Small Radios Big Televisions promises something a little different on PS4

Small Radios Big Televisions is a game I’ve been working on since last summer. It’s built out of my love for games, analogue mechanicals and music. I’m also proud to tell you that it will be coming to PlayStation 4.

The game is about exploration, finding old data cassettes strewn through the insides of old factories and discovering the worlds you find inside. The aim is to make an experience that borrows some of the “softness” of analogue media and put that into a modern console title.

In Small Radios Big Televisions your main goal is to find cassettes and slam ’em into your tape deck. Your tape deck is different though. Instead of just playing audio, these tapes contain entirely different worlds for you to explore. This idea came about when I was thinking (in light of the recent virtual reality explosion), “What if you could put on a virtual reality album the same way you do with a music album, or a movie?”

The tapes in the game are tapes for a reason, too. Unlike a compact disc or a memory card the magnetic tape inside a cassette can easily be warped by magnetic fields. If you come across a strong magnetic device, why not stick one of your tapes in and see what happens?

Music and sound design are a massive part of the game as well. I want it to feel like you’re hearing the soundtrack played back through an old tape deck with big bass-y headphones. All the music in the game is synthesised and bare-bones to manage that retrowave feel.

Bringing a strange game like this to a console like PlayStation 4 is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and I’m really excited to bring it to all of you. Let me know what you think in the comments below, or ask me questions if you’ve got them!