You’ve gotta defeat the hive queen and kill all the bad guys in order to save the galaxy—bonus if you collect alien goo. This is the objective of Hive Jump, a new St. Louis–created video game, now available on Nintendo Switch and Xbox One. Developed by Matt Raithel and his video game company Graphite Lab, the game is reminiscent of old-school Nintendo games Metroid and Contra—except when you load Hive Jump, the first screen flashes that the game was made in STL. “I think the thing that I’m most proud of with the game is that it was an original concept that grew here in St. Louis,” says Raithel, who teaches game design at Maryville University. “[It’s] a town that isn’t immediately thought of for game design, and the fact that you can grow an industry here with all the support from not just Graphite Lab, but other developers here, is pretty cool.” We caught up with Raithel to learn more.
Developing video games seems like a dream job.
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Totally a dream, at least for me. I was an ’80s kid, so growing up around Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Atari, and other things like that, it was cool, it was new, it was flashy. It totally consumed me as a kid.
How did you get into actually designing games?
I went to school at Missouri State to get a degree in computer animation. I’ve always been an artist. When I was younger, getting into games was basically an engineering path. But as the industry grew up, it made more room for artists to get involved by making characters or worlds. Right out of school, I connected with a group of about seven other people who had started a video game studio down there. They were new, they were young, they didn’t have an established résumé. They were kind of a garage band of misfits who wanted to make games. So I got connected with them, and we grew this company from the ground up.
Where did the inspiration for Hive Jump come from?
The inspiration came from the same era I grew up in, if you think of old-school Nintendo games like Contra or Metroid. … It’s got this retro aesthetic, visually, to it.
What’s the mission of the video game?
The goal of the game is collaborative. You can play by yourself or with multiple players. Your goal is to control the space marines called jumpers. They have a mission. They have to get this transponder backpack down to the depths of this alien hive, so that the mothership can eradicate the alien menace from within the hive. You’ve got to destroy the queen and all the bad guys. So it’s very much like an arcade-style game. It’s easy to pick up and play. It’s action packed, and it’s simple in its plot as well. It’s the humans versus the aliens. Whoever’s left standing wins.
