In 1980, Mad Max gave the world a genre-defining vision of a decaying Australia that entranced audiences and spurred decades of imitators. 

But behind the roaring engines and manic performances, it was the real flaking paint and cracked roads of outer-suburban Melbourne on-screen. 

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Working 50 years ago, director George Miller and his team lacked the budget or technology to truly transform Australia’s environment.

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But today’s artists have very different tools to play with.

This year, the video game Broken Roads was released worldwide, rendering its own vision of post-apocalyptic Australia in computer graphics.

It gave landmarks like Wave Rock and the Kalgoorlie Bitter Tower in Merredin the full digital treatment, relying on 3D art and pixels — rather than cameras and props — to sell a unique depiction of a crumbling Western Australia.

“The goal was to try and get them as true to life as possible,” game director Craig Ritchie told triple j Hack.

Like Mad Max, the game’s landscape is immediately recognisable.

Many of the game’s sounds were recorded directly in the real places they depict, and small details were preserved in their digital copies.

However, despite Mr Ritchie’s commitment to accuracy, the game’s digital art style immediately sets it apart from the films that inspired it and the real places it depicts.

This is true of all games, and it isn’t strictly a problem.

Like paintings or animated films, games’ liberation from using real cameras has paved the way for a variety of new artistic styles to blossom in the video game format.

They’ve shown that even in the most abstract and pixelated styles, real places are never out of reach to artists with enough skill and creativity.

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Don’t forget your reusable cup

In Knuckle Sandwich, a game released for PC last year, a pixelated protagonist explores the island of Bright City.

The game’s charming pixel art borrows far more from other games than any film.

The style is deliberately reminiscent of early Pokémon, Mario, and arcade games — the kind Knuckle Sandwich’s lead developer Andy Brophy grew up playing.

Its story and setting also draw heavily on his experience living in south-east Melbourne.

“I would be like, you’ve never seen that in a video game ever. So I just put it in there.”

Many of the game’s jokes and stories may also be familiar to players from Melbourne’s barista belt, or indeed any suburb where trendy people gather across Australia.

“There’s a coffee shop that’s very specifically based on one in Balaclava – it’s not there anymore – and the owner forces [reusable] keep cups on you,” he said.

Many of Knuckle Sandwich’s references aren’t just specific to a particular place, but to a time and lifestyle as well.

“I used to tell people that it’s semi-autobiographical because you play as a guy who was early 20s, who just moved out of home for the first time and tries to get a job, which is exactly what I did [while making the game],” he said.

Smaller references to Australiana are also dotted throughout Knuckle Sandwich: Bubble O’Bill-like ice creams feature in surreal fight sequences, while identical ‘potato cake’ and ‘potato scallop’ health items are sold at an in-game shop, both giving the player identical benefits.

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Lessons learnt in the surf

Mr Brophy’s partner is also a game developer, Olivia Haines, who is working on her own nostalgic vision of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast for her upcoming game Surf Club.

“I wanted to combine that with this very girly, bubblegum pink aesthetic that I have going on with my games.”

Like the now-closed cafe in Knuckle Sandwich, much of Ms Haines’ game is drawn from her memories of a place that has changed.

Specifically, Surf Club is set around the coastal Queensland of Ms Haines’ childhood. 

“I think I’m a sentimental person, so a lot of really mundane things can become important to me,” she said.

“That time when I did, ‘blah, blah, blah’, when I hung out with my friends, where I went with my parents or whatever.

“Because there’s things like that, that are still important to me but probably not to anyone else, I feel like it’s my space to claim.”

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(Not just) wayward youth

Both Mr Brophy and Ms Haines work full-time as game developers in Melbourne, spurred on by their artistic ambitions and a lifelong love of the medium.

But as Australia’s games industry matures, it’s starting to create opportunities for other artists who didn’t expect to be a part of it.

Among them is 19-year-old art student Nancy Curtis, who made her professional voice acting debut in the game Wayward Strand, released in 2022.

“I guess it started with my teacher telling me about the game and it sounded like a really cool opportunity,” she said.

“I thought ‘why not?’ So yeah, I sent them a recording of my voice and they liked it.”

Ms Curtis was still in high school when she scored the role of game protagonist Casey, a teenage journalist solving mysteries on a magical airship hovering off Victoria’s south coast.

And if it weren’t for her teacher’s suggestion, she said she would likely never have heard of the game or the opportunity.

“It definitely made me mad that I didn’t know about the video game world.

“I was like, ‘how do I not know about this?’ I think it’s such a wholesome, beautiful community.”

Just a few years ago, opportunities like that might have eluded Australian artists like Ms Curtis, with local employment more than doubling since 2016.

Historically, the largest games set in Australia, like racing title Forza Horizon 3 (2016) and Mad Max (2015), have been developed internationally.

The disconnect occasionally sparked backlash from fans.

As well as opening the door for new talent, Wayward Strand marked the video game debut of multiple Australian film and TV stars.

