It’s like playing the greatest old-school arcade game that never existed. You are in control of a small aircraft, flying just above the ground, whipping across a landscape at blinding speed. The areas you traverse are littered with simple objects like cubes, cones and spheres. You hit any of them and kaboom — it’s a fast end for your fast ride.
This is “Race the Sun,” a new independent video game that combines arresting visuals with endlessly exciting flying and a thrilling chase against the clock. The concept is deceptively simple, yet wildly addictive. It’s the kind of tremendously fun title that small indie developers specialize in, and they don’t get much smaller than “Race” creators Flippfly — a team comprised of two brothers, Forest and Aaron San Filippo.
“[I] started out doing graphic design, first for an established retail business and then as an independent freelancer,” Forest said in an interview with Toledo Free Press.
“And my brother was working for Raven Software here in Wisconsin, which was — and still is — a subsidiary of Activision. So he was working making games like ‘Call of Duty’ and all that stuff. And he was getting to a point in his career — he’d been doing professional game development for about eight years, and he was ready to do his own thing. …
“So he came to me with this, and he said, ‘We’ve always talked about it. … Let’s give it a shot.’ And so I jumped onboard,” Forest said.
Though the San Filippos never owned a gaming console growing up, the occasional weekend rental of a Super Nintendo gave them the chance to sample a slew of classic games during the 1990s — including the iconic flying game “Star Fox.”
“That aesthetic just got imprinted on us. We just thought that was the coolest game in the world, and I don’t know how many times we played through it,” Forest said.
When the brothers first started developing their own titles in 2012, their different points of view and areas of expertise began manifesting themselves in the process by which their work began to develop — Forest on design, Aaron on programming.
“We had just finished up a little children’s app,” Forest said. “Although we liked that, we wanted to make games. … And at one point, my brother drew this picture in a Google SketchUp. And it was this big, open area, with a couple sparse buildings in there. And he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun just to fly through this, really, really fast?’ And that was really the beginning of it.”
The modest success of “Race” on PC has allowed the production of a version for PlayStation systems.
“One of the strong ethics that we have in our statement there is, we are really focused on fun,” Forest said. “It’s a little difficult as an indie these days to compete in a market where there’s a lot of manipulative gameplay design. And this is nothing new, this goes back to the arcade era. In the arcade era, they were trying to get you to pump in one more quarter. In our era, they’re trying to get you to buy that in-app purchase, or pay to get you a little stronger, whatever that happens to be.
“And for us, we just want players to be able to jump in and feel free. That sense of, ‘I’m just here to enjoy this.’ That’s really what we experienced as kids.”
