Summary

• Wax Heads game creators drew inspiration from experiences for unique gameplay.
• Balancing gameplay and storytelling, Wax Heads creates a familiar yet fresh experience for players.
• On the relationship between art and consumer experience, Wax Heads aims to highlight the intention behind albums and games as a whole.

I grew up in a family that appreciated music. My dad would share classic ‘70s songs with us, introducing my siblings and I to the likes of Harry Chapin, while my mum was respon🐻sible for my love of ‘80s rock, Meat Loaf included. We always had a record player in our house, and that’s something that stayed the same even as we all grew up and started our own families.

My own record collection is rather meagre, with a few classics and a bunch of gaming soundtracks. My brother, however, went all in. He can play multiple instruments, performed in various bands, and now owns an indie record store down on the coast. When I saw Wax Heads at WASD in London꧅, a narrative sim about managing an indie reco♛rd store, I just knew I had to play.

“I'm a big vinyl collector. Love music, and I love… records are definitely my vice,” Wax Heads creator Murray Somerwolff tells me when I ask him where the idea for the game came from. “I was playing Wilmot's Warehouse, and whilst I was playing [I was] going, ‘imagine these were all records’. That would be cool. And that got the idea spinning.” Somerwolff says that initially he was imagining some procedurally generated records, but then quickly realised that would be incredibly hard and instead pivoted to a record store game.

Much of the team’s personal experience is channelled through Wax Heads, with Somerwolff telling me that he also extrapolated ideas from other people, like his wife, and other music lovers who like different things and have different experiences from his own. “The community side of things, the themes of the game, definitely the music. I think it has to come from a personal place. It's the only way to make it feel like it comes from a personal passion and love.”

For a game about a record store, of course music comes into play. As an indie game, the budget is smaller, but Somerwolff 🔥hired Gina Loughlin to create three one-minute tracks for the game that he refers to as “all bangers”. Somerwolff’s wife actually lends her vocal talents to the song at the end of the Wax Heads trailer. You wouldn’t know it without being told, but it continues this idea of the game having a personal element to it.

The Familiar Heartbreak Of A Beloved Band’s Split

One thing you’ll notice about Wax ꧒Heads immediately, other than the vibrant, quirky art style, is that it pays homage to music stereotypes in a familiar way, without ever feeling cringeworthy or tropey. We’re told about a popular band from the ‘80s, Becoming Violet, which in꧑cluded two sisters, Morgan and Willow. The band eventually splits after Willow attempts a solo debut. Throw in some blurred lines with the producer being Willow’s love interest and Morgan going AWOL, and you’ve got a recipe for every big pop band scandal in history. Fleetwood Mac are divorcing Apple and coming to PC.

We all know these st꧋ories. You can’t help but think of a band you once adored that split, the most charismatic 🤡member of which tried to go solo (but didn’t always succeed), and the dramatic love lives attached to these celebrities. Despite being entirely fictional, Becoming Violet gives players that level of familiarity because we can relate to it.

Balancing the story with gameplay seems to come naturally, with Somerwolff explaining that he wanted to make fun gameplay and a story that would hook players. “I love telling stories,” he says, “I’m trying to write something that is conventional and it’s got familiarity to it, but not in a way where it feels to🌠o tropey.”

The drama with Becoming Violet will be the “beating heart” of the game, with players discoveri🐠ng why the sisters stopped talking to one another and whether they can regroup for a benefit show as they work in Morgan’s record store.

You spend your time serving customers, who come in and ask you for a record, sometimes explicitly, sometimes with vague descriptions or clues. It’s up to you to check your stock and read the information on the albums to💃 work out if it’s the right fit for each customer, but whether you get it right or wrong, that customer will leave with that record.

In the demo, you can also flex your creativity by making a flyer for a concert and dragging around stickers and icons to create your masterpiece. Somerwolff promises that the full version of Wax Heads will include other minigames, “I just love minigames. Sometimes, it's fun to deviate. Both me and Rocío [Tomé, programmer on Wax Heads]] are really into playful expression. Sometimes, it's not skill-based, but it's the idea of doing stuff where it gives you enjoyment.”

Music, Gaming, Art, It’s All Disposable

“Music is a culture,” Somerwolff tells me. “I want to be careful because there are games, especially recently like We Are OK, which tackle the idea of music culture, but generally, in a lot of games you play, you execute music, but it's not really about music culture.”

The industries and cultures surrounding both music and gaming are very similar in many ways. Neither aওre going anywhere, but they’re adapting to modern climates of digital launches, things becoming more mainstream, and the pros and cons of the industry being more accessible than ever. You get more and more people able to step into the industry, which is great, but it also makes it harder for any one project to stand out from the crowd. Not to mention, gamers have the same reverence for second-hand game stores as vinyl collectors have for indie record stores.

“It's interesting with the overlap of games,” Somerwolff says. “I think the relationship to art in general, I feel like there's a kind of a disposable nature. This is a judgmental answer, but I hate Spotify. One of the things I love about records is, when I put a record on, I listen to the whole album.”

When music was only physical, when you bought albums on vinyl, tape, or CD, you sat and listened to the whole thing. The whole album had a theme, it told its own story. When you l♉isten to songs on Spotify, you’re more likely to skip through tracks and often you’ll find yourself liking a single song from an artist that you’ve heard of, but never becoming familiar with the rest of their work. You just know that single song.

Listening to just a single song removes a large part of the experience, Somerwolff explains. “It removes its context. What I really want to do with this is celebrate art. The whole idea of the maximalism of, you can look at the records, the lining notes, all that kind of stuff. I think the same with games. One of the big problems we have at the moment is that there's all this work, all this passion that goes into stuff, but the relationship between the consumer model is that it's, —the word content—it's so hard not to use it.

“What I'm hoping we are doing with this is we're trying to celebrate the relationship to art and the idea that when people make an album, it's a whole artist’s intent, it's not just a song you grab on Spotify, a playlist, whatever. It's actually like, ‘Hey, someone had an intention with this.’ I think that reflects into making this game as well as a metaphor.”

Wax Heads has no set launch date yet but you can . I didn&rsquoಌ;t get all the record recommendations right—sorry random customers—so I hope you fare better than I did.