New psychedelic-retro themed Nintendo game created by 2 Londoners

Jesse Jacobs, the creator of Nintendo's newest game dubbed Spinch, says the inspiration came from games he loved most as a child.

Created by the award-winning Canadian cartoonist and game developer who lives in London, Ont., Spinch transports you to a retro-psychedelic wonderland bursting with bright colours and old-school arcade sounds.

James Kirkpatrick, an artist also known as Thesis Sahib, created the soundtrack for the game.

Kirkpatrick met Jacobs while playing shows in London's underground hip-hop scene.

Kirkpatrick told CBC London Morning his musical instrument of choice for the game was a modified Game Boy console that he used to create tunes that fit the retro style of Spinch.

"It's kind of like hip-hop, you know, where someone uses a record and a turntable to create a whole new track, you know, sampling and scratching," Kirkpatrick said.

Spinch was released in North America last month and is set to release in Japan on Thursday.

Indie publisher Akupara Games, who brought the game to Steam and Nintendo Switch, calls it a world "thick with bubbling psychedelia," where you dash, dodge, climb, swim, jump in six vibrant worlds. In the game, you become a "hyper-agile organism" referred to as "Spinch" who is "consumed by the quest to rescue its litter of missing offspring from an endless invasion of misshapen and malformed offbeats and oddities."

Jacobs said he had always envisioned the game to be a perfect fit for Nintendo.

"It was something I think I always wanted to do, maybe subconsciously, I grew up loving games like all kids mostly, and I'm always up for something new," Jacobs said.

"I got to flex a lot of the similar creative muscle, like I'm creating characters I'm creating worlds and stories."

Kirkpatrick said the pair worked incredibly hard on developing the game while waiting to see if it would be picked up by the giant consumer electronics company.

Jacobs said he always had Kirkpatrick in mind for the project.

"As soon as his sounds went into the game, everything kind of snapped into place," Jacobs said. "James' sound was the missing piece of the puzzle." 

In terms of who can play this game, Kirkpatrick says its "like classic Nintendo games, it's not easy." 

The pair say this game was intended to bring back old-school difficulty that was common in the 80s.

Kirkpatrick says he has friends in their late 30s and early 40s who play it with their children who are as young as six. He says the difficulty increases level by level but there is still a wide demographic.