Jupiter & Mars
How Tigertron’s virtual adventure could reconnect us with reality
PS4, PSVR
Most days, we’re sat between the same four walls, working within familiar limits; today, we find ourselves suspended just below the surface of the ocean. A deep, dark expanse falls away beneath our feet. Our stomach follows suit. VR adventure Jupiter & Mars is set in the ocean of an apocalyptic future Earth that probably isn’t far off, when you think about it. And the point is to think about it. Environmentally-focused studio Tigertron’s first game attempts to reconnect us both with nature, and our relationship to it.
It’s a story about two dolphins – the titular Jupiter and Mars – working together to navigate the mess left behind by mankind. Creative director James Mielke had his own moment of reconnection while working at Japanese studio Q Entertainment in 2009 after watching The Cove, a documentary about dolphin-hunting practices in Japan. “By the time I finished, I was in tears,” he says. “I wasn’t sniffling, I was bawling. I could not believe that we could be so callous. And I felt like I could be doing more.” The first idea of the seed of Jupiter & Mars was born; in 2012, Mielke would help found Tigertron. What the New York studio has created is a dazzling virtual space of dizzying scale. Down here, the giant iron skeletons of the world we know litter the seabed: the London Eye looms over us as we swim around as Jupiter by tilting our head. Gentle puzzles guide us: we fetch manta rays, avoiding spiky sea urchins, to help open a gate. Dodging behind rocks avoids audio-harassment devices, and tapping Circle has AI partner Mars ram breakable doors. In one Rez- like scene, a grateful turtle mother leads us underneath a whale tail, into a deep cave twinkling with bioluminescent barnacles and pulsing with music. “We are, first and foremost, trying to make an entertaining game, a cool game,” Mielke says. “[Tetsuya] Mizuguchi is my mentor, and I’m still trying to fly that synaesthesia flag wherever I go.”
It is tough, however, to make a game with an environmental message without being labelled preachy – or worse, ‘edutainment’. “We could very realistically be setting ourselves up to fail, because gamers don’t want to be preached to, and the environmentalist media might not ever care,” Mielke says. “But we want to show that there are other ways to communicate with an entirely new demographic.” There have been precedents: Katamari Damacy bore an environmental message, though it mainly rolled straight over most players’ heads. “Yeah, the garbage-ball metaphor probably got lost in the fact that the game was so fun,” Mielke says. He and his team are determined to stick close to reality, even if it’s sometimes uncomfortable.
Designed for niche hardware and tied to activism, Tigertron must work harder than most to position Jupiter & Mars in front of people. But its trance-like beauty and aweinspiring sense of scale are hard to ignore once there – largely because they’re so grounded in a reality that we too often forget. “Our planet is interesting enough without having to devise a sci-fi world,” Mielke says. “All you have to do is watch a documentary on the deep sea. That stuff is crazy looking! It’s like, why are you worried about Narnia when you could just be focusing on Earth?
“We could have had players collect orbs or coins, and have that represent something else,” Mielke says. “But on the news, we see birds trapped in plastic, turtles with deformed shells. So for us, it should be satisfying to free the turtle from the plastic. It should be satisfying to use your powers to blow the oil off the manta ray.” He pauses, and laughs. “This is a not-so-subtle metaphor for real life: it should be satisfying to help creatures.”