Did you ever play Pokémon on the Game Boy in the late '90s and dream of a sequel set in the UK?
Well, good news: they basically did that 7 years ago. Pokémon Sword and Shield took inspiration from multiple parts of the country in its world of Galar.
But! If you were looking for a less fairytale depiction of the UK – and more specifically, London itself – one upcoming monster-collecting game captures the less tourist-friendly side of living in the capital.
Cassette Beasts 2002 is a game where players record monsters onto cassette tapes then play them back to make them do battle. Superficially, it resembles Pokémon's mix of capturing and battling colourful beasts, but it has a number of unique twists. You can combine any two monsters to generate tens of thousands of variants, for example.
It's also set in London in the year 2002. Well, one half of the game, anyway...
A walk through 'Elmwich'
While you might expect its in-game version of the city to focus on Zone 1, like past London-set video games The Getaway and Watch Dogs: Legion did, the creators took a different tack.
"We weren't interested in setting it in the middle of Oxford Street, Big Ben, or the Millennium Dome," says Jay Baylis, co-founder of developer Bytten Studio. "All the obvious signposts to an outsider of what London is don't reflect our own experiences of London."
This version of London is instead inspired by the creators' own pre-Covid experiences of commuting into the city to work at a development studio based in Canary Wharf. "Setting it in an East London borough high street...that is London to us, in a way."
In Cassette Beasts 2002, players split their time between London – specifically a town called Elmwich – and Nodnol. Both represent different sides of the traditional RPG experience.
"Elmwich is your downtime. It's where you go to gather items, hang out with other characters and further your relationships with them and so on. And then Nodnol is your adventure space. It's where the monsters are. It's where you explore and do dungeons and fight bosses and so on." A mystery-based story links the two locations together.
"Revel in the mundanity"
Cassette Beasts 2002's setting is deliberately down-to-earth, Baylis says, because they can use more humdrum imagery to create an authentic sense of place. Or "revel in the mundanity", as he puts it.
"There was something appealing about making a somewhat mundane high street location, or town centre location that might be like a London borough," Baylis says. "It features characters living in London and working in London, but outside of the Paddington-esque view of the city."
"That taps into our interests and also our sense of humour as well."
Both Baylis and Bytten Studio's other co-founder, Tom Coxon, come from the north of the UK, which coloured their interpretation of living there.
"London to us is very much about people from outside London coming in and working. Is this a stepping stone for them? Is this where they want to end up? A lot of the characters are not from London. That probably does come from our own backgrounds as outsiders."
Baylis makes the point that games are often culturally uncomfortable with being anything less than American, especially compared to the UK's other cultural exports like music, TV and film. This game has zero shame about it.
"The Britishness shines through in how the characters talk and what they talk about and the fashion, and it's unmistakably English. It makes sense, I think, in context for it to be London, thematically and narratively."
"But I think there's something fun about [the idea of], 'hey, this is a game set in London, but it's a bit crap'."
All walks of life
The 20-something characters in Cassette Beasts 2002 reflect the mix of folks you meet in the capital, too: you'll see working class and privileged British people interacting, which is highly unusual for a video game. It perhaps takes a British studio to comprehend our social classes and capture how you can often find yourself talking to another person whose life experiences are totally alien to you.
The game leans more towards British archetypes over the personality types you're likely to see in Japanese RPGs, then. "We prefer drawing from the real world," Baylis says.
The other key component of the London setting is the '2002' bit of the title. This affects in-game details like the fashion and technology, as well as the soundtrack's pop, nu metal and rap influences. Baylis says the early '00s have become a lightning rod for nostalgia among younger players, similar to how the '80s had a stranglehold on Millennials in the 2010s.
"For the longest time, '80s nostalgia was all the rage in games, based on the age of the people that were directing games, I feel. But young people now never grew up in the '80s. I didn't grow up in the '80s."
With Stranger Things ending on a bum note, mainstream '80s nostalgia has arguably passed its peak. The fascination with Miami Vice and synthwave music is less meaningful to younger people today than The Lord of the Rings movies, low-rise jeans or Linkin Park.
"I think part of that nostalgia is there's a recognition of familiar iconography and pieces of media that shaped the modern day and musical stylings and things."
"But it's also the last moment in time where you don't have the panopticon of social media."
Between the analogue and the digital
Cassettes themselves were on death's door in 2002, we point out, which Baylis says the game highlights in one of its first lines of dialogue.
"It's this very transitory time period between the analogue and the digital age. And I think a lot of people are fascinated by looking at the early 2000s through that lens. Exploring that narratively is also a factor in the game."
Video games themselves were also having a real moment in the early 2000s.
"2002 is probably one of the best years there'll ever be for video games. I think it's quite fun to have a video game that is set in an era where at the time video games were very exciting."
2002 saw the UK releases of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Final Fantasy X, Halo and Metal Gear Solid 2, among many other classics. Perhaps some of that magic will rub off.
One of the best 2002 touches in the game, though, is another dull British detail that's somehow way more evocative than seeing Big Ben for the umpteenth time.
"We've made sure to have the crappy, early 2000s BT phone boxes with the glass and the metal frames, as opposed to the really kitschy and iconic red phone boxes," Baylis says. Celebrating the naff parts of British life is one of the great privileges of living here, which is clearly not lost on these developers.
Still, with London ticked off, that doesn't mean the developers plan to tackle other parts of the UK in future games.
"There is something alluring about exploring more mundane places and locations in the country," Baylis says. "But we'd have to also balance that with how many people are interested in going to Middlesbrough in a video game."
Cassette Beasts 2002 releases in March 2027 on PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC and Nintendo Switch 2.
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