The Making Of...
Finger snaps, fan art and fragments left behind – the story behind Simogo’s pop heartbreaker
The story behind Simogo’s spellbinding ing pop heartbreaker Sayonara a Wild Hearts
Format iOS, PS4, Switch
Developer Simogo
Publisher Annapurna Interactive
Origin Sweden
Release 2019
Parallel Universes is the 13th, and one of the most conceptually ingenious, of Sayonara Wild Hearts’ 23 tracks. Here, the player character rides a motorbike down a course flanked by a pair of masked twins: the Stereo Lovers. With each snap of their fingers – on Switch, this is accompanied by a small but perceptible buzz of HD Rumble you can feel in your palms – the course shifts between two realities. Click. You steer left to gather a trail of score-boosting hearts. Click. You swerve right to avoid a wall that suddenly appears in front of you. Though from start to finish it lasts no more than 90 seconds, it’s so beautifully executed and thematically fitting you’d never believe it was an 11th-hour inclusion – so when Simogo’s Simon Flesser admits it was put together in a little more than a week, and squeezed in just before the game was sent to QA, we’re quite taken aback. Really? “Yeah,” he says. “We were working on a WarioWare- style megamix mode, which was functional and up-and-running, but opted for giving the Lovers one more stage instead.” Appealing as that mode might sound, it’s hard not to think Simogo made the right choice.
Yet if there were mere days between conception and completion of the last tune to make the tracklist, it had taken years for development to reach full speed; in contrast, “months and months” of effort went into the first finished stage, Begin Again. By which time,
Sayonara Wild Hearts had already undergone a major shift in direction. Inspired by The World Ender, a song by indie-folk band Lord Huron, Flesser first imagined a game about “an avenger that comes back from the dead”. Then, taking cues from the teddy girl and café racer subcultures, he drew a picture of a masked woman as the lead, which became the focal point of early development. At first, the game was much darker in tone, with the music blending surf rock and Ethiopian influences. Until one day – as discussed in the Post Script to the review in E338 – Flesser was hit by an epiphany while listening to Chvrches, and decided that pop music was the way forward.
To compose the game’s centrepiece pop songs, Flesser called upon regular collaborator Jonathan Eng, the man largely responsible for the soundtrack of The Sailor’s Dream as well as songs for Year Walk and Device 6. Begin Again, a song about deciding to leave a relationship behind and start afresh, was the first he sent over, having been given very little direction. From there, Flesser began to provide more detailed outlines: “I’d have requests, but they were more about tempo and such,” he says. “For a few songs I provided some keywords or phrases that Jonathan could play
“THE INSTRUMENTAL STAGES WERE EASIER, BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T HAVE TO BE SO RIGID TO THE FORMULAS OF A POP SONG”
around with.” When Eng returned, Flesser would offer some ideas or lyric feedback until each song was completed.
Another friend of Simogo, Daniel Olsén, provided the arrangements to make Eng’s words and melodies sing; Flesser shares two of Eng’s early submissions (these appear on Fading Memories, a cassette compilation of demos and unused tracks recently released by publisher Annapurna Interactive) and they sound remarkably different to the finished versions. Olsén was also responsible for the instrumental tracks between the main songs that turned what was originally planned as an EP into an LP – including a remix of Debussy’s Clair de Lune, transforming what has recently become something of a videogame staple into something delightfully new. For these, Flesser says there was a little more back and forth between himself and Olsén – although not because they were more difficult to get right. “There was just more wiggle room for Daniel and I to play around with ideas. In fact, I’d say the instrumental stages were easier, because they didn’t have to be so rigid to the formulas of a pop song.” Meanwhile, the final piece of the aural puzzle fell into place with the arrival of vocalist Linnea Olsson, around ten months into development. By which stage, Begin Again had been fully composed, although the stage it would soundtrack was still incomplete.
“I always knew we had something with the music,” Flesser says, yet it wasn’t until Begin Again was fully finished that Simogo knew for sure it was on the right track: “It was quite an easy thing to just hand to people and they’d immediately get the idea.” But eight months later this was one of only two finished stages – and the other would eventually be scrapped. Having grown accustomed to setting itself limitations for its previous games, the studio found its latest project beginning to drift alarmingly. Was it a case of too many ideas? Overscoping? “It wasn’t just one thing,” he says. “We usually work within a box of rules, be that platform or scope, and we didn’t do that for a long time with this one.” Flesser goes so far as to suggest it’s possible the game would never have been finished without a little more accountability – which Annapurna’s involvement duly provided.
At that point, he says, Simogo was still in denial about how long it was going to take to finish the game, though with a publisher now on board, the studio began taking steps to get stages done quicker. Yet it did so without cutting back too many of its ideas; the finished game proves it simply packed them in tighter. Still, a few were abandoned – more owing to concerns about overcomplicating the player experience (this is the rare game you can play with one hand, even on console) than giving itself too much work. Interstitial sections with free movement were cast aside to sustain a stronger pacing, while aiming mechanics were simplified to avoid the need for any kind of tutorial. Other stages stayed, but ended up quite different from their original form, the oddly soothing twilight drive of Night Drift being the prime example. “It had quite a different ruleset – something much more like Out Run with a Time Extend – but that kind of thing made it feel like we were creating a game collection instead of a game.”
