The Art of... Arcade Paradise
With its vibrant games arcade populated with homages to classic games throughout the ages, Arcade Paradise is a miscellany of gameplay and art styles not seen since game compilations regularly came on cassette. Andreas Firnigl, CEO and founder of Nosebleed Interactive, presses play to continue…
HOW DID THE IDEA FOR AP’S VISUAL DESIGN COME ABOUT?
Andreas Firnigl, CEO and founder of Nosebleed Interactive
In terms of UI and overlays, we needed something to tie what is quite a wide range of disparate activities and ideas together. Since Ashley, the lead character, sees the world as a game, the UI looking like an arcade game overlay just worked. In terms of the fully playable arcade games themselves, because we have a canvas of games from the late seventies right up to the nineties we just decided what games suited what looks. We have early vector graphics stuff, to 8-bit, through to more advanced 16-bit with mode7 stylings, right up to early, low poly 3D. But we wanted the sense of place to feel real. Like you’re really playing these arcades in a physical space, so screens all come with CRT effects and artefacts. Older games might have a really bad monitor with tracking effects and so on. We felt this really sells the atmosphere.
HOW DO YOU GET AROUND CAPTURING THE LOOK AND FEEL OF AN ARCADE WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO FEATURE THE ACTUAL VIDEOGAMES? We DO feature actual videogames. That was one of the major things we set out
50 | MCV/DEVELOP September 2022
to do. Alongside running the laundromat and arcade, everything needed to be fully playable. And not in some throwaway, minigame way. These are full games. A few of the bigger games might even take three or four hours to complete. At various points we discussed licensed games but we always felt coming up with our own takes on genres or classics afforded us much more freedom to build this world. The game is chock full of references and nods and homages, but we were always careful to bring something new or unexpected to the mix. One of the first games that’s unlocked is Racer Chaser, an obvious homage to both Pac-Man and GTA. My boss at a previous company, Steve Banks, was one of the designers on the original GTA at DMA and he maintained that GTA (even the modern ones) were just Pac- Man with cars. It’s always stuck with me. The other thing creating our own games allowed us to do is tie them much more closely into the game loop. Each game comes with a number of achievement-like “Goals” to complete, which will increase that machine’s profitability. These help tie each arcade game into the overarching metagame. I think the approval process for adding these to licensed titles might have been really hard.
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