The Blood of Dawnwalker is an ambitious RPG from brand-new studio, Rebel Wolves. But look at the roster and resumes of the Wolves, and you'll notice they hail from numerous studios - notably, CD Projekt Red, and games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

In our latest Cover Story video, we asked game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz and lead quest designer Rafał Jankowski about their experience in making The Witcher, and how that informed their work on The Blood of Dawnwalker.

We aren’t talking about Mixtape the right way. That is an admittedly brash start to what I’m getting at here because there is no right way to talk about a game, a book, a movie, an anything. But I’ve read so much good criticism about Mixtape, the nostalgic music-soaked adventure game from The Artful Escape developer Beethoven and Dinosaur, since its launch last month. I’ve read a lot I agree with, and just as much I disagree with. A recurring sentiment, however, is the intense focus on the “when” of Mixtape – when it takes place, what year it must be set in, how this period of time does or doesn’t connect to specific types of people, and entire arguments for and against it hanging on the idea that Mixtape has an answer to that question. After finally playing through it myself, it’s so clear there is no answer. 

Mixtape takes place never; it takes place always. 

On its surface, Mixtape is about three teenagers – the counter-culture Stacey Rockford, the classic goodhearted stoner Van Slater, and the silver platter girl who rebelliously rejects it, Cassandra Morino – and their final night in the Pacific Northwest-inspired fictional town of Blue Moon Lagoon. Stacey, suffering from Main Character Energy (though she actually is the main character of Mixtape), will leave in the morning for New York City and impress a music executive with her mixtape-creating abilities to land her dream job as a music supervisor; there is no other option because Stacey knows she doesn’t need one – the job is hers. As such, she’s bailing on a road trip the trio had planned across the West Coast en route to Cassandra’s college of choice. 

Cassandra is quietly (then not-so-quietly) devastated by this, disappointed in Stacey’s decision to prioritize herself over the trio. Slater is also disappointed but unwilling to rock a boat he’s happy to float along in. Stacey doesn’t understand why Cassandra doesn’t understand. 

All of this is the on-page text of Mixtape, and it’s backed by Stacey’s custom, fourth wall-breaking playlist that defines this final night in Blue Moon Lagoon. A close read of this text does make Mixtape a messier game than Beethoven and Dinosaur likely intended. Its mishmash of modern-day terms and sayings like “sauce” and “Jesus Take The Wheel” obscures an otherwise clear 1990s story, as does the inclusion of songs from 1995, when in-game references nod to a 1992 setting. From there, you can extrapolate, as many have, the ways in which Mixtape fails as a nostalgic trip to the 1990s of American suburbia, washed clean of the turmoil unfolding across the country during the same period. 

But again, Mixtape doesn’t take place in the 1990s, not really.

Instead, what I believe Beethoven and Dinosaur is attempting to do is speak to the mandatory reckless, cringe, teenage romanticism demanded of the path to adulthood. Gen X romanticized their teenage years; Millennials, perhaps more than any other, did the same, and I’m already seeing Gen Z do it too, grasping for an emotionally transcendent life the COVID-19 pandemic robbed them of. This is nothing new, either – The Perks of Being A Wallflower, Looking For Alaska, Whiplash, Dead Poets Society, Life is Strange, Night in the Woods, to name a few that immediately come to mind (and there are countless more). Mixtape isn’t particularly revelatory in its messaging, nor are any of the above examples.

There is an entire genre of entertainment that transcends any one medium, that aims to romanticize life, and make you feel good about a life you once had or maybe never had through what it presents to you. 

Of course, there is strife and heartbreak and loss and desperation and angst and cringe… so much cringe… and first-love-that-you-swear-is-forever-but-will-probably-end-sooner-than-you-think-because-it-is-fleeting. Life sucks in a lot of ways, and games like Mixtape, books like I’ll Give You The Sun (fantastic, by the way), movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (directly referenced with a running-through-backyards-scene in the game), are created to make the mundane larger than life. They are about characters who must be the main characters. They’re nothing without that pedestal. The overt text of these examples is wildly different, but the subtext is all the same: whatever it is you’re doing, there is something fantastical to be found in it, and it is incredibly important that you, specifically, do it. Nobody else could.

