Summary
“I joined Don’t Nod 16 years ago,” remembers Lost Records: Bloom & Rage director Michel Koch when we start our interview at Gamescom. He does a quick overview of his career, going over the days when he worked as the art director of Remember Me, the first game developed by Don’t Nod and published by Capcom. “Remember Me was something amazing, all this story about Neo-Paris. It was a blast to design for this game.”
Regardless of your opinion about the studio’s debut, Remember Me created issues for Don’t Nod. It sold poorly when it came to physical sales, and the company entered a “judicial reorganization” (a legal process in France in which an agent called Judicial Administrator is charged with the responsibility of overseeing how the company is doing).In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Don’t Nod’s CEO Oskar Guilbert explained that the company wasn’t in bankruptcy, but it needed to be “resized” to get the fundings for their future projects. In either way, It wasn’t until the launch of Life is Strange that Don’t Nod became a respected name in the industry, creating successful sequels and new series.
“The thing I remember and I always loved with Don’t Nod [was] how the studio has been focused on making different games that look different and [have a] very artistic background. I think what I really enjoy is creating a universe and characters to tell some meaningful stories. And I think we had the chance with all the games we worked on to do that.”
Lost Records is Don’t Nod’s latest bet, and as we’ve come to expect from the studio, it’s a narrative adventure that focuses on its characters. This time, the game centers around four young female teenagers who become friends during summer, until something happens and they don’t see each other for 27 years.
When I asked what made Lost Records unique, studio executive producer Luc Baghadoust just told me to look around. “It feels different from a lot of the other games you’re able to see on the [Gamescom] floor,” he says. There’s a lot of shooting games. And ten years ago, we presented the first Life is Strange at Gamescom here. We already had the feeling of doing something different, because all around us you could hear this gunshot from the other trailers, [but] we had this guitar sound, something different.”
Baghadoust goes on to explain that they create the stories they want to tell, without following any trend or what the people are expecting. Going deeper in Lost Records, Koch highlights how Swann, one of the protagonists, uses a camcorder to record everything around her.
“When we were working on the game, we knew that we had this big part of the game taking place in the ‘90s,” says Baghadoust. “We remember that a lot of our memories from the ‘90s were the very, very beginning of home videos and starting to film things with a camcorder, which felt very, very new back then.
“[Today] we have phones, we film everything, and we are always filming us, posting pictures of us. So we thought that it was really interesting also to showcase the difference between nowadays and the ‘90s, like the present timeline and the past timeline. To use an old VHS camcorder in the ‘90s to record things and to have this contrast of the adults who are looking at things on their phones. We also wanted to give the player a more immediate tool to interact with the game at all times.”
Koch goes on, explaining how this camera is Swann’s way to look and interact with her environment. On the one hand, it’s a gameplay mechanic with layers because you may find unique events and objects in the scenarios when you pay attention to details. On the other hand, it’s integrated into the story organically because it’s how the group bonds and it also lets you hear Swann’s inner thoughts when you go over the videos you create with her.
When I played the preview of Lost Records, the other element that stood out to me was the interplay between the different timelines. It’s not only that you get to see what’s going on in the present as you reconstruct the past, but it feels like another game: the colors, the vibe, the music (or lack of it) are drastically different depending on what year you are playing.
“I remember Michel the first time explaining to the team what he wanted for the different moods,” says Baghadoust. “That the present would be colder, and the past would be more saturated, more colorful, more nostalgic.”
Koch also mentions the fact that in our own lives, we might not remember things as how they were exactly. “Sometimes when you think of memories, that’s where I think you’re able to add your own music over your memories, making them more colorful, idealized, or bittersweet than they were.
“What we’re trying to do is that the game is about really remembering the past, but also recreating [it]. Because the way you are, you start the game in the present time, and you know that something happened, that they made a promise about something dark that happened. As you play, as you go into those memories, you make the different choices in the present and in the past, you are basically writing the story.”
Koch doesn’t want to spoil a single thing about what supernatural element we will see in Lost Records. Instead, we speak about his most relevant influences, TV shows like Twin Peaks, X-Files, and Buffy, and some books like Stephen King’s It (which shares the lengthy time skip for the protagonists, among other things). Koch explains that he loves how these sometimes “mundane” stories presented an interesting amount of sci-fi or supernatural elements without leaving the characters’ development on the side.
“We always wanted to work on stories that are blending those two elements. Like, we focus on characters with their more day-to-day lives, but we still bring a bigger sense of mystery, of something a bit mystic that’s happening around them. It enhances, in a way, their story and what we’re telling about the characters.”
As I center my last question about the episodic nature of Lost Records, something that has been a staple in Don’t Nod’s narrative adventures, Koch (kindly) corrects me: “We are not calling them episodes, we are calling them tapes.” Without going too deep into the reasons, he explains that the names of the tapes (‘Bloom’ for the first one and ‘Rage’ for the second and last one) will represent the mood that you should expect going through them.
There’s still a long way to go to see if Don’t Nod has another banger up its sleeve as we have to wait for June 02, 2025, the launch day for the first tape. However, its director can’t wait to make us go
through a new emotional rollercoaster and see what unique videos we come up with.
