The largest rock bands of the ’80s and ’90s — together with Journey, Queen, Mötley Crüe, Aerosmith, and Metallica — achieved a selected cultural significance past their music, their movies, and their excursions. A few of these area rockers constructed video video games round themselves, typically to blended outcomes, in a means that doesn’t actually occur anymore. Now, large musicians present up in Fortnite or Beat Saber or in cellular video games constructed round their manufacturers.
However one indie developer is attempting to deliver the rock band-inspired online game again. Nicola Piovesan, head of Chaosmonger Studio, is popping his longtime fascination with the band Voivod right into a sport, Voivod: The Nuclear Warrior.
Should you haven’t heard of Voivod, you then’ve clearly not been dialed into the Canadian thrash and pace steel scene over the previous 40 years. In all seriousness, that’s comprehensible; Voivod has by no means seen the extent of worldwide industrial success of a Metallica or an Aerosmith. However the Quebec-based group is a venerable, influential band throughout a number of steel genres, and like different notable steel acts (Megadeth, Iron Maiden), it has a selected inventive aesthetic and a mascot, the Voivod.
Voivod, the character, is the creation of Michel “Away” Langevin, drummer for the band Voivod. The star of Langevin’s post-nuclear fiction, conveyed by album artwork and different illustrations, hails from a bleak sci-fi fantasy world often known as Morgoth. Langevin is chargeable for practically all of Voivod’s paintings, and his distinct illustrative and musical type has lengthy been an affect on Piovesan.
Picture: Chaosmonger Studio
“I’ve been listening to the band since I used to be an adolescent,” Piovesan stated in an interview with todaysviralmedia. “Again then I used to be extra like a metalhead. Now I take heed to virtually each type of style, however Voivod is a kind of bands that I saved listening to by the years. They’re very eclectic and their sound may be very authentic and it retains occurring, regardless of modifications they’ve had within the lineup.”
Langevin has been the only constant member of Voivod since its formation in 1982. He’s chargeable for the band’s visible aesthetic, which is stuffed with darkish, sci-fi imagery, often rendered in ink, markers, and paint. The Voivod character seems on many album covers, together with the band’s debut, Conflict and Ache.
Piovesan plans to adapt the world of Morgoth, the character Voivod, and the numerous unusual alien creatures that Langevin has created over the previous 4 a long time into pixelated kind for Voivod: The Nuclear Warrior, a Metroidvania-style, run-and-gun narrative sport.
Throughout his earlier profession as a filmmaker, Piovesan directed an animated video for Voivod’s tune “Goal Earth.” He’d had the concept of a Voivod sport “for a very long time,” Piovesan stated. “And within the meantime, I shifted my profession from the movie business to the sport business. I launched a number of video games within the meantime and I assumed, OK, now could be the correct time to do a Voivod sport, so I discussed this to them throughout a live performance in Prague a pair years in the past.”
“I began engaged on it concretely final 12 months, slowly,” Piovesan stated, and he approached the band with a pitch to make it official. “They had been very comfortable additionally as a result of they knew me from the music video I made for them. I shared [a few screenshots and the concept of the game] with Michel, and so they had been instantly on board with the concept.”
Piovesan stated his Voivod sport pitch was “a bit retro within the type,” the “type of retro pixel graphic impressed by the late ’80s, early ’90s video games, which is the golden period of Voivod,” when the group launched their hottest albums. (Piovesan grew up enjoying Amiga video games — together with the Motörhead beat-’em-up the place you play as Lemmy Kilmister — and that affect is clear within the Voivod sport’s visible type.)
Voivod: The Nuclear Warrior will comply with the tales of the band’s idea albums, Piovesan stated, although barely altered to suit a “extra commonplace sport narrative.” The Voivod will change form and earn new powers over the course of the sport, within the Metroidvania type.
“The concept is that [the Voivod’s] waking up on this type of a nightmare, and he has to recuperate fragments of his thoughts,” Piovesan stated. “So every degree mainly may have a distinct fragment. So there might be exploration, combating, and narrative — additionally dialogue with NPCs to know extra in regards to the story. When all of the fragments are collected, then the character can escape this type of cosmic nightmare that’s referenced within the lyrics of the idea albums.”
Picture: Chaosmonger Studio
Piovesan is funding his Voivod ardour undertaking by Kickstarter. His fundraising marketing campaign for Voivod: The Nuclear Warrior is already profitable, although he has a handful of stretch targets to get by. Piovesan is dealing with sport design and coding himself, and dealing with a small staff of artists and musicians to adapt Voivod’s paintings and music into retro sport kind.
He’s additionally working carefully with the band. Langevin is contributing to the sport’s visible design and paintings, whereas guitarist Daniel “Chewy” Mongrain supervises the musical adaptation; singer Denis “Snake” Bélanger will present the voice of the protagonist; and bassist Dominic “Rocky” Laroche playtests and supplies gameplay suggestions.
Voivod: The Nuclear Warrior remains to be early in improvement; Piovesan’s Kickstarter marketing campaign lists a November 2026 launch date, however it sounds extra prefer it’ll be a “when it’s prepared” sort of factor. “When individuals ask me when the sport goes to be prepared, it’s at all times onerous to answer as a result of I’m not doing this for cash,” he stated. “I’m a fan of the band, and for me, it’s essential to make a great sport to start with, and to pay tribute to the Voivod universe. So I’m actually focused on making it a great sport, to start with.
“I’ve discovered that for making video games, you want two years to make 90% of the sport, and also you want two years extra to do the final 10%,” he stated. “Within the case of Voivod, I hope it received’t be a four-year factor.”