How Simogo built Sayonara Wild Hearts' best stage
We talk with four members of the team about how "Begin Again" came about, why it took them a year to finish it, and the challenges of building something new.
Towards the end of an interview with Sayonara Wild Hearts developer Simogo, it becomes clear I’m more enthusiastic than they are about what I consider the game’s best stage.
I’m describing how I still play “Begin Again” — one of 23 levels that play out like interactive music videos — about once a month, now six years after the game’s release. From my perspective, it’s the game’s masterpiece, letting you ride a motorcycle, skydive, dodge trollies, and time backflips with button presses as though Dragon’s Lair won the fast food wars. As a roller coaster ride set to a pop song about a break-up, it’s hard to beat. In fact, that’s why I pitched the interview — I wanted to learn more about the four minutes and 31 seconds I haven’t been able to stop playing.
Little did I realize what I was stepping into.
For Simogo co-founder Simon Flesser, the stage carries a bit of extra baggage. “Begin Again” was the first stage the team built, he says, so it’s filled with visual and design wrinkles that the group learned to iron out while making the rest of the game. “You can sort of feel that we hadn’t really figured out the rhythm of the game,” Flesser says, calling the stage “rigid” and “wonky” and not as interesting to play nor as readable as other levels.
Behind the scenes, Flesser and Simogo co-founder Magnus Gardebäck say the stage also proved particularly challenging to develop — taking a year to nail down and using elements like hard cuts that ended up being too time-consuming to include elsewhere. While working on the stage, the team even established a toolset that Flesser is highly critical of in retrospect, calling it “a completely insane way to build a video game” — yet Gardebäck says they stuck with it because they didn’t want to redesign the level after spending so long on it.
Thankfully, they don’t let any of that get in the way of talking about all of this for an hour.
Let’s Pop
Before becoming “a dreamy arcade game about riding motorcycles, skateboarding, dance battling, shooting lasers, wielding swords, and breaking hearts at 200 mph” (per Simogo’s official site), Sayonara Wild Hearts started as an idea based on a vibe. Simogo had built a reputation for smart, puzzle-focused adventure games like Year Walk and Device 6, and Flesser and Gardebäck were ready to try something different.
They wanted to try something more action-oriented, something starring a blindfold-wearing, motorcycle-riding main character (known as “The Fool”). In the early stages, the game hadn’t yet taken on the pop-music approach that would define the project.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): So this game wasn’t music-based at all to start with. I don’t think it was based on anything at all to start with. [laughs] Just cool girls and motorcycles in a very dark, I guess post-apocalyptic or very empty world. We had all these references — the Teddy Girls culture, cafe racers, all these subcultural things. And [for a long time] we were doing basically nothing with it. We were just doing prototypes of The Fool on her motorcycle.
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Trying out different gameplay styles, I guess.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): But not really gameplay. Just like…
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Yes, but with the actions and stuff like that.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Mmm, I would say that that came later, right? ‘Cause everything was just trying to figure out how on-rails it was. We wanted to make something that was very on-rails, but that still sort of felt that you had some kind of control, very inspired by Sega stuff. You will think about something like Out Run that is sort of almost free, but it’s very on-rails still. But I guess in this sense, this is more on-rails because it’s basically just left or right. But I think, at this stage, we were doing some drifting stuff and whatever. Anyhow.
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): And I remember jumping through rings, right? It’s one of those early prototypes.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): But I think it’s later.
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): I remember it well. [laughs]
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): We just had this almost-forever highway, going through a tunnel. And as we were playing this, we had a playlist on with like Robyn and Chvrches — very pop, pop, pop music [which inspired us to try something similar].
Jonathan Eng (acoustic composer, Sayonara Wild Hearts): The music was very different in the beginning. It was very guitar-based. I would say we were very dark.
Daniel Olsén (audio producer and designer, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Like rockabilly — dark rockabilly kind of music.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Yeah, with twangy surf guitars. And you were both involved, Jonathan and Daniel, at this point. And I had some vague ideas [of using] taiko drums and stuff.
Daniel Olsén (audio producer and designer, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Yes, I remember making one of the songs and then making a dark version of the same song. It was kind of dreamy, and we had these taiko drums in there. So there was some idea of going through different modes or something when you were playing. I can’t really remember.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Please talk about your drums. [laughs]
Daniel Olsén (audio producer and designer, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Okay, so the reason why we brought in taiko drums was because I’ve been playing taiko for 11 years. So Simon thought, Why don’t we try to bring some of that in? So that was really exciting for me to kind of bring in some… All the music I make is always electronic, so it was kind of fun to bring in something that was more physical and acoustic from my part. But we let go of that idea, eventually.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): I had this vague idea of having music that was maybe not so pop cultural, but maybe more world-inspired, inspired by Japanese folk music [and] Ethiopian folk music and mixing that with sort of like surf guitars and stoner rock and that kind of stuff, and maybe finding some specific vibe from that.
