“We’ve already got a couple of offers about graphic novels and stuff,” he revealed. That cred, plus the fact that it’s a fun giant monster beat-‘em-up in a video game landscape that’s been largely devoid of that kind of thing, has made Dawn pretty highly anticipated outside of Toronto as well-an early limited-edition run of soft vinyl toys made by Seismic Toys (which Rushdy co-owns) quickly sold out. Most of all though, the 13AM team wanted to ensure Dawn had what Rushdy called “kaiju cred.” That meant reaching out to folks like legendary Godzilla character designer Shinji Nishikawa, Godzilla comic book artist Matt Frank, and Transformers and Ultraman illustrator EJ Su to contribute artwork and monster designs. He described the art as a mashup of manga and Mike Mignola, best known for creating the Hellboy series: “He’s got such a unique style, and such a distinct and colorful and bold look that once we decided we wanted to go with a stylized route, but still aimed at an older audience, that was a pretty easy decision to make.” When it comes to the look and feel of the game, Rushdy said they tried to do something a little more stylized, to make Dawn feel like it was ripped out of the pages of a comic: “When you perform certain attacks or blow stuff up, you’ll actually see Japanese characters, Japanese onomatopoeias, like comic book onomatopoeias, pop out.” (Attention: anyone who’s ever fantasized about doing the same while riding the 504 King during rush hour.) You’ll even be able to pick up TTC streetcars and beat the ever-living shit out of other monsters with them. “There’s a bunch of little Easter eggs we’ve put in the game through billboards and whatnot, like Tom Norton’s,” he teased, sharing some exclusive shots from Dawn’s Toronto levels with Complex Canada. (Case in point: back in 2013, Pacific Rim, the most successful piece of original kaiju IP since Cloverfield, used Toronto to stand in for Tokyo.) That’s definitely not happening in Dawn, he promised. Rushdy thinks part of the reason the trailer connected with folks from the 6ix so much is due to the fact that the city rarely gets to play itself in pop culture. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. An old-school 2.5D side-scroller that calls back to the arcade classic Rampage, Dawn is scheduled to release on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC in early 2022. In Dawn of the Monsters, an upcoming co-operative beat-‘em-up from Toronto’s 13AM Games and U.S.-based publisher WayForward, players can tear it up with giant monsters in the shell of a destroyed downtown Toronto like something out of a Godzilla movie. Which likely helps explain why, earlier this month, a video game trailer released by a local Toronto indie developer ended up striking such a chord with Torontonians. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re rapidly barreling towards two full years of COVID-related lockdowns, piled on top of a seemingly never-ending string of racial and social injustices, a housing bubble that refuses to pop, not to mention the impending holiday season and all the stresses that come with it, but it sure seems like people’s fuses are shorter than ever these days. In the immortal words of Limp Bizkit, “It’s just one of those days/Where you don’t want to wake up/Everything is fucked/Everybody sucks/You don’t really know why/But you want to justify/Rippin’ someone’s head off.”
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