It was the rise of the digital marketplace that allowed indie games to thrive. In a sense, it was gaming counterculture: titles like Braid, Fez, and Limbo prospered as an alternative to expansive, focus-grouped experiences, which helped developers from all over the world find new audiences. Q-Games—based in Kyoto, Japan—were one boat lifted by the rising tides of the indie boom, thanks in large part to their beloved PixelJunk series.

Since 2007, 12 PixelJunk titles, including three sequels (alongside a few mobile and VR spin-offs) have been released. These range from twin-stick shooters to meditative audiovisual experiences to tower defense-like strategy games, not to mention 3D roguelikes. PixelJunk Scrappers Deluxe has just landed on the Epic Games Store in a rebalanced, expanded form, and PixelJunk Eden 2 will bring its naturalistic musical experience to the platform by the end of the year.

The franchise has provided a creative environment for the team at Q-Games to experiment with new ideas and a wide range of genres. The motto behind each title was to capture and modernize retro experiences for a new generation, challenging the team with new technological or mechanical ideas with every game in order to create an experience unlike what had been seen before.

According to studio founder Dylan Cuthbert—known for his work on titles like the original Star Fox before PixelJunk—the franchise was inspired by his youth, particularly the mixtape-like expansion of his library of pirated Commodore 64 games. 

“I think the core tenant of PixelJunk’s development is to find something that's a little bit different or a little bit new,” Cuthbert explained. “With Scrappers, the mechanic of throwing rubbish between each other in a side-scrolling beat-'em-up is almost like a garbage-based basketball game, you know? And that thinking comes from my background in old 8-bit games from the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, where all the games were so different.

“When I was a kid, we had these pirated tapes. We couldn’t afford all those games, so we'd have the longest possible tape you could buy—maybe like 360 minutes or something—and it would just be crammed full of games. When you liked one of the games you bought, you’d save out to the tape then pass it on to your friends, so you’d have this ever-increasing library of games. It’s kind of like that for the PixelJunk series. There was one game that PixelJunk Eden was inspired by called Bugaboo the Flea, which I played for hours on end as a kid. Looking back it was really hard, but I loved it. Overall, the feeling behind the series comes from those days in my youth.”
This mixtape idea also provides a throughline to these seemingly disparate ideas. Early games like PixelJunk Racers capture the joy of racing model cars around a track with friends. Yet in the same franchise, you have titles like PixelJunk Monsters, where you run around a map placing defenses around your base like a lone hero set against the world. Both are very different experiences, but they're connected by this shared creativity and vision that unites all the games in the franchise under one big bubble.

The success of the series also helped the team to expand and experiment within this PixelJunk bubble. “We had a lot of early success,” Cuthbert noted. “PixelJunk Racers did well, Monsters did fantastically well, it was a big surprise. Even famous people like Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails reached out to us because he’d been hooked on the game, which was weird and surprising. We had some proper income coming in, and it gave us the freedom to do other things.” 

PixelJunk released at just the right time, with the industry making it easier than ever for independent publishers to release their games. With support from Sony for QA and international distribution, the team was able to self-publish and release their game worldwide for the first time. By comparison, when the team contributed to Nintendo’s Bit Generations series in Japan with Digidrive in 2006, they had to establish a direct partnership with Nintendo to release on cut-price GBA cartridges. Only later did the game release digitally via DSiWare under Nintendo’s publishing banner, which was a far cry from the simplicity of the process that allowed the team to self-publish The Tomorrow Children or later PixelJunk titles.

As the series has evolved over 16 years, so has its scope. While early titles leaned heavily into Cuthbert’s formative Commodore and Spectrum memories, later 2D titles moved forward in time —Scrappers was openly inspired by games like Final Fight—while titles like PixelJunk Raiders experimented with 3D concepts. Still, this mixtape vibe of the franchise remains, both through the blending of genres and ideas, as well as the evolution of past ones, as seen with Scrappers Deluxe and Eden 2.