Mixtape understands, and arguably weaponizes, this feeling and deploys it to uplift the mundanity of teenage arrogance, selfishness, and small-town escapism, turning it into something larger than life. The cars adorning the streets of Blue Moon Lagoon absolutely explode when you flick them the bird while cruising down the asphalt (as someone who actually did blow up a car in high school, this was the part I related to most); the fireworks most definitely light up the skies when you tell them to; you bet running through a field of flowers with your friends lifts you off the ground – you’re flying in euphoria. It’s stupid and fake, but also real, and it’s everything. 

Do we not all have a Pop-Punk playlist meticulously created for these sweltering Summer months? You probably don’t, but you have something like it, something to take the everyday usual and give it some needed whimsy. Of course I listen to Persona 5 tracks when I’m in Japan. Of course you transcend into bliss when the drinks have flowed just enough that you’re positive the DJ is playing your song because they know it’s your song. Yes, everyone is thinking about how cool and mysterious you are while you lay your head on the train’s window, raindrops coloring your enigma. That is what life is about! We are not original (and neither is Mixtape narratively, though I’d argue some of its mechanical interactions are genuine); we are all our own main characters and to act like Mixtape is anything but a look at the way we all romanticize even our smallest actions is to ignore the idea that to be cringe is to be free, to quote the Associated Press Stylebook Of Millennials lexicon.

Stacey’s over-ears headset is just one small part of that, as is her perfectly curated playlist for every moment, as are Van’s well-timed stoner one-liners, as is Cassandra’s public defiance of her cop father. I’m not arguing Mixtape excels at speaking to these feelings, and your mileage likely varies given how much other media you’ve consumed (I’m telling you, these stories are everywhere). But I struggle to see Mixtape as anything other than an exploration of this teenage romanticism. 

We play through Mixtape in real time, but from Stacey’s immediate fourth-wall break at the start of the game to its final moments, we are envoys to her story. So much of it didn’t happen, but to her, it all did. Stacey didn’t fly over Blue Moon Lagoon, but she felt like she did, and that’s what’s important here. You know this teenager is fibbing, adorning this story with things that totally and definitely did happen, and you need to accept it; she doesn’t know the realities of life that will soon (attempt to) crush her spirit.

Call it lying, embellishment, romanticizing, whatever you want, but when we tell our stories, like any self-serious self-aggrandizing storyteller, we aim to make the listener feel something, anything, and Mixtape is Beethoven and Dinosaur’s expression (and implicit understanding) of that. It was true in the 90s, it’s true today, it’s true always. That feeling is timeless, even if Mixtape’s setting or songs or vocabulary isn’t. Hold onto it. 

In 2001, Halo: Combat Evolved hit store shelves and completely revolutionized the console first-person shooting market. In the latest issue of Game Informer, I traced the origins of the Halo franchise with early members of Bungie, the original studio behind the Halo franchise. As part of that conversation, Master Chief voice actor Steve Downes repeated a claim he made on his personal YouTube channel: Bungie and Microsoft originally planned to recast Master Chief and Cortana with Hollywood talent to broaden the mainstream appeal. While that didn't end up coming to pass – Downes and Jen Taylor still depict Chief and Cortana, respectively, to this day – I couldn't help but dig more into that with those who were involved in the conversation.

During my discussion with Downes and Taylor, we got on the topic of people finding out they were the voices of these characters. For Downes, he was visiting a friend's brother's house, and they had a group of kids playing Xbox. "It never even crossed my mind that we would do this again," Downes recalls. "I walked through the living room one day, and [the kids] were playing Combat Evolved, and I jogged my memory, because, believe me, I forgot about it; it wasn't anything that I remembered doing, but I saw the game, and I was like, 'Wait a second... ' and I think I almost said it to myself out loud, 'I think I voiced a character in that game.' And the kids stopped, and they said, 'Well who?' And I said, 'I can't remember the name, but I think he was the main guy in the game,' and they said, 'Master Chief?' and I was like, 'Yeah, yeah, Master Chief.' So within, I don't know, 20 or 30 minutes, every kid in the neighborhood is over at the house with a copy of the game on Xbox, wanting to get it signed. That was my 'A-ha!' moment that, 'What do we have here?' and it was a life-changing moment that continues.'

Halo: Combat Evolved

Taylor speculates that maybe the fact that nobody knew who voiced the characters was by design. "I felt in the beginning, Bungie didn't really want people to know who we were, because they really wanted you to have the characters in your mind when you were listening to our voices and not, 'Oh, that blonde lady,'" she says. "They weren't selling us, they were selling the characters."