But anyhow, we were playing that prototype and we had that pop playlist on, and sort of immediately, you could see that, Okay, there’s some energy happening between this prototype and this music. So I immediately wrote a text to Jonathan, like, “Do you think you could write a a pop track in the style of Chvrches, Robyn, Taylor Swift, et cetera?” And I can’t remember what you replied, Jonathan.
Jonathan Eng (acoustic composer, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Yeah, I think I was excited, because a lot of the stuff that I’ve done together with Simogo has been very song-focused. It has been a lot of verse, chorus stuff, so I really felt that that was my thing. I thought I could pull it off. So yeah, I started writing the first song, which was “Begin Again” — that was the first song we started.
Begin Again
Feeling his way through the game’s new musical direction, Eng started composing a song to try to channel the energy Flesser felt when playing pop songs alongside the team’s prototype. He wrote an initial version of “Begin Again” and recorded it on guitar, then handed that off to Olsén to handle production. The pair had worked together on previous Simogo games, but on projects with vastly different musical approaches, so this one took a bit of figuring out — and a bit of luck for the vocals.
Jonathan Eng (acoustic composer, Sayonara Wild Hearts): We had this idea of making [a song inspired by] the artists that Simon mentioned, like Chvrches and Robyn and all those artists, and I also listened a lot to this song “For You, Love,” by Frida Sundemo. I think that was maybe the main inspiration. It’s a really sad electropop song. So I think we wanted to capture a really sad, sad feeling, but combined with a really upbeat and driving feeling.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): I think we used the term “gråtdisco.” It’s like “crying disco.”
Jonathan Eng (acoustic composer, Sayonara Wild Hearts): I was just trying to paint an image of a relationship ending, really. I mean, most of it is fiction, but I think the bridge is somewhat out of my own experience — being really bad with relationships and having problems expressing your feelings in certain situations. So that’s direct from my life [laughs], but other than that, it’s a sad ending of a love story. […]
I’m not much of a producer, so I wrote all the songs on acoustic guitar, basically, and sent [them] to Daniel — I wrote down the chords and passed [them] along to him and then he built [them into electropop versions].
Daniel Olsén (audio producer and designer, Sayonara Wild Hearts): I think when I got that song from Jonathan, it was the first time ever when I tried to translate someone else’s music into my own music. So there were so many iterations before I figured out how to do it, because I loved the original so much. So I was just trying to make an electronic version of that. I listened to [one of my first attempts] earlier today — that’s this kind of fake electronic guitar and synth-poppy drums, and it’s also very high energy, but it wasn’t right. It wasn’t as good as the original.
So eventually, Simon was like, “Well, why don’t you try to do it like a half-tempo?” I was like, “Okay, yeah, maybe.” And then I started thinking about it differently. It’s like, Okay, I have to write it like it’s my own music. This is not Jonathan’s song anymore. This is my song. So when I started thinking like that, it took a completely a different turn. Like, How would I think if I wrote this melody, this kind of thing? And then, yeah, it ended up the way it is in the game today.
[Olsén and Eng say they had a basic version of the song done in about two weeks, with “a lot of iteration after that,” according to Eng. During that iteration phase, the team also brought Linnea Olsson on board to sing vocals on the track, which came about in part due to coincidental timing.]
An early character concept and early screenshot show Simogo's work on "Begin Again." | Images: Simogo
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): [It was] an extreme amount of star-aligning. Me and Gordon had, one year previously, maybe, went to a record store gig she did here in town [in Malmö, Sweden].
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Very small, yeah.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): And she’s not from here. And I bought a CD, a signed CD from her after the gig, and I gave her my card and said, very out of the blue-ish, “If you’re ever interested…” Because she was doing some movie and and TV series stuff, music as well. So I said to her, “If you ever want to do something for a video game, let me know.” And then a year later, as we were doing this song, I got an email from her saying, “Actually, I’m looking into seeing if I can do something in video games.” ‘Cause she has two separate careers, I would say, or maybe three. She plays the cello with a lot of big artists, she has her own pop career, and she also does soundtracks.
And she wrote an email to us [about possibly working on a soundtrack], and I was saying, “No, actually we don’t have anything now, but we are actually looking for singer. So if you want to listen to this track and see if maybe you would be interested in singing on it…” And she quite immediately said yes, because she loved it. […]
This was quite a finished demo, right, but Jonathan singing on it — Daniel’s version with Jonathan’s vocals.