After a quick tangential aside, in which Flesser wishes for a parallel universe where Out Run 2 was on Switch (“Literally no one cares about the licence! Oh well”) he notes that he wanted Sayonara Wild Hearts to feel like the kind of game Sega doesn’t make any more – “or anyone else, for that matter”. If you’ve played the game, you’ll detect the influence of Space Harrier and Rez, with hints of After Burner and even Jet Set Radio. As such, he’s slightly put out whenever anyone likens the game to endless runners instead: “I don’t have anything against them, but Sayonara Wild Hearts is only a runner if you’re completely unaware of games before 2000.”
It’s not endless either, although it can feel that way if you’re trying to earn a gold ranking on the Album Arcade mode that unlocks after you finish the game. While on your initial playthrough each track is accessed separately from the menu, here the 23 tracks run consecutively, with only brisk cutscene breaks interrupting an almost seamless 50-something minutes of play. Given that Sayonara Wild Hearts was conceived as a ‘pop album videogame’, did Simogo think about having it the other way round? “Tons and tons,” Flesser says. “Up until the very end. But the album mode was actually added very late. We didn’t want to add the mode before we could get down loading times until they felt invisible. Ultimately, we felt the freedom of being able to replay and understand the game properly before being tossed into a one-hour session felt more fair.” We venture that this also allows the player to instantly replay a favourite track – much as they might do with a song they’ve heard for the first time – and Flesser agrees. “Also, as unfashionable as it is, it is very much a game that is built around ‘rehearsal’ and learning the stages, which feels better suited to dividing it up.”
Though it’s a less story-focused game than much of the studio’s recent output, Sayonara Wild Hearts’ tale of a young woman recovering from a broken heart seems to have resonated strongly with players. So did Simogo collectively or individually draw upon personal experiences of heartbreak, or was it aiming to capture something more universal? The tarot theme, we note, seems to lend itself well to several interpretations, though Flesser suggests the music played a more important role. “Heartbreak and pop music go hand in hand with each other,” he says. “The thing about that kind of pop music is that it is quite broad in terms of emotions. It’s not specific.”
In other words, we shouldn’t expect a definitive answer to our question. “I want it to be up for interpretation, like a song. If I talk too much about what it means to me, it will lose its meaning to an audience. And I don’t want it to.”
Happily, he is prepared to talk about the song that arguably marks the game’s emotional high point. With its lyrics about treasuring “fragments left behind” and keening backing vocals, The World We Knew sounds like someone grieving over a relationship’s end just as they come to terms with it being over. Conceived as a direct
response to Begin Again, the song’s lyrics didn’t change, though its overall tone – and the design of the level – was originally very different. “It was going to be a doo-wop song performed by a robot,” Flesser says, surprising us for the second time. “I had this vague scenario in mind, where the Hermit would call upon a jukebox robot that would perform this song while attacking, as you chased roller skaters around a circular rink.”
It sounds like a fun idea to us, though Flesser says it was nixed because he felt the doo-wop vibe was too jokey – the game has moments of humour, but this felt a little too knowing. Either way, it’s clear the song was always set to be quite a departure from the rest; Flesser says he wanted it to be the equivalent of Ouendan’s Over The Distance or Gitaroo Man’s Legendary Theme (specifically, the acoustic version). “It’s a little trick I like to do,” he says. “A finger snap at the audience – ‘Hey, you aren’t sleeping are you?’ – and then you go back to standard procedures again. Once a player thinks they’ve got the structure figured out, you come in with a twist.”
That audience has certainly been paying attention. Though Flesser doesn’t have any download figures to share, it’s clear the game has reached a wide player base through Apple Arcade alone – even if Simogo may have had understandable misgivings about what amounted to a stealth launch three days early through Apple’s beta programme. Judging by the sheer volume of fan art (of which a pleasantly surprised Flesser remarks, “It has plenty of characters and ticks off some pop-culture boxes that makes it inspiring for people to draw, I think,”) it’s attracted a devoted cult following. And so that partly fatalistic title – the ‘sayonara’ alluded to Flesser’s fear that this could well be Simogo’s final bow – seems to have been wide of the mark.
All the same, a post-launch tweet suggested this might still be farewell – for the time being, at any rate. “Things will likely be a little quiet from Simogo for a while now,” Flesser wrote. “But we’re sure we’ll see you again, someday, somewhere.” So, is this au revoir, or a more permanent adieu? “We’ve got to keep you on your toes a little,” he says. “It’s definitely some kind of goodbye. It’s all a little unclear at the moment. But yeah – new adventures ahead.” Whatever those adventures might be, it’s probably wise to expect the unexpected; another change of direction, another snap of the fingers. Click. And the horizon changes again.