working on Spellbreak) adds that there was a dedicated room for drum testing in Rock Band, and meeting rooms would often be booked entirely to do full-band runs when needed. But for the most part, people would “always hear somebody clacking away at a guitar or quietly humming at their desk to test vocal pitches.”

There was plenty of room for QA to do their jobs safely as well as hydration available. Sadly, aside from a member-exclusive gym in the building (which was free for salaried employees), there were no office showers available. This is similar to how amenities worked in EA Vancouver. According to Kyle, there were showers and lockers available in the gym, but only full-time employees had access to it. The EA Sports Active 2 QA team, due to how chaotic the project was, was granted this privilege. But this wasn’t the norm for contractors. “It was kind of encouraged among the team to take breaks and not overexert yourself,” Russell explains. “But it’s rapid physical activity, you’re gonna get sweaty eventually.”

Caelyn Sandel, Caves of Qud developer and former QA at Harmonix, recalls the encouragement for “everyone to bathe regularly” from the team leads. “I’m not saying it never got ripe, but it wasn’t a persistent issue.” That being said, Sandel recalls a specific day that stood out from the rest. “One time the HVAC system had some kind of crisis and that smelled so bad that we all evacuated and went to Flour Bakery. That was a fun day except for the horrible stink.”

The lack of widely available showers isn’t unique to Harmonix or EA. During a CEDEC 2020 presentation reported by Famitsu and translated by PushDustin on Twitter, it was mentioned that the Ring Fit Adventure office only had one, so the testing team would have to wait sometimes. (Nintendo declined our request for comment.)

The intensity of the required effort from testers, even as they all juggle far more ordinary QA tasks in between (inputting bugs, working on tickets on platforms such as JIRA, maintaining databases, and so on), can lead to a myriad of results. Not all QAs are professional drummers, dancers, or fitness trainers.

Two of the developers recall how the constant movement and exercising helped them to get in better shape, one case being the result of the studio hiring professional dancers who had teaching experience and would lead testers through stretches and better practices. For others, the training activity during the day job was a compliment to already established exercising / health habits, while a few opted to not change theirs.

While pretty much everyone I spoke to mentioned ways in which they could get away with reducing the physical workload, it’s important to note that tests that involved completionist achievements or high difficulties would usually require traditional testing. Without the possibility of workarounds, some tests could only be done by someone who excelled at the task at hand.

These logistics are part of daily planning. For a studio like Harmonix, this meant making sure there were enough working instruments for particular tests, knowing who in the office had a reliable vibrato to test out certain exploits on vocals, and, ultimately, recognizing whether there was someone who had the required level of skill to test specific bugs.

Some cases could be bypassed by just playing in lower difficulties, but the full spectrum had to be tested at some point to avoid inaccurate results. Drum testing a fake plastic kit might not seem like much — yet, as Russell points out, playing it at a decent skill level “is a huge burden and often caused a lot of issues.” If the two people who were good enough at them to play on the expert difficulty weren’t in the office, then those bugs had to wait.

In most cases, testers were able to take breaks throughout the day without objection from leads or management, sometimes outside of settled company breaks as well. EA, for example, offered two 15-minute breaks across mornings and evenings, on top of the lunch hour. Everyone would usually be understanding, allowing QA to trade tasks between them and, once again, encouraging them to find ways to cheat exercises.

Based on those I interviewed, studios and managers mostly had the right intentions in terms of setting healthy boundaries. But in practice, issues often took place. Testers who suffered any kind of injury outside of work still had to put up with physical testing, although there was a push to focus more on administrative work during the recovery periods. Scenarios like this, however, are inevitable — even in safe and accommodating environments. 

Two particular cases stood out during interviews. An anonymous QA who worked on the Nintendo DS game New International Track & Field says that while there weren’t any set breaks, the team didn’t need to put 100 percent effort in, except for high-end tasks or multiplayer tests. The latter would get “a bit too competitive” when the producers would ask the team to take part in a game mode that involved playing every event back to back. Producers would claim the testers wouldn’t be able to beat them, staking “free morning Starbucks on the challenge” as an incentive.

