Design Inspiration

What Inspired NLIR?

The Beastie Boys, Austin Powers, and Fighting Baseball for the Super Nintendo.

I used to go to a bar that constantly projected old MTV and VH1 on the wall, and whenever Intergalactic by The Beastie Boys would play I would get distracted from whatever conversation by the giant robot/monster fights. I love the camp of it, and I could never really get it out of my head how much fun it would be to be that giant monster fucking up the city.

Don’t get me wrong, being the giant robot would be fun, but there are already so many games where you fight other enemies your size and so many where you defend your base from some eldritch force. I thought I needed to take a page out of Molyneuxs very old playbook and let the player have fun being a villain.

Austin Powers is directly responsible for the grim shift in tone of the James Bond series. I don't think anyone is denying that. The Godzilla series also suffered a tone shift in the same decade, but I don't think Mike Meyers had a hand in that. It probably has something more to do with climate change becoming a real and recognized threat. I assume it became harder to make light of the avenging spirit of the earth when the earth was starting to wake up and take its revenge.

During the turn of the Godzilla series from campy to serious, the last Austin Powers movie had a throwaway joke about a monster who is legally distinct from Godzilla terrorizing the streets of Japan. While I've been making my “Kaiju” game, I've been saying that line “it looks like Godzilla, but due to international copyright laws, it is not” over and over again to myself, and I’ve been thinking about a silly series making fun of two different franchises that both started taking themselves way too seriously.

This is one of my favorite things in the history of apathetic localization, right up there with the makers of Call of Duty not putting graffiti in the real languages. It’s a series of “American” names made up by a Japanese game developer, and one of my potential pen names if I ever start writing books.

I love this picture partially because the names are funny and partially because of the attitude in the old gaming industry that it represents. The game went through localization, the developers knew the American market was going to be important for a baseball game, but still, the original developer couldn't be bothered to look up some real American names and no one ever corrected them. It is such a different feeling than even the indie side of the games industry today. Such an unserious attitude to a product that likely cost the company many millions of dollars to produce and that unseriousness resulted in pure gold.

I think that is the thread that ties these three things together, the unseriousness of the cardboard monster fight, the unseriousness of legally-not Godzilla, and the unseriousness of Bobson Dugnutt. That is what I want this game to be and what I want the players to feel when they play it. I want you to run out of the sea and smash up buildings and eat people with a goofy, unserious grin on your face.

If that sounds appealing, check out the Steam page for Nuclear Lizard Island Rampage and put it on your wish list, or read more about it on Reddit or more here.