Johnny Galvatron, it’s fair to say, is a passionate man.
Once the voice behind notorious scene band The Galvatrons, he’s now the mind behind developer Beethoven & Dinosaur. The creative director and his team are busy preparing for the release of their next game, Mixtape, a nostalgic trip through adolescence in the ’80s and ’90s that shares a musical quality with Beethoven & Dinosaur’s breakout game, The Artful Escape, released in 2021.
It’s a musical quality that Galvatron himself carries. “I was on tour in The Galvatrons, and I was touring everywhere, and I was like, ‘I never want to leave the house ever again’… I wrote a novel that I showed to no one, and then I was like, ‘How am I going to live?’ And I saw a little window for this rock opera called The Artful Escape, and I thought I had a pretty good run of being able to put it together. The only two people I knew who made games were Sean Slevin and Justin Blackwell. And we started Beethoven and Dinosaur.
“We did a Kickstarter, and it failed. And then I got a call from Annapurna [Interactive] who had seen the game on Reddit, and they’re like, ‘Are you going to be at PAX in Melbourne?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, we got a table. We got a demo. Come down.’ We didn’t have a demo. We didn’t have a table. We had nothing booked. We had three months to get it right.”
After playing a demo in their rapidly assembled booth, Annapurna signed on to publish the game, and The Artful Escape was a hit. Now, the team is looking ahead to Mixtape, which had a starring spot on this year’s Summer Games Fest lineup, where Galvatron was sweating in the crowd.
“I could see the teleprompter from where I was sitting… So I spent the whole time just seeing what the first lines of what [Geoff Keighley] was talking about. So that’s my level of nerves. I’m literally watching the teleprompter, waiting for the thing to come up,” he recalls.
And before the event was done, Summer Play Days rolled around. There, Galvatron was already getting to sit down and show his game to video game royalty. “[Double Fine Productions founder] Tim Schafer was there, [Naughty Dog studio head] Neil Druckmann was there.”
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“And I’m sitting there playing with Phil [Spencer]. You know, Phil from Xbox. THE Phil…We’re sitting there talking about the game, talking about Xbox, then someone comes over to me, George Bush-style and says, ‘[Hideo] Kojima (Metal Gear Solid, Death Stranding) is here, and he wants to play the game.’ I played the whole demo with him, it was like being in the room with Stanley Kubrick, it was crazy.”
So, how did Mixtape earn the praise of the CEO of Microsoft Gaming and three of the most well-regarded video game creators of the decade?
For one, it features tracks by The Cure, Iggy Pop, Joy Division, Portishead, Roxy Music, Smashing Pumpkins, Devo, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and many more, but Galvatron had a do or die inclusion. “I had to get ‘That’s Good’ by Devo, the song that opens the game. That was non-negotiable.”
“When you try and get the licensing for a lot of the bigger artists, it actually goes through the artist,” Galvatron explains. “It goes through [Devo co-founder] Mark Mothersbaugh; he has to tick off on it. That was super cool. Someone who owned a third of the rights to The Cure track we used was on a mountain, and we had to send someone up to go get them.”
But getting the music is only half the battle; the needle drop within the final product is just as important, and Galvatron is confident Mixtape won’t disappoint there. “A needle drop is always a culmination… when the gameplay is right, the narrative hits, you can use the level design and the artistry of the world you’ve constructed to hit that perfect point, and that’s when you play ‘Freak’ by Silverchair, right at that point, no other song,” he jokes.
Galvatron teases several moments in Mixtape in that vein, “maybe three or four,” but keeps the tracklist close to his chest when asked if there’s a moment he’s especially looking forward to players experiencing.
While Mixtape doesn’t yet have a release date attached, the first public demo of the game will debut at Big Games Night Out on Thursday, October 9th, alongside a slew of other Aussie-made games. Specifically, it’ll be in the retro-styled Electric Arcadia section, on a vintage rear projection TV.
Galvatron is “pretty excited about that. If my artists were in the room right now, they would throttle me knowing that it’s going to be on screen like that. And they have every right to.”
Mixtape, if it’s anything like its creator, looks to be filled with passion for the era and the signature music that immortalised it, and it seems likely it will be among the best Australian games of the year. But Galvaston has lots of love for his fellow Aussie developers, recommending a few games to come, saying, “I also want to shout out The Dungeon Experience. It’s got a demo on Steam, and you should check out The Big Walk when it comes out. They’re looking sick. And Mixtape. Please play that and buy it twice.”
Australia’s first playable demo of Beethoven & Dinosaur’s Mixtape is free to play at Electric Arcadia (October 3rd-9th at Melbourne’s Fed Square), a vintage Amusement Plaza made in collaboration with Big Games Night Out for Melbourne International Games Week 2025.