Far from a mere port of the original Apple Arcade experience, Scrappers Deluxe adds new levels, balances gameplay, and addresses feedback from players. A re-release gave the team more time after a speedy development cycle of just two years.

Cuthbert explained the game’s origins: “Some of the people in the office knocked up a small demo where they were collecting trash with these robots. One of our artists really likes drawing robots, so he wanted to explore that near future Tokyo-Kyoto-Japanese robot vibe. We built a pretty good prototype and wondered if there's anyone interested in taking on this kind of game. It just happened to be about the time when Apple Arcade was coming into play, and Apple were going around asking if we had any games to show. We said we’ve got this, fresh out of the oven, and Apple said it was great, just the sort of thing they wanted, so things quickly escalated.”
The time given to polish the new release has improved the overall experience, in Cuthbert’s view. “Maybe the Apple Arcade version was a little bit rushed at the end, we couldn’t iterate as much as we’d have liked,” he said. “We thought if we’re going to re-release it, let’s take it back to the drawing board a bit and rework bits of the game to make it fresh and new. For example, in the Arcade version you can only carry three pieces of scrap, but now you can carry as much as you want, but it’s more precarious, for a bit of risk-and-reward. We also returned to every stage, played it through, found points that weren’t as exciting and reworked them, taking it to a point where it’s way better now.”

At the end of the year Q-Games will also bring PixelJunk Eden 2 to the Epic Games Store, a sequel to a beloved game in the series made in partnership with then-freelance musician Baiyon, who is now a creative director at the studio. At the time, Baiyon was a creative living and making music in Kyoto, where he became good friends with Cuthbert, which led to the award-winning collaboration. “Even in high school, I had a band, I was running a music label, I was releasing vinyls and touring as a DJ, even making art and cartoons and making apparel,” noted Baiyon.

“An opportunity came from one of my favorite shops in Kichijoji [in Tokyo] called Shop 33 which was run by a man really close to the techno scene, and had a bunch of exclusive stuff by the likes of Koji Morimoto and Katsuhiro Otomo. They had a magazine that was pretty popular, one of those where if you got a feature there you got opportunities because it was connected to so many people. I got a chance to be featured alongside some famous designers, but the feature was called ‘The End of the Era of the CD.’ So I began to think I might need to find something to combine my music with and that was gaming. But it wasn’t a random choice, as I was always inspired by them, I just never knew how to make them. I had this one friend who was a mutual friend of Dylan’s and we met at a Christmas party at a time they were looking to launch PixelJunk, so the time was right.”

It was sharing art and music inspirations at a later meeting at the Q-Games offices that eventually spawned into the first PixelJunk Eden. Development of the second game started not long after Baiyon went from a freelance collaborator to an employee at Q-Games. It was his first project on joining the company, and it expanded further on the naturalistic art and musical ideas inspired by the portfolio shared in that first meeting. “It’s such a personal game, since a lot of the assets are drawn by my hand,” explained Baiyon. He said that revisiting the experience was a natural choice upon joining the studio.
If Scrappers Deluxe and PixelJunk Eden 2 are the main focus for Q-Games in 2023, what is next for the franchise in 2024? For now, there’s not much that Dylan Cuthbert and co. can share for the next steps, but the team certainly has a few ideas floating around. These include new places to explore, but also old ideas that'll be re-examined with new perspectives.

“We’ve got two, actually, that might come to fruition and are forming quite well, and we do a lot of experiments all the time,” teased Cuthbert. “Hopefully, we’re looking to announce those next year, but they’re both from very different genres in different directions, so it should be quite interesting. With PixelJunk Raiders, Google [Stadia] did turn around and say we could do whatever we wanted with that now, so I would like to rerelease that as well. But I’d want to approach it similar to Scrappers Deluxe, go back in, fiddle with it a bit, things like that, and I need time to do that.

“There's still so many ideas we have that we want to make, so we just have to get round to them, one by one.”