Tegan and Sara, F–ked Up, Metric Tapped for Indie Rock Video Game
Tegan and Sara, Metric, Fucked Up, Metz, Cadence Weapon, Lights and more will contribute music and avatars to a new arcade-style indie music game titled LOUD on Planet X. The game, which also features original scores written by Fucked Up’s Mike Haliechuk and Jonah Falco and Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning and Justin Peroff, is aiming to arrive on various gaming platforms this fall.
LOUD on Planet X combines tower defense and tap games with some of Toronto’s best acts. The premise of the game involves the player choosing one of 12 musical acts who, upon completing a Level 1 hometown gig, go through a portal to a foreign planet. There, they need to defend their stage against marauding hordes of aliens by tapping to the music and using an assortment of weapons, including speakers, strobe lights, fog machines and bouncers.
“The idea for LOUD on Planet X sprang out of obsessively playing old arcade classics on a MAME [Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator] with the audio down, listening to my own music or checking out what friends were listening to,” Alex Jansen, Creative Producer at Pop Sandbox Productions tells Rolling Stone. “Around the same time, I also got pretty into Plants Vs. Zombies, and we somehow landed with a strange hybrid of classic shooter meets rhythm game with tower defense elements.”
As Pop Sandbox Productions inch toward LOUD on Planet X‘s final stage of production, the Toronto-based game developers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to help them reach their $50,000 goal. The more money raised, the more acts will be added to a slate that also includes July Talk and Austra, with a goal of 12 artists and 24 songs.
Through their Kickstarter campaign, LOUD on Planet X is offering up unique perks to those who pledge, ranging from a green 7-inch featuring the game’s original scores and a Michael DeForge-illustrated T-shirt to limited edition signed illustrations of the involved acts’ avatars. The perks also escalate from $10 (a thank you in the game credits) to $5,000 (VIP tickets to the game’s launch party, an in-game avatar of yourself, executive producer credit and much more).
More pledges also means LOUD on Planet X can be developed for more platforms; Pop Sandbox hopes to bring the game to Playstation Network, Steam and mobile devices by October, with planned Nintendo Wii-U expansion if Pop Sandbox reach their first stretch goal.
Below, you can hear a snippet of Haliechuk and Falco’s score, which morphs from pulverizing and breakneck to ethereally ambient to triumphant and acoustic in a mere minute.