Trivia / Hi-Fi RUSH

• Approval of God:
  • John Johanas reached out to Square Enix to get their permission to do a Xenogears Shout-Out, partially out of worry that it could be copyright infringement. Thankfully for Johanas, they were cool with it.
  • The Joy Formidable, whose track "Whirring" plays throughout the game's penultimate level, acknowledged the game via a YouTube upload of the scene.
    Had great fun watching this, so must be even better to play. All of Whirring & an arse kicking CAT 🐱 called 808 for the win ❤️
• Blooper:
  • In the intro sequence, even though Chai's right arm is supposed to be disabled, he's shown extending both arms out to hand over his music player; though we are never told exactly what is wrong with his arm.
  • 808's LED lights are inconsistent through animated cutscenes. While in some she is exactly as ingame, in others her inner eye rings and/or paw beans are black instead of glowing.
  • In the final 2D cutscene, both of Korsica's arm implants have a red plate, when in-game only the right one is red and the left is silver.
• Creator's Oddball: Tango Gameworks had previously been known exclusively for fairly serious horror-based games with The Evil Within, its sequel, and Ghostwire: Tokyo. Hi-Fi RUSH, by contrast, is an over-the-top action-Rhythm Game hybrid with a very colorful and cartoony art style. This tonal and genre shift is even lampshaded in the launch trailer.
  From the makers of The Evil Within (seriously)
• Defictionalization:
  • Chai's signature red graphic tee is available to buy at Bethesda's Gear Store.
  • The panorama in the Hideout (that gets filled in as you complete challenges) can also be bought from the above storefront in the form of a lithograph and a mousepad as well.
• Descended Creator: The game's director, John Johanas, voices multiple minor robot characters in the game, most notably all of the SCR-UB and Smidge units, plus JSF-001 and WA-ES-2.
• Dueling Works: Came out just the day after Forspoken, a game that unlike Hi-Fi RUSH's surprise release had a huge marketing budget. It then proceeded to utterly dwarf Forspoken both critically and financially.
• Fake Nationality: The African-English Macaron is voiced by American actor Gabe Kunda and the Scottish-accented Korsica is voiced by Sarah Elmaleh, who is American. In a podcast about HFR's game design and voice acting, Elmaleh and director John Johanas explain that it's an intentional voice direction; as the game is set in a Fictional Earth, they wanted to approximate the accents to various regions but not reflect countries that don't actually exist on it.
• Inspiration for the Work:
  • According to director John Johanas, the game's direction and humor was heavily inspired by the works of Edgar Wright. More specifically, Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and Baby Driver.
  • In an interview with The Verge, John Johanas attributed Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse for "pushing the art team to learn new techniques" the studio's staff normally didn't dabble in, such as cel-shading and squash and stretch movement.
• Recycled Soundtrack: On a publisher level, "Lonely Boy" previously appeared in Forza Horizon.
• Sleeper Hit: The game was kept under wraps all the way up until its release day, with no one even knowing of its existence until then. Just one day out from release, it shot up to #5 on Steam and attracted near-universal praise from players.
  • According to the developers, this was 100% intentional. The game had gained so much buzz internally at Bethesda through good word of mouth that that they decided to shadow-drop it and let the same thing happen with players (with the idea that Game Pass would encourage people to try it with little risk).
• Surprise Release: The game was announced on January 25, 2023 during the Xbox and Bethseda Developer_Direct, and was released later that same day. The strategy behind this shadow-drop was to let the game speak for itself with good word-of-mouth becoming the game's advertisement.
• Throw It In!: SEB-AAA was created by one of the character modellers for fun, which evolved into him becoming a Recurring Extra. His dialogue was also written by simply writing down a rambling stream-of-consciousness monologue, which fits his faux-noir detective character well.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The giant robot controlled by Kale that blows up the transport Chai and Korsica are on was going to be a boss at some point in production but ultimately got relegated to being a cutscene-only entity. This particular bit of trivia gets lampshaded by CNMN immediately afterwards in an optional Leaning on the Fourth Wall moment.
  • John Johanas (below the above mentioned tweet) also mentioned that the Offscreen Moment of Awesome before defending the cannon was also another cut set-piece that didn't quite make the cut.
  • A seventh Vandelay department that Chai would need to fight the head of was Human Resources, but this was slimmed down to the six departments in the final game for pacing reasons. SEB-AAA was introduced after the HR department levels were cut in order to still get some representation of it.
  • The original pitch for the characterisation of Roquefort was that he would be a coffee addict who would turn into a mecha-werewolf if he did not get his fix, which Chai would provide after accidentally breaking his coffee machine. This was cut due to the joke being clunky to set up. In the final game, a Running Gag about a disgruntled employee switching all the coffee machines to decaf remains, as does Roquefort's wolf form, but the two are completely separate.
  • In an interview, it's mentioned that Chai's backstory would've been brought up more in earlier drafts of the script, but was cut in favor of focusing on his character development and Peppermint's story.
  • John Jonhanas also revealed that the player was initially going to get more warning about the final QTE in Korsica's boss fight, where Chai manages to catch Korsica in his arms if the player times it right. But if they fail the QTE, Korsica just slams into the ground. However, the dev team found more funny if the player was caught off-guard, especially because failing the QTE is Played for Laughs, so they left it as-is.
• Word of God:
  • The director, John Johanas, confirms that Chai did not have "full function of his arm" and was disabled prior to the start of the game.
  • Johanas has also mentioned that the Mimosa levels are inspired by the Futurama episode The Series Has Landed.
• Working Title: Hibiki^meaning"sound, echo, resonance".

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