Interview with Sri Kankanahalli, director of Neon Inferno

Neon Inferno is an up-and-coming run-n-gun shooter from Zenovia Interactive, the makers of another run-n-gun classic, Steel Assault. The team has been hard at work making this newest action game that harkens back to the arcade classics like Metal Slug and Contra.

Having followed Neