INTERVIEW: Lzzy Hale and Cream Productions join forces for ‘Raze’
Photo: Raze Vol. 1 is out now from Cream Productions. The title character is voiced by Lzzy Hale, lead singer of Halestorm. Photo courtesy of Cream Productions / Provided with permission.
Raze Vol. 1 is a new virtual reality game featuring the voice of Lzzy Hale, frontwoman of the successful band Halestorm. In the game, which is now available on Meta and Steam VR, Hale plays the title character, a 1990s-influenced punk rocker who is subject to a horrible accident on stage: She gets caught between her guitar pedal and an amp, and is eventually sent into a bizarre alternate universe that is run by one of the most ghastly villains of all: satirical influencers.
Raze Vol. 1 is the brainchild of Johnny Kalangis, vice president of digital at Cream Productions and creative director of the title.
“We started off as a prototype,” Kalangis said in a recent phone interview. “We were working on a game where the player was able to control an action figure, sort of a smaller hero, that would run through various levels and try to solve puzzles. We thought maybe [there’d be] some battles. Originally it had been a spoof on superhero culture.”
Eventually Kalangis changed course and realized that there’s not enough comedy in the gaming world, so he changed Raze Vol. 1 into a satirical VR experience. His focus shifted to this character of Raze and how she exudes punk rock vibes, but is chased down by these influencers.
“That started feeling like really where I wanted to go with it, so we started spinning it differently and just looking at the whole landscape differently and decided that our hero was actually going to be this punk rock singer and guitar player,” he said. “We ended up having a backstory where she gets zapped by her guitar pedal and crushed by her amp at the same time in the middle of the gig, and then that traps her in this bizarro world where some big influencers are.”
For Kalangis, he needed to create an experience where fans would fall in love with Raze, and then the rest would fall into place. There are fun puzzles along the way, but the emphasis has always been on character-building and making sure that the title character is a badass.
“We’ve got to put the resources toward designing her, so I was working with a great designer,” he said. “And we started visualizing her, pulling in all sorts of references. … We also had this concept that she had an arm that would change depending on what puzzles she was trying to solve, so she’s got kind of a gravity arm. There’s a little bit of a super power idea in there, and her eye also changes. And that was very much based on me as a kid.”
Here’s where Kalangis’ childhood comes into play: As a kid, he fell in love with the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man, whose title character had a bionic eye, and he thought Raze could have a similar feature.
“I remember the action figure of the bionic eye,” Kalangis said. “You would hold this doll up to your face and look through the back of its head. There was a lens that was supposed to be his bionic eye. Really it was just a lens. It was like looking through a hole. It had no magnification. It had nothing on it, but that was the toy. I thought, well, if Raze then, as a result of transforming through this transition that she goes through and ends up trapped in this bizarre world, one way of making the game more fun is if you actually pick her up. … You can pick her up out of the game and hold her up to your eye, and you can see clues that you can’t see otherwise.”
Kalangis sees many connections between the world of indie games and the world of indie music. He wanted to combine these two fan bases into one VR experience, and having Hale along for the ride was a special treat.
“Anything that’s got a little bit of an outsider vibe,” the creative director said about his inspiration. “They kind of stay outside the mainstream. Certainly VR has got a little bit of that. It’s a little bit of the outlaw in all the consoles. We’ll see if it actually moves into a more mainstream thing, but right now, it’s a little bit of an outlier. I do have some vision for the game or parts of the game becoming a flat-screen experience as well because I just think they’re fun.”
He added: “The connection with the music is the character Raze has a plastic cassette walkman, and throughout the game, you can find mixtapes. You pick them up, and you give them to her. That kicks in a randomized song from our playlist of indie bands that are female-driven, punk and metal stuff that we acquired specifically for the game because I thought that would be part of the personality of the game, to expose people to music that they wouldn’t regularly find. It’s very much in the spirit of a mixtape that someone gives you.”
Nothing like receiving a mixtape in a virtual environment from a badass character voiced by Lzzy Hale.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Raze Vol. 1 is now available from Cream Productions. Click here for more information.
