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Gripper Creative Director talks about being inspired by loss and Akira

We learn more about upcoming indie cyberpunk title Gripper by talking to Creative Director Kirill Zolovkin.

Ozzie Mejia

March 22, 2023 4:00 PM

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In a dystopian cyberpunk future, your motorcycle is your greatest ally. Gripper puts players in the role of a hero named None, who is working to survive a harrowing post-apocalyptic nightmare with his trusty cyber bike. While the mechanical monstrosities in the world are dangerous, so is None's bike, which is armed to the teeth. To learn more, we spoke with Gripper Creative Director Kirill Zolovkin about where the idea for this action game came from.

"Akira was one of the inspirations, but the idea behind it was kind of different," Zolovkin told Shacknews. "When I lost my mother, it was a long time ago, I was 20, I had an idea of somehow conveying this feeling of losing someone you love in the gameplay, because I was doing game design for 20 years. It was the only language that I knew well enough to express myself, so I thought maybe we should do something very furious, since losing someone you love is sometimes hard and the game should be hard."

Zolovkin talks about how he expressed his sense of loss and translated it into an mile-a-minute action game. He also goes into some of the other movie and anime titles that helped influence both Gripper's story and its game mechanics.

Gripper is releasing on Steam next Wednesday, March 29. For more interviews like this, be sure to subscribe to Shacknews and GamerHubTV on YouTube.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?