When Downes hears this, he chimes in with his assertion that a recast was on the table. "There was no reach out from [Bungie]," he says. "In fact, as we found out later, they had every intention of replacing us with famous people."

Taylor, seemingly having heard this before, pushes back a little, suggesting they need corroboration from Halo: Combat Evolved audio director and composer Marty O'Donnell. "Well, you say that," she says with a smile. "Does Marty back us up? We've gotta ask Marty!"

Halo 2

After claiming that O'Donnell does, in fact, back up the claim that a recasting was on the table for Halo 2, Downes shares some of the names that were on the table, but with a caveat. "I don't know if this part's true, but it makes for a fun story that Tom Cruise was considered as the guy who would voice Master Chief," he says. "They were going to replace both of us – well, they were certainly going to replace me, I don't know about Jen – and Marty said the conversation was, 'Why are we fixing something that isn't broken? The game did great as it was. Why are we gonna mess with it now? What's the point?' And thank God cooler heads – thank God for me [laughs] – cooler heads prevailed, and they did not make any changes."

With Downes' claim now aired, and a corroborating source explicitly stated, I reached out to O'Donnell to discuss, among other things, the casting Downes and Taylor. Though Taylor expressed doubt that Cruise would have taken on the role in the early '00s, given how big he was at the time, it turns out there was some truth to it. According to O'Donnell, the conversations were short, and only started once Halo: Combat Evolved became a big enough success to get him into rooms in which he'd never had been.

Halo 2

"That was for Halo 2; we were never going to recast them in the first one, because Halo had no cachet, really, until three years later, after it became a million-seller, and then a 2 million-seller," O'Donnell says. "Microsoft had sort of shipped me out to Hollywood shindigs and parties, and they saw that there was a lot of anticipation for Halo 2. I'd be in Hollywood, and I had already been interested in, like, 'Well, maybe I can start casting some actors who are...' I wanted actors who liked games and were already fans of this new game called Halo. I didn't want to get actors who were just looking for a big payday, because there was no big payday."

In the midst of these Hollywood-centric events, O'Donnell was approached by someone from one of the biggest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency. "One of the guys came up to me at one of these parties and puts his arm around me," O'Donnell recalls. "'Marty, you know, it's time! This is a big deal. You're in the big times now. You've gotta step everything up. We represent Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise.' Now, Tom Cruise was already a Bungie fan, believe it or not; he had played Myth, so this wasn't the first time we'd heard about Tom Cruise. It was this guy basically saying, 'We should make this deal to get Tom Cruise to be Master Chief, and Julia Roberts to be Cortana in Halo 2.'"

Halo 2

According to O'Donnell's recounting of the story, he was less than impressed. "I was like, 'Wow that's really cool! Yeah, thanks a lot,' and I was just like, 'What a slimeball,'" he recalls. "I'm just like, 'Okay, I've got to be really careful in Hollywood, take advantage of who I can, get the people I think are cool,' but I knew that would have ruined everything. The fans would never had accepted – because I know game fans are not necessarily blown away by big stars, they're blown away by solid gameplay and emotionally compelling stories, and they were blown away by what we had done. But they wanted us to stay true to that relationship between us and the fans, and if we just threw Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts, who I would have had a blast working with them – if I could have done that to begin with, maybe that could have been cool – but there was no way that I could replace Jen Taylor and Steve Downes, because the fans already had a relationship with those voices, because they were Master Chief and Cortana. I just could not think of replacing that, so that was never really in the cards to be considered, but I like to dangle it over Jen and Steve every so often, like, 'You know, I could have gotten Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise,' [laughs] It's just a fun story. It never went any further than that one conversation."

Even though the conversation about Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts ended there, it is fun to imagine a world where those celebrities voiced those characters. However, it certainly would not be the same, and likely would have alienated large portions of the fan base. Additionally, they would have almost certainly abandoned those roles by now, as gaming's tumultuous history with one-off celebrity voice actors has shown. Meanwhile, in this timeline, Downes and Taylor still provide the voices for Master Chief and Cortana to this day, even returning to the booth to re-record their lines for Halo: Campaign Evolved, which gave them a chance to deliver their now-iconic performances with more perspective on the characters and franchise as a whole.

