This article was originally published in Issue 2 of the ICG Zine, April 2024. It was reformatted in November 2025, but has not been edited further.

In this interview with Mark and Cassandra, the creators of the upcoming game Take That Mainstage!, we explore the game’s history, the creators’ journey, and their inspirations.

ICG: Tell us about the history of your game.

Mark: At the beginning of the pandemic, people were so terrible to each other. We were thinking of having a game where if you could understand people better, see their motivation, maybe that would be a positive influence on the world.

Cassandra: It started with this really cool AI engine, and then we really wanted to simulate a musician’s journey. So, we’re trying to make this life management loop happen and then make this AI engine to power this whole life management loop.

ICG: How has your history with music influenced the game?

Mark: I grew up playing in glam metal bands, so I’ve always written and recorded music. At some point I started a business because I would write hundreds of songs and I’d have all these little riffs and ideas and poetry, so I started a business in 2013 doing custom music called Serenade Me where somebody could go online and place an order choosing the style they liked.

Behind the scenes I would wire together unused riffs and clips I had and then that would become a song. That morphed into breaking music down to its component parts and reconstituting it.

Someday I thought it would be really cool to write an engine that could string that together and make some cool music, and that found its way into the game as our own AI generated songs.

Cassandra: Mark and I met because of music and then I started writing after meeting. We wrote some songs together and then I started my own first album. After he built this AI engine, we talked about making the soundtrack for the game together.

Starting off, I was expecting to help out with the music more, but later I also participated lots in terms of game design, business, marketing, and management.

ICG: What is the focus of the game?

Mark: We wanted to focus on the struggling artist songwriter experience — your relationships with people, the grind of keeping yourself motivated, the depression, and the loneliness, focusing on the journey of being a songwriter.

Cassandra: We’re focusing more on the songwriting because that’s completely different to the usual rhythm game. When you write a song you have a bunch of decisions to make like “Is this is a trending topic people are talking about,” and “Is the style one people would like?” and “Do I just want to take risks and try something revolutionary?”

Creating a song and performing it are different skills so we’re really focusing on the songwriting and trying to create the journey.

ICG: What games do you take inspiration from?

Mark: One of the original inspirations of this was Darkest Dungeon, thinking about the concept of an artist going into a dungeon and dealing with sanity and fighting your own demons or having conversations with people. But Punch Club is our number one inspiration.

Our game is very similar to Punch Club, where you’re at home and you can choose to write songs or meet up with your friends to boost different things, so the conversation is still the main crux of like whatever.

ICG: Why the ‘90s?

Mark: What we really wanted to capture from the ‘90s was that sense that being weird and creative was what everyone aspired to do. We’re really trying to capture that unbridled kind of creativity where Wean could have like a top 10 song.

I want to capture all the different feelings to it. I want to capture everything from Alice in Chains to Aphex Twin to the more poppy Paul Westerberg stuff to the Melvins. I want the soundtrack to be eclectic but approachable.

I look at grunge as the key that opens the door, that gets the discussion going because they kind of kicked it off. And what’s cool about this, and what we talked to publishers about a lot, there’s so much potential for DLC here. You could do a ‘70s pack or ‘50s, you could do a boy band pack from the 2000s so it has a lot of potential to expand scalability too.

ICG: What can we expect to see next?

Cassandra: We’re trying to really think about our conversation AI engine. We’re trying to build up this whole universe, this life management loop. I think what we can expect would be an updated playable demo with a life management game.

While starting to market Take that Mainstage! we’re trying to attract more attention and grow our little fan base. We’re doing lots of things in parallel — on the development side we keep building and on the marketing side we are really trying to showcase what we have so far.