Hi-Fi Rush has become an instant success after Microsoft and Tango Gameworks revealed the game and shadow dropped it during the recent Xbox Developer Direct, giving fans a rhythm-infused action game that no one was expecting from the Japanese studio. And as it turns out, the entire game was inspired by an iconic scene from an Edgar Wright movie.
In an interview on the official Xbox Podcast, game director John Johanes revealed that Hi-Fi Rush has been in the works in some capacity since Tango released the original The Evil Within title in October 2014—though it was only a pitch back then.
Hi-Fi Rush was being treated as a way for the studio to break out of the horror-genre mold it is best known for, with Tango internally noting that the character action title could “completely change the image” of the studio and would push them as developers to see “what’s possible, even, in the game universe.”
Following the launch of The Evil Within 2 in October 2017, Hi-Fi Rush became a “palette cleanser” for some of the Tango devs as they delved into the world of action, character-focused, and rhythm games. And, as an inspiration, the team looked to how director Edgar Wright would tie music into key moments of action and character-building within his films. Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World got a special mention from the game director.
“One of the earliest things we had—and this kind of influenced the direction on our style for how we did things—was the movies that Edgar Wright as a director would make,” Johanes said. “And I know maybe people would compare this to Baby Driver which is about music—music tied to the images very coherently—but actually, this pre-dated that significantly. There was a scene in the original Shaun of the Dead that had them fighting in a bar to a Queen soundtrack that was choreographed to it.”
From there, the Wright inspiration only grew as Johanes took that idea and went “what if we made a game that was exactly like that?”
Just from what was shown in the Developer Direct, and the reaction to the game across social media in the days after its surprise launch, you can tell the team nailed this idea from a presentation and gameplay perspective. It also helps when it is helmed by Masaaki Yamada, a legendary game dev who worked as a designer on Devil May Cry, Okami, Bayonetta, and a director on Viewtiful Joe 2—so you can see where some of the quality came from.
The concept grew from that single idea and took on a life of its own, with Hi-Fi Rush’s gameplay modeling itself off of that one scene and expanding it into an entire world of its own. Johanes also noted that Scott Pilgrim, the character, was used as an early baseline for the game’s main character Chai, as the team wanted the defective rockstar to be someone who isn’t evil, but “just almost dumb.”
Who knows, maybe games like Hi-Fi Rush will become a more common sight from Xbox Game Studios moving forward as Microsoft looks to bolster its first-party offerings in new ways.