Halo: Campaign Evolved

Though both actors have certainly grown in the roles, returning to re-record their original performances in Halo: Combat Evolved for this year's Halo: Campaign Evolved, was a bit daunting for Taylor. "I was intimidated," Taylor admits. "I felt like, you know, did we capture lightning in a bottle? Am I in the right headspace for this? Am I going to be so intimidated by who this character is now, which I didn't have that information back in the day. I was creating her from the very beginning, and now I was intimidated by it. In the end, it was really fun. I did a lot more ADR for this than I've ever done – I guess I did ADR for the fourth game, and for this one, because they shot it in Budapest, interestingly enough. So, all the motion capture, because we were on strike at the time, as I recall, so they did all the motion capture in Budapest, so I was matching to another actress, who did it physically, did the motion capture, so that's always an interesting challenge, and one I'm not sure I'm very good at, honestly. So, we'll see, but it was, in the end, it was fun, because it was a great group of people who were working on it with us, and that always makes it. It was a group of people who were really excited about it, which makes you excited. You can't help but feel that."

Downes even chimes in with high praise for the process of re-recording his lines for Halo Studios' new remake. "I don't think I've had more fun voicing for Halo than I had for Campaign Evolved," he says. "It was such a unique experience to, as Jen said, you get to revisit where it all began, but there were challenges, because you don't want to mimic what you did. You want to honor the origin part of it. Especially on some of the big lines; I didn't want to just parrot it. But I didn't want to stray too far away from what people remember, and as Jen said, the people we worked with while recording were passionate Halo people, and people who had been with this game for a very long time, and were deeply involved in the story and the lore and all of it. That's like being surrounded by friends, not just a director." 

Halo: Campaign Evolved

Based on what I played of Halo: Campaign Evolved, the performances have evolved alongside the campaign, but not in a way that flies in the face of the original recordings. Instead, the lines feel more confident, which could only be achieved through having the same actors in the same roles for a quarter century. Halo: Campaign Evolved arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on July 28. For more, if you're a Game Informer subscriber, be sure to check out our latest cover story.

The big developing news this week is Xbox’s reported plans to cut several studios from its game division, with Compulsion Games (South of Midnight), Double Fine (Psychonauts), and Ninja Theory (Hellblade) specifically cited as being at risk of closure. Ninja Theory was especially surprising given it had revealed a third Hellblade title called Senua during the Xbox Games Showcase less than two weeks ago. However, a new report alleges that this had always been the plan.

Game File, a newsletter written by veteran reporter Stephen Totilo, reports that Xbox had already planned to either sunset or split with Ninja Theory before the announcement of Senua, per an anonymous source said to be familiar with Microsoft's plans. This was done with the idea that announcing a new game would attract investors to fund the studio following an Xbox divorce or studio closure. Game File also reports that it is unknown if Ninja Theory’s leadership was involved in this plan.

Neither Xbox nor Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, or Double Fine has publicly confirmed any of the reports regarding their status over the last couple of days. However, The Verge reported earlier this week that Ninja Theory has already been closed and is currently seeking a buyer. The reported studio closures follow Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty's plans for a "reset' of the Xbox division, which would involve significant layoffs. 

Senua was announced as the third Hellblade game, but is billed as a full-on action-adventure title with an increased emphasis on combat. It is scheduled to launch in 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. 

As the entire gaming world waits with bated breath for the release of Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar Games has announced a surprise treat for those still playing the last-gen versions of the previous entry, Grand Theft Auto V. 

Starting tomorrow, June 18, owners of any PlayStation 4 version of Grand Theft Auto V or the digital Xbox One version will be able to upgrade to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions for free. The news was announced via a Rockstar Newswire blog, and it coincides with an upcoming update for GTA Online called The Kortz Center Heist, a big new mission launching in July.

The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of GTA V were first released on March 15, 2022, and originally had no free upgrade path. Instead, the current-gen versions were priced at $39.99 (and included GTA Online). These upgraded versions boast improved resolutions (up to 4K), HDR, ray tracing, improved textures and draw distances, and up to 60 frames per second gameplay. The PS5 version also features 3D audio and DualSense haptic feedback. Story progress from the PS4/Xbox One versions can also be transferred to the current editions.

PC players can experience the same improvements by upgrading from the Legacy to the Enhanced edition for free. GTA+ members can also play GTA V’s story mode as part of the GTA+ Games Library. 

As we march towards the November 19 release of Grand Theft Auto VI, it seems Rockstar wants players to revisit GTA V or play it for the first time in the best way possible. This may not be a new update on GTA VI, but you can remind yourself of what’s in store for that game by watching its latest trailer from May 2025.