This serpentine successor is a slipper y beast indeed
Developer Puddle
Publisher Creature
Format PCVR, Quest, consoles TBA
Origin US
Release 2024
Seldom has a game been summarised as concisely as 2016’s Thumper, its two-word logline – ‘rhythm violence’ – setting out its oppressive agenda. As an iridescent beetle zips down winding tracks suspended in a void, every corner represents a threat, a single mistimed input enough to shatter your fragile carapace, leaving you one more hit from death. Despite some aesthetic similarities, the teaser for artist/composer Brian Gibson’s successor makes it clear that a similar name needn’t mean a similar game. Even so, the two-word phrase that stands out when we ask about Thrasher’s origins is one we’d never have guessed.
“We had this selfie stick,” co-designer Mike Mandel begins, explaining that it emerged from a prototype he and Gibson had developed shortly after Mandel departed Harmonix (they were colleagues until Gibson left to make Thumper). Gibson was looking to do something new, and Mandel convinced him to try VR. “We had this shared sensibility of wanting to start from something that just feels good,” he says. Moving said stick in a figure-eight pattern led to the idea of using gestural controls to steer a dragon or serpent, which then prompted thoughts of a fresh take on a mobile classic. “Snake is inherently about getting bigger, right? And in VR you have that visceral experience of scale. So we put a ribbon and a weird face on the end of the stick, swung it around and realised, OK, there’s something here.”
Thumper was a response, Gibson says, to “buzzwords like synaesthesia, and games being about having good, blissful feelings. I was like, no, actually, videogames are this confrontational, aggressive thing; they kind of bring out your demons when you play them.” Early development of Thrasher was in turn a reaction to Thumper, beginning as a more lighthearted game – “almost casual”, Gibson adds – with cartoonish, voxel characters. “It was a completely different vibe. I thought it would be cool to thwart expectations of what I might do next.” But as the idea took shape, Gibson was “seduced” back to the darker side of his previous game, particularly its look – “that sleek, stylish minimalist aesthetic that makes you feel uncomfortable.”
As the idea took shape, Gibson was “seduced” back to the darker side of Thumper