Michael Caton (The Castle, The Sullivans), Jenny Seedsman (Blue Heelers), and Anne Charleston (Neighbours) each voiced characters on the game’s mysterious airship-turned-aged-care home.

“Wayward Strand was conceived by a small group of developers and artists who were particularly curious about telling Australian stories which were not all knives and crocodiles,” game director Goldie Bartlett said.

“We thought no, that’s not our experience.”

Melbourne-based 3D artist Susan Dang was also part of the team behind Wayward Strand.

She said it took heavy inspiration from its regional Victorian setting and Australian art.

“Wayward Strand itself looks quite like a children’s storybook,” she explained.

“We would gather that reference material and we did a lot of tests on how to create pencil outlines and a watercolour wash effect.”

Ms Bartlett said Wayward Strand’s simple controls, narrative focus, and familiar storybook presentation were intended to open it up to audiences that might not otherwise consider playing a video game.

That philosophy extended to older audiences as well.

“When I was doing play-testing I got my dad to play it, and it was really obvious to him straight away just how intrinsically Australian and even Victorian it was,” Susan said.

“He has quite the eye for detail, because I remember the antenna on one of the cars was on the wrong side, and he was straightaway like, ‘oh no, that’s on the wrong side’.”

“He’s passed now, so the recording of him playing the game is such a lovely memory to me.”

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Culture on screen

By giving control of characters’ actions and choices to their audience, games open up artistic possibilities that other mediums cannot.

Depending on the game, players might perform set actions in a test of skill, or they might reshape the story through their choices.

Melbourne developer Maddy Clute, whose upcoming game centres on a disappearance in the Victorian High Country, described the process as “six-dimensional storytelling”.

“You can set the player up with this world and you can suggest what you’d like them to do with it, but if they decide that they want to go off and explore the bush and not solve the mystery, we can’t really make them do it,” she said.

“You can really have this two-way relationship between the player and in the game in a way that film or even literature [cannot] — it’s like the creator is saying, ‘here it is’, and then just chucks it over the fence.”

When games are set in real places, that two-way relationship can invite choices that might be unrealistic or uncomfortable for the communities being depicted.

In Broken Roads’ vision of a post-apocalyptic WA, game director Craig Ritchie said players’ actions are enormously influential on the places and people they encounter, including the Indigenous Noongar nation that stretches across the game’s world and the real Wheatbelt.

“You’ll see some places get absolutely destroyed and other places flourish based upon the player’s actions,” he said.

“One of the companions is able to be an elder if you go through the right path in the game or you can also have him completely reject that way of life and then go in a different direction.”

To write this story, Mr Ritchie approached Noongar filmmaker Karla Hart, who said she was happy to join her first video game project.

“I did consult with elders throughout the process of working on this game, and I felt pretty comfortable, because why would non-Indigenous people want to write Noongar lines?” Ms Hart said.

“We can tell things when we’re watching aren’t quite written by our mob or are a little bit off, but when you listen to the lines that I’ve written, you’re gonna know that it comes from mob.”

Karla said the authenticity of the Noongar culture depicted in the game was a priority, but that some things — like the process of becoming an elder — were changed for the sake of the role-playing format.

“The concept of ‘becoming an elder of community’, it really shouldn’t be talked about [that way],” she said.

“It is present in the game because they have to do certain things to advance to the next level and be accepted within the community, and potentially be an elder of the community, but in real life you don’t have to ask to become an elder — you just suddenly are one; one day people look at you in that way.”

Even when real places are heavily fictionalised, uncomfortable comparisons to real-world issues can arise.

In the Summer of 2023 to 2024, around the time Broken Roads was released, Perth recorded its lowest-ever rainfall as drought gripped the state.

In the inland farming regions depicted in Broken Roads, the need for rain was even more dire, and many Wheatbelt towns continue to grapple with declining populations and business closures.

Like Mad Max, Mr Ritchie found it didn’t take much alteration to sell a convincing post-apocalypse set in regional Australia.

“The early parts of the game start off not that different [to the real Wheatbelt] — it’s a little bit more rundown, there aren’t as many cars, but they’re still trying to farm and make do,” Mr Ritchie said.

“Then as soon as you start exploring, it becomes clear that this is a post-apocalyptic world, there’s no central government, there’s no running water, there’s no electricity.”

“It isn’t real and we’re not claiming that this is WA. This is a fictionalised representation of certain real-world locations.”

Unlike Mad Max, Broken Roads hasn’t set record profits or spawned legions of imitators, yet.

Like most artists, all of the developers in this story work on limited budgets and hope their work becomes a hit.

Nonetheless, they’re all eager to keep making Australian games, and it’s always possible that one of them will strike artistic gold and deliver the next genre-defining vision of Australia to the world.

Or, Mr Ritchie hopes, inspire the person who will.

Credits

• Interviews: Angus Mackintosh and Gianfranco Di Giovanni
• Production & Video Editing: Gianfranco Di Giovanni
• Additional Imagery/Sources: Wikimedia, Supplied