Jonathan Eng (acoustic composer, Sayonara Wild Hearts): [At one point we] tried to switch keys to fit her voice. But that turned out worse, because it was something about when she sung in her high register that kind of fit the song. I think [we ended up going with] the same key that I wrote it in from the beginning.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Yeah, her first version is what ended up in the game. She did one later that is much lower key, that is in her “natural” key. But I think that’s sort of what makes it so intense, that she’s like, I’m about to not make it. It’s way too high for her.
Jonathan Eng (acoustic composer, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Yeah, because the other one was a bit lower energy, I think. It turned out better to keep it high.
Hear the evolution
Simogo sent over five demo versions of "Begin Again" for this story, showing the song's evolution from 1) Jonathan Eng's initial composition, to 2) Eng's acoustic version created so Daniel Olsén wouldn't feel attached to Eng's electrical arrangement, to 3) Olsén's first stab at a more highly-produced version, to 4) Olsén's semi-complete version that the team sent to Linnea Olsson, to 5) a near-final version of the song with Olsson singing in a lower key than what appeared in the game.
Hearts & Swords
While composing “Begin Again” posed certain challenges, building the stage around it proved especially time-consuming — in part because the team was simultaneously figuring out how the game would work. As the first stage in development, it served as a prototype for the team to experiment with the gameplay, the visual style, and the tools it would use for the rest of the project.
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): We basically just had one level with this song [for a long time]. We iterated gameplay and also the tools with this song. So if I remember correctly, we worked on this level specifically for almost one year. Something [like that]. [laughs] […] There was a lot of challenges since it’s designed frame-by-frame, basically.
We figured out a way to sample animations while not playing the game, so you can basically [edit a stage like you would edit video footage]. It was inspired by video editing tools, scrubbing the timeline, but that was a bit of a challenge in Unity to figure out how to sample the animations and actually see it perfectly, every frame, without actually running the game.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): You can basically just scrub the entire level back and forth, like a video, and then at any given point, you could sort of… It is basically one big animation and all the different attributes are animated as well. Meaning, Okay, from this frame to this frame, The Fool can only go between this width, or Now everything is animated and you sort of can…
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Move key frames back and forth and stuff like that.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Which is a completely insane way to build a video game.
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): How you usually do it is, set it up and iterate it while playing, but we aimed for something else so we could actually design the whole level and iterate it without playing the game. Offline, so to speak.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Because basically the only thing you can do is move the character left and right, right? So the rest is just animation, basically. And that took a lot of time to figure out how to build a video game like one big cutscene.
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): But we got better and better at using the tools, of course. It was a challenge, but it’s a cool way of doing it because every frame is handmade, so to speak. So there’s no difference — for every time you play the stage, it’s the same for the camera and stuff like that. It’s a movie.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Which also makes it a very neat game to optimize because you’re in control of every frame. We would make stuff like, Okay, we have a frame dip here, [so] I would just tilt the camera down a little so that it doesn’t see as much of the stage happening in the background, and we could do these very minimal or very specific adjustments to make it always be 60 frames, or 120 frames depending on what you’re playing on. But never dip.
[The team also used the year working on the stage to experiment with different gameplay ideas.]
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): We had this idea of The Fool learning a new skill for every song. And flying was the thing in “Begin Again.” […]
For a long time, we were also making adventure sections. Because we were only imagining that the game [would consist of] the pop songs, and between them, you would have little third-person, slightly-puzzle-y but more event-based stuff where you would walk around and then sort of transition into the song. And we had that for “Begin Again,” right Gordon? When you’re walking into the cinema and stuff.
Concept sketches show a theater and city street from "Begin Again." As an Easter egg for fans, the name of the theater, "Letztes Jahr," is also the name of the hotel in Simogo's Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. | Images: Simogo
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Yeah, that’s correct.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Basically walking around and then meeting the characters, and then they were like pantomiming stuff because there [wasn’t any dialogue]. So in “Begin Again,” you’re walking — we had this idea that the different gangs had different hideouts and The Devils lived in an old abandoned cinema. So you walked into the cinema and then you [would] sort of do stuff, I guess, and walk into the projector room, and then one of The Devils would start the projector and then you’d go in to watch the movie, and then you’d get sucked into the movie and that’s the level.
[We cut the adventure aspect because] we just thought it was too slow, too low-energy, and it wasn’t what the game was about. So it was just trimming away the fat.