A similar scenario took place in EA for EA Sports Active 2 by a POC (point of contact). Back in the day, they acted as a contact intermediary for managers or developers to get and spread work orders to employees. While our source is unsure whether this came as an order, he recalls a voluntary incentive for testers: whoever lost the most weight under a certain period of time would receive a prize. The reward was a one-month gym pass or a punch card that could be used for a gym or yoga class, one-on-one training, or even a consultation with a chiropractor, all activities that were already available for full-time employees.

On social media, it’s common to see people joking around how QA testers who work on these games must be in excellent shape, but the reality is far more difficult to parse. Office preparations and day-to-day responsibilities play a big role, but so do each person’s capabilities and health conditions. In most cases, the aforementioned problems do nothing but strengthen or add upon the issues already in place that testers have to deal with across the video game industry as a whole.

In a report on Paradox Interactive, one tester mentions how the team “often got overlooked and it was very, very obvious that QA was lowest down on the hierarchical ladder.” During an interview with EGM, a contractor who worked on Titanfall 2 paints a similar picture to the clear and enforced distinction between salaried employees and contractors, as the latter are often subject to lower pay and lack of benefits. In that same report, another source calls working QA for VR projects a “horrific job.” Both internships and contract work are especially common with young developers, offering a foot in the industry in exchange for deplorable conditions. In many cases, QA is considered a stepping stone instead of receiving the same recognition as any other role in game development.

Sandel considers her time at Harmonix a “weird employment experience,” as she was kept as a contractor (alongside the professional dancers hired for Dance Central 2) for two years with “no benefits and low pay.” She mentions it was a different world after getting hired full-time for Dance Central 3. “Harmonix’s healthcare coverage is the best in the industry by a country mile. I’m still kicking myself for only transitioning after I stopped working there.”

For many testers, one of the things that made these challenging conditions more tolerable was the camaraderie that emerged from working with a small team on intense projects. “I have this really strong positive memory from close to the end of Dance Central’s production,” Sandel says, “trying to record the filter data for individual moves over and over because the first scoring system was a mess. We were up late and kind of delirious, fueling ourselves on stress and whiskey. We crunched a lot for the first game and I definitely sort of fell for the exhilaration of it, which was helped by how personable and fun to be around the team members were. Thankfully, crunch eased up a bit on subsequent projects, but we did still crunch.”

The former Ubisoft QA recalls their time working on the Just Dance series with “a massive wave of nostalgia” as they “genuinely had so much fun on that project.” They fondly remember one specific contraption called “Sweaty Betty,” which involved strapping a controller to a desk fan to test the scoring during Just Dance 3’s development.

But the series’s tight schedule often resulted in late nights. “It’s difficult for me to critically analyze exactly why there was so much overtime on that project since I was so new to the industry at the time, but Just Dance was usually featured at E3 too so there was a lot of work to get that ready for the reveal.” The source adds that at that point in time in their career, they were “extremely stoked to be in the industry, so I kind of expected it.”

According to Kyle, in order to avoid overtime, the team was split into day and night shifts. During the last few months of development, EA put budget aside to offer employees working late nights “10 to 15 dollars” toward the campus’s own restaurant for dinner. A second Volt Media contractor recalls taking part in the so-called “graveyard shifts.” During the last month or two of the project, some shifts would go from 8AM to 8PM, while the other half of the team worked 8PM to 8AM. The source did about five nights a week.

While most of the stories from the developers I spoke to happened years ago, it’s worth noting that the issues surrounding QA continue to this day. Music and fitness games have their own particular challenges when the work conditions aren’t suitable for the physical task at hand. But at the very least, this also opens the door to inventive solutions. As absurd and anecdotal as they may sound, they’re often a lifesaver.

During a graveyard shift, the second EA contractor recalls one time when the team was asked to test the Kinect in low-light situations. Since the project was one of the first games for the hardware, the UX was uncharted territory. This, of course, led to its own array of experimental testing.

“For a lot of us, around 5AM, when your last two brain cells have decided they’ve had enough, that’s when the real ingenuity kicks in,” the source concludes. “To ensure the game would pick up the user’s motions in a low-light environment, some of us ended up using a combination of cubicle walls and blankets to build tunnels that we would modify to allow more or less light in to see how the game responded. It’s the only time in my life I’ve been paid to build blanket forts.”