Mixtape is a four-hour narrative adventure about Stacy Rockford, a teenage girl in the fictional 90s suburb of Blue Moon Lagoon, and it lands as the second game from Johnny Galvatron’s Melbourne studio, Beethoven and Dinosaur. Set over a single day, the game follows Stacy as she faces one last stretch with her best friends, Slater and Cassandra, before she flies to New York tomorrow.
Her goal is as simple as it is desperate: she wants to shove a mixtape into the hands of a superstar music supervisor she believes will give her a job. That chase gives Mixtape its engine, and the game keeps moving with skateboard riding, kissing, toilet-papering a house, riding a dinosaur, learning to fly, making a perfect slushie and even renting a video while stoned. The opening track on Stacy’s tape is Devo’s 1982 minor hit That’s Good, setting the tone for a soundtrack that also includes Roxy Music, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Portishead, the Jesus and Mary Chain and more than 20 other bands.
The game’s emotional pull comes from its touchstones. Beethoven and Dinosaur leans hard into the ache and swagger of Dazed and Confused, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, High Fidelity and Wayne’s World, then folds those references into a story about leaving home before you are ready. Galvatron said his own musical history helped shape that instinct: in 1995, when he was 14, a cousin gave him Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and in 2001 the soundtrack to Donnie Darko left a lasting mark on him.
That nostalgia was not built as a museum piece. Galvatron said the team wanted deep cuts rather than the most obvious singles, and he described one song in particular as the song that had sat at No. 1 on his personal playlist every year for as long as he has been able to track it. He said he hears it every day and loves it more each time. He also said he does not think there is a track like Tonight, Tonight from any other band. Mixtape’s soundtrack choices follow that same logic: familiar enough to catch the ear, but chosen to carry the story rather than decorate it.
There is a wrinkle in that polish. Mixtape was made by a 12-person team in Australia, even though its world is built from American suburbs, American films and American music. That distance gives the game a slightly off-kilter edge, and it helps explain why it can move so freely between grounded teen comedy and magical realism. One sequence, in which the player escapes from police in a shopping trolley, comes from producer Dean Woody Woodward’s own life, a detail that sits somewhere between joke and confession.
Galvatron has said he thinks one day the studio will make a game set in Australia, but Mixtape shows how far Beethoven and Dinosaur can stretch when the story pulls first. He put it plainly: sometimes the game tells you what it needs to be, and the story drags you in one direction, which is where it took the team. For now, that direction is Blue Moon Lagoon, and the question Mixtape answers is whether a teenager can hold on to one perfect day long enough to make the leap into the next one. It can, and that is the point.
