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Your Test//Subsidize This

Ideally, the stage version of Yamantaka//Sonic Titan’s rock opera Star would feature a Hong Kong-like metropolis being invaded by fascist dog people, fended off by a spiritual hero. It would be a cross-cultural spectacle, expanding their current live performance, which blends their experimental sound with narrative, imaginative costumes, video production and black and white paper sets. But the funding required would be astronomical. A game’s budget is by no means small, but once you pass a certain threshold, creatively, the star’s the limit.

“Star is an opera that can’t be quite given full justice on stage,” says Yamantaka//Sonic Titan co-founder, co-director and life-long gamer Alaska B. “We’re kind of reworking it, infusing it with a video game approach.” The result, Your Task//Shoot Things, turns a would-be audience into the performer.

Alaska B adores virtual spaces, and doesn’t see why an art world occupied by video installations can’t treat an artificial reality with the same credence. “I don’t see much difference between various kinds of art forms,” she says. “Gaming isn’t that much different than other [art forms], aside from interactive components.”

The band is well equipped for the venture into gaming. Alaska holds a degree in computer animation, on top of studying interactive media and robotics at Concordia. She enjoys the spatial qualities of Minecraft and Terraria and the surreal atmosphere of Earthbound. She also used to modify Quake 3 maps for fun. “I don’t really like first person shooters as much as I like building environments inside of them,” she says. “I feel like they strive to have all that realism, then ignore it and ask you to shoot things.”

Alaska always intended on creating a Yamantaka//Sonic Titan game, but it wasn’t until working on the theme for Mark Of The Ninja that she revisited the relationship between games and their music. Alaska’s familiar with the guts of game making, though she felt more comfortable teaming up with Golden Gear Games, who recently collaborated with Fucked Up members to develop Pipe Trouble.

The world of Your Task//Shoot Things expands the mythos developed by the band. A quilt of cultures, Yamantaka//Sonic Titan has built a hybrid lore of reoccurring themes taken from Buddhist, Iroquois and Norse influence. Star launches from the common tale of a village under assault. It’s intermixed with politics as well: colonial morality, royalty and race in North America, though the band has chosen the, ‘Sun Ra approach’ to speaking on it.

“You remove it, you take it to space. You put it somewhere else. Star Trek’s like that,” says Alaska. “Instead of taking the Rage Against the Machine route, just dropping bomb tracks, we use more imaginative ways of accomplishing a message. Adapting something like that into a video game requires focusing more on the action, and that’s where a lot of our rewriting work has been.”

The game plays like Gradius or Jetpack Joyride with Rez sensibilities. It’s a 2D-sidescrolling shooter/defender, synchronized with epic music and sounds. One of the band’s most notable elements is their epic, lulling repetitions, which have long worked amazingly for games as well.

Like other ambitious games before it,

Your Task//Shoot Things has also taken to crowdsourcing, offering homemade hot sauce and piano lessons to supporters who chip in. With a few days left and only a fifth of the goal secured, its odds aren’t great.

But Indiegogo isn’t the last stop. There are other options for making an experimental game in Canada. Alaska admits that these initiatives either seem to get funded in the first few days or fizzle out, but

Your Task//Shoot Things is a game that will come into being regardless, and it won’t be the last.

“I think regardless of if it works out, there will definitely be more interactive projects,” says Alaska. “

Your Task//Shoot Things is just one note, it’s the design we settled on. I wouldn’t bar any other interactive excursions in the future.”

Let’s hope not.

Update (5/15/2013 1:46 PM): An earlier draft of this article referred to Yamantaka//Sonic Titan as a “duo.” They are, it turns out, a “collective.” The article has been corrected to reflect this distinction.

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