[After finishing the majority of work on the stage, the team found ways to speed up and streamline its process while it worked through the rest of the game. For one thing, it determined that the rest of the stages needed to be shorter. “I think Simon explicitly said to me, ‘You can’t write songs that are that long because we’ll never finish the game,’ says Eng. The team also took external feedback, even late in development.]
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): [The game] wasn’t a lot of fun — and maybe you could argue that it isn’t now [laughs] — but it wasn’t a lot of fun for a long time. And for a long time, we only had that you were chasing, and basically the entire state [it is now] without any pickups. And so one thing that happened quite late was a producer from Nintendo was playing it. And they were saying, “It’s quite fun, but this game is only telling me when I’m bad. It’s never telling me when I’m good at it.” And we were like, “Actually, this makes a lot of sense.”
So we just started [thinking], Okay, how do we get in some positive feedback to the player? And then the heart rings happened, and I will say a little later, the small pickups that we call coins also happened. But I don’t think they came at the same time, but that’s sort of — it’s a bit fuzzy. So that took a long while to get, and I guess it might seem dumb, ‘cause it’s quite obvious, but when you’re so close to a thing, there’s these obvious things that you can’t see yourself.
[With the game taking about four and a half years to develop, Flesser and Gardebäck both describe it as one of the most difficult projects they have worked on, which they attribute to a few things.]
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Small team. I will say, a much smaller team than what is feasible to make this game. And maybe not having figured out good tools, and then just running along with the tools we had made early on and just building on top of them, and never being willing to sort of reinspect that and saying, “Actually, we need to rethink how we’re making this.” And we just kept on making it the same way and some of the stuff worked and a lot of stuff didn’t work. It’s just — it’s very asset-intense, animation-wise, and everything’s so custom built. Because there’s not even a real level editor in that sense. We’re just building the actual road and then doing animations on top of that, and yeah. It’s very brute force-ly built.
Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck (technical lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): And since we spent so much time on “Begin Again,” we didn’t want to redesign it to new tools, I think. We wanted to keep that level as-is. So, yeah. Going back, we should have iterated on the tools. We would have saved a lot of time if we had done that, but we kept on going and it was frustrating at times, but, yeah. We made it work. […]
We came from self-publishing, but this was the first time we had someone to deliver to. So we had an obligation to actually pull through and finish the game. If we would have self-published, it was pretty frustrating at times [and we might have given] up. I don’t know, but it was a good thing, I think, that we had a publisher at this point.
Simon Flesser (art, sound, and design lead, Sayonara Wild Hearts): Yeah, I think if Annapurna hadn’t been there, we would have probably given up. That seems likely. […]
I think what we learned from Sayonara and also [Simogo’s 2024 adventure game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes] is maybe try and — not aim lower, but try and scope more reasonably within what we have. But I will also say that Lorelei was maybe an effect of that, ‘cause it’s scoped much better to the team than Sayonara. Sayonara was more based on the idea and then trying to make that, whereas Lorelei [was] more like, “Okay, we have this team. What can we make with this team?” Which is how we have always worked, but Sayonara was sort of where we didn’t understand.
The final version of Sayonara Wild Hearts, seen here, leans heavily on bright colors to establish its visual style. | Images: Simogo
Wild Hearts Never Die
Closing out the interview, I was curious what analytics Simogo had on the game’s songs — and in particular, if I could use those numbers to prove I’m not alone in considering “Begin Again” the best stage. I knew I liked it. I knew NPR liked it (“Eng’s best-constructed song and my favorite level to replay”). As of publishing this story, it’s the game’s highest-viewed single song on YouTube. But that wasn’t quite enough.
So I asked what data Simogo collected on the game’s stages. Turns out: not much. According to Flesser, Simogo didn’t build a system to see how many people played each song, nor the relative popularity of each song.
Anecdotally, Flesser and Olsén say they often see people playing “Parallel Universes” — which has surprised them because it’s a short stage with a simpler composition that the team made “so freakin’ fast compared to the other stages,” says Olsén. “Parallel Universes” was also the last stage the team put together, bookending the work that began with “Begin Again.”
Flesser says he also sees strong reactions from players when they play the game’s final stage, a medley of various songs from the game called “Wild Hearts Never Die.” “Which I think is nice,” he says, “because, as we were making that, I was about to give up, basically. So it’s nice that it sort of paid off.”
Then, perhaps humoring me, Flesser adds: “I guess people like ‘Begin Again’ as well.”
[Disclosure: Sayonara Wild Hearts 2D artist Åsa Wallander created the Design Room logo. 12/19 update: We have corrected the phrase “guilt disco” to read “gråtdisco” and fixed two typos in Jonathan Eng’s quotes.]