When Super Space Club creator Graham Reid was a child growing up in Jamaica, he couldn’t even conceive of video game development as a career possibility.
“I thought that game development was just Nintendo and Sony and the big companies making things,” he tells me. “And of course I played games on Newgrounds and that kind of stuff, but I never actually thought that I could just make that. Looking back, I think, of course I could have made a Flash game. But in Jamaica, they don't teach any of that stuff. All the jobs are about being a doctor or a lawyer. One of those traditional, stable jobs.”
But many years, a motion graphics degree, a move to New York, and a major game release later, Reid seems to finally believe that he might be a game developer. He introduces himself to me alternatively as a “Jamaican game dev,” a “solo indie game developer,” and a “creative director,” saying that he changes his intro every time - it’s still a bit hard for him to believe, even now that he’s launched his arcade shooter Super Space Club on PC to positive reception, with an Xbox release on the way.
Reid’s path to video games began in college, when a friend in the game design program invited Reid to join him for a game jam. Through the jam, Reid was introduced to mobile game development, which in the early 2010s was widely accessible for many developers who would have otherwise struggled to get a game released on a console or even PC. “Mobile allowed anybody to make a game,” he recalls.
“People still paid for mobile games back then. I could [release] a $2 game and people would actually buy it… I couldn't try that now. People would laugh at me.”
After the game jam, Reid went on to make an arcade mobile game based loosely on Pong called Hecticube, which he released in 2015. Around that same time, Reid was hired at Snapchat, where he worked for six years while noodling away at game development in his spare time. During this period, Reid began working on what would eventually become Super Space Club, which started out as “reverse Ridiculous Fishing” on mobile - an arcade shooter where you tilted a phone to move and shoot. But eventually, Reid moved away from mobile as more and more companies with millions to spend on advertising began to dominate the space.
But even with the shift to PC, Reid was still committed to his vision of a “cool space game.”
“It was initially supposed to be all black and white,” he recalls. “More innovative Asteroids. And then I watched Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse and it got very colorful. This game has to be a burst of vibrant color and energy. There's too many black and white space games. And it just kept going from there.”
Reid started working on Super Space Club full-time in 2019, and had a relatively complete, albeit simple, version done later that year. But he kept envisioning a bigger and bigger game, so he kept adding to it. In the following years as he worked, he quit Snapchat, became a father, and began to struggle with the mental balance of making art while having to also make money. Reid recalls the confluence of major life events becoming overwhelming as they coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, eventually causing him to burn out for a period of time in late 2021 and early 2022.
“A solid six to eight months was me trying to work and I just couldn't do it,” he says. “I'd get a little bit of work done, but it was just very hard…Whenever deadlines came around, whenever it's time to submit to an expo or something, I got shit done. I did everything I needed to do and it all worked out. And then I look back and I count my hours. ‘Oh, I spent eight months of a full time, six hour, five days a week job. But it took me four years to make.’”
But make it Reid did, in spite of struggles, and I’ve had the pleasure of puttering around with Super Space Club for the last few weeks. Historically, I tend to shy away from arcade-style games - I’m more of a story fiend than a reflex queen, and I was a bit worried Super Space Club would be too hard or too intense to stick with me for long. But as I worked through the tutorial, I found a very different experience: Super Space Club is relaxing! I like this!
Steering my ship through asteroid fields has space-appropriate movement physics, which gives it a drifty, floaty feeling perfect for sleepily making wide turns and shooting piles of missiles pell-mell into enemies as you go. One mechanic that’s grown on me is the health and missile meters being one-and-the-same – it forces me to slow down and take my time picking off enemies. More time to do cool flips, more cautious and steady play. The difficulty curve is nice and slow, and there are upgrades and weapons aplenty for you to customize with the more you play. The backgrounds are colorful, soothing, and the sound design is full of nice, chunky asteroid and ship explosion sounds that don’t detract from the game’s lo-fi soundtrack.
And oh, what a soundtrack. With music by Fat Bard, Reid has found the exact perfect concoction of tunes to give Super Space Club the smooth, welcoming vibes it needs to keep me floating and flipping around the galaxy again and again.
“I wanted a jazzy lofi hip-hop,” Reid says. “Inspired reggae fusion. Because I want to bring my culture in any way I can. I love hip-hop and I love dancehall and reggae music. And I love music that's not just in English. And so I really wanted languages from all over the world.”
Reid admits he wasn’t quite able to get a truly global spread of vocalists, but he did one heck of a job - especially for a solo developer on a first major project. The Super Space Club soundtrack includes work from French rapper Oré, Black American artists Serengeti and Parabellum Raps, rapper ArtClassHero, and Jamaican reggae fusion artist Rizk - whose piece “Runaway” holds a special place in Reid’s heart.
“He has probably my favorite track on the OST,” Reid says. “Not because it's the best track. They're all really good. But because I've never heard a Jamaican song in a game before, especially like this one. I've heard one in GTA or something because they just licensed actual Jamaican song. But never heard of an original Jamaican song in a game, which is dope.”
And even more importantly, Reid says, he’s able to share that meaning with a much wider audience. He tells me with pride that he included numerous small references to Jamaican culture, memes, and more in small places such as Super Space Club’s achievements. It’s his hope that these small touches will resonate with Jamaican players - maybe some of them will know from his work that they can make games, too.
“There's one person who was on Stream,” Reid recalls. “I think they're British, but they have Jamaican parents. And when they heard the Jamaican track come on, they paused the game and they started sobbing on Stream. They were like, ‘You never see this in games. I've never heard a Jamaican artist in a game before or heard anything like this. Seen my... felt my people represented in anything.’
“And that alone, I'm like, ‘Yep, I'll do this for the rest of my life.’”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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