The pair brainstormed together, coming up with the idea that he is an assassin from heaven, giving off big Constantine vibes, and there’s a ladder he has to climb to be the very best heavenly assassin (like no one ever was). Not for Esposito’s FPS platformer, just for a game. The Neon inspiration came from his partner Geneva. Except it wasn’t a Neon smoothie at this point, it was just a regular video game smoothie.

It was one ingredient in his Neon smoothie. He always wants to make something different, both from what he or anyone else has made before, so this game was never going to be a Jumping Flash remake. It was really fun and important to me to try to bring in a lot of old school ideas into the mix, because we weren't trying to make a refinement of the most modern movement techniques, we were trying to pull from the history of first person platformer gameplay scenarios.”Īfter finishing Donut County, Esposito was working on a concept inspired by Jumping Flash for the original PlayStation. “I was playing Team Fortress Classic, doing concussion grenade jumps.

“My background is playing Counter-Strike surf maps, and I used to make mods for Half-Life and Quake and I was into jump maps,” he explains. What makes Neon White gamey though? What makes any game gamey for that matter? Over the course of our conversation, we tried to get to the bottom of just that.Įsposito rejects the Titanfall 2 Gauntlet comparison, and delves further back into video game history and his own experiences when explaining the inspiration behind Neon White’s speedrunning tekkers. If there’s one way to describe Neon White, it’s video gamey, although I tried to be more generous with my words in TheGamer’s review of the FPS platformer slash dating sim.

“I think an overriding concept behind this game and one of the impetus for making it was that we wanted to make a really video gamey game,” Neon White’s lead designer Ben Esposito tells me on a Zoom call.

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