Guardians of the Galaxy Game’s Peter Quill Is An 80s Kid, Not 70s

A recent interview with the senior audio director for the new Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy game revealed that the Star Lord in-game is raised in the 80s versus in the 70s like the Star Lord in the Marvel’s Cinematic Universe movies, giving Square Enix’s character a significant difference from the well-known movie character. With a release date slated for later this year, it makes sense that more information will be released and questions will be answered about the game as the summer progresses.

In the new Marvel game, players will take the role of Peter Quill, aka Star Lord, and attempt to lead his team to save the universe. Lending itself to elements of a TellTale game, every choice that Peter makes will affect his relationship with his team and the game’s narrative at large, making this game very different from Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers. By focusing on a single-player approach as opposed to switching perspectives throughout the game and play with other characters, Eidos Montréal is able to focus more on story development and narrative.

In the conversation, Steve Szczepkowski, Senior Audio Director, discussed the challenges and excitement of selecting the right music for the game (via Game Informer). One of the main challenges he discusses is restricting himself to focus on the music that was right for the game and not just picking a song that he likes, and even then it wasn’t that simple. “Just because I want the song doesn’t mean there’s going to be a fit for the artist for whatever reason; they might not want to be involved in any games or they might not want to license their stuff, so there was a lot of factors into that,” said Szczepkowski. To pick the right music for the game Szczepkowski worked with Jean-François Dugas, Senior Creative Director, who grew up in the 80s like Szczepkowski but had different tastes in 80s music.

As with the Marvel’s Avengers game, it was important for Square Enix to separate the game characters from the well-known movie characters. In this case, Marvel specifically asked them to make the game a stand-alone experience, which is how they decided to make Peter an 80s kid. “Here’s a decade that’s rich and it’s a lot more familiar for our audience than the 70s,” said Szczepkowski. He admitted that he did include one or two earworms into the game, but didn’t say what.

What works so well in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie is how perfectly organic the soundtrack fits with the scenes, and  Szczepkowski says that is the same with the game except for a few exceptions where they build the scene around the song kicking in. The game is bound to be full of classic songs that everyone will sing along with. This could, however, cause trouble for streamers who want to play the title online, since the DMCA is notoriously aggressive on platforms like Twitch.

One of the iconic elements of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie is its soundtrack, so it makes sense that the developers would put emphasis on this for the game as well. When Marvel’s Avengers was shown for the first time, a big issue was that the characters were simultaneously too different and too eerily similar to the Avengers everyone was used to from the movies. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is coming out at a time while there is space between the movies starring the eponymous characters, and Square Enix and Eidos-Montréal are working to make sure the difference between the game and the movie is embedded throughout the design.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is scheduled to be released October 26, 2021 on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Switch and PC.

Source: Game Informer

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