Tango Gameworks seemingly knew they had a hit on their hands with Hi-Fi Rush before the game was even released to the public.
According to Hi-Fi Rush‘s director John Johanes, interest in the game was initially built-up internally at Bethesda before the decision to shadow-drop it on Game Pass. In an interview with IGN’s Rebekah Valentine, Johanes explains that Hi-Fi Rush went somewhat “viral” within Bethesda.
“That’s how it actually built up within Bethesda,” said Johanes. “Some people had played it and they spoke about it to their other [colleagues]. They’re like, ‘Did you see that game that they’re making there?’ There’s this weird sort of viral positivity to just playing this game, and Game Pass just felt like an excellent opportunity to let something…lose that skepticism immediately by just playing it and people just talking about it.”
This came after Johanes explained to Valentine how releasing Hi-Fi Rush on Xbox Game Pass was key to its success, with the director saying that asking someone to purchase a shadow-dropped game can lead to “a lot of skepticism”.
He goes on to say that Game Pass allowed for Hi-Fi Rush‘s organic word-of-mouth marketing to work in full effect, saying, “They can just play in and they can almost naturally talk about the game, talk to their friends, tell them how cool it is. That’s what we were kind of hoping for because internally, we knew it was something special.”
One could say that Tango Gameworks really nailed it in that aspect, as Hi-Fi Rush has already blown up since its surprise release during the Xbox Bethesda Developer_Direct. Its review scores are already up there with Elden Ring and God of War: Ragnarök, and it has managed to outsell Forspoken on PC despite having no marketing prior to launch.
If you’d like to hear what we think of the surprise banger from Tango Gameworks, you can read our Hi-Fi Rush review right here.
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