SONIC TITAN Create Video Game to Showcase Rock Opera

Posted on Jan 16th 2013 5:00PM by Ian Gormely
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YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN

Toronto-and-Montreal noh-rock collective YAMANTAKA//SONIC TITAN have just a half-dozen southern Ontario dates on their current tour to promote last year's re-release of their debut album, YT//ST, by Paper Bag Records. But it's with good reason. On top of working on that album's much anticipated follow up, the band are currently hard at work on their very own video game.

Called Your Task//Shoot Things, a play on the band's initials, the game is being developed "in house" by the band's video and lights "wrangler" Aylwin Lo and drummer Alaska B.

"It's a cross-platform game that's a mix between a side-scrolling shooter and an RPG," explains singer Ruby Kato Atwood and will feature music from the band's debut album.

Atwood says that while she enjoys playing video games "Alaska is amazing [at them]," she says, adding that the drummer once joked, "One of the saddest things is that her parents will never know how truly good at video games she is."

While video games aren't the first thing that come to mind when fans think about the band, the collective see the medium as an affordable way to further explore their rock opera "Star," which was detailed on YT//ST.

"We did some multi-disciplinary experimental theatre at Buddies in Bad Times theater (in Toronto) and again at Pop Montreal," says Atwood. "It's really expensive and hard to do.

"We're finding that in terms of playing with experimental narratives and playing with audience relationships to that narrative, the video game platform is kind of mind-blowing. You're a player and you can choose the world that you're in.

"It's something we wanted to achieve through theater, but we'd have to wait for a couple more years before we could do something."

While Lo handles the programming end and Alaska the animation (other members, including Atwood, are working as consultants), the band still needed an injection of cash to fund the project. They found sympathetic wallets via crowd-funding startup ideaBOOST, which involves a jury of investors who have agreed to fund a demo version of the game.

Like Skrillex, who recently hired programmers to make a video game soundtracked by his music, the band think that gamers, the kind of people who are familiar with complex and interactive narratives, will find something to like in their music. They just don't know it yet.

"I think it's cheesy," says Atwood of Skrillex's outsourced game. "All the drawings, all the designs, all the programming is genuinely from our band -- it's a way to do our opera, 'Star,' in a way that we can afford, in a way that's contained and in a way that presents our music in a different context."