![]() a 'cookie clicker meets twin-stick shooter', which we also really liked. He doesn't swear as much there.Īrcade Paradise has been the success Nosebleed has long been looking for. "I'm like, 'No, no, no, it's an asset pack - it's totally fine!'" There's a nice, multi-part documentary about the making of Arcade Paradise that you'll see Andreas Firnigl in. "People are like, 'They've stolen your stuff!'" he says. And he knows all of this because people - players - alerted the team to it, as if they'd caught the thieves in action. The assets also appeared in a hardcore first-person shooter he can't remember the name of, but which reminds him of Rainbow Six Siege, and in a couple of other places. "It appears in this weird sort of homoerotic hentai porn thing," Firnigl tells me, with a laugh - he doesn't elaborate any further. How do you know, for instance, where those assets might also appear? They might even appear somewhere quite risqué, as was the case here. It ticked all the boxes.īut picking a popular asset pack can have some unusual and unintended consequences. It was dead end, tick, it was dull, tick, it was quiet - no offence anyone who works in a laundrette by the way. "I saw the King Wash asset pack and I was like, 'That - that could work.'" he says. And suddenly, there it was, the King Wash Laundromat, and the moment Firnigl saw it, he knew he'd hit upon something. Nosebleed only had one full-time artist so an asset pack was always the plan. The 'something else' came from an unusual place - one frankly as mundane as the setting itself: while browsing Unreal Engine asset packs. Again: one half of Arcade Paradise needed to numb you with boredom, not keep you engaged, so Nosebleed needed something else. "Kitchen jobs are super stressful - or can be super stressful," Firnigl says. The problem this time, though, was running a restaurant took too much concentrated effort, too much work. The team tried a pizzeria as a setting instead, then, and "doing an almost Overcooked pizzeria type thing", he says. It needed to feel numbingly dull enough that your mind wanted to escape elsewhere, which in his case meant dreaming up games. The job needed to make you feel like Firnigl felt when he was working the many shit jobs he says he worked in his life - pot wash in kitchens, for instance. "But also," Firnigl adds, "the second problem was, in the 90s, or when I was a kid and you were a kid, working in a video shop was actually quite an aspirational job, and we wanted to be the opposite of that." To be blunt: "It needed to be a shit job." I can't imagine a more perfect game for him. Watch on YouTube Ian tries out the first couple of hours of Arcade Paradise. "A," Firnigl tells me, "to be authentic, we would have needed hundreds of video cassette covers with cool custom art and all that sort of stuff in it, because it needs to feel like here's Jaws but it's not Jaws here's Critters but it's not Critters, and all those pastiches." Arcade Paradise is a game of pastiches - a game where the many arcade cabinets you collect are all loving riffs, let's say, on real-life machines, and part of the fun is guessing what the original inspirations were. "You'd be working in a Blockbuster or something like that," says Andreas Firnigl, designer of the game and founder and CEO of Nosebleed, the company behind Arcade Paradise. ![]() ![]() A physical Netflix, if you like - and you don't know how much it pains me to say that. In fact, the original idea was to set the whole thing in a video shop, the kind you might have visited in the 90s, which, if you remember, looked like libraries of VHS boxes showing covers of films you'd probably never heard of before. If you have played it, well, there's new DLC to tempt you back in, but also: can you imagine the game without the laundrette? Because it very nearly didn't have one. And if you haven't played it: good news - we're giving away Arcade Paradise game keys to supporters right now. We loved it - it was one of our games of 2022. Have you played Arcade Paradise yet? It's a game about running a laundrette while building the arcade of your dreams in the back room - an arcade which eventually takes over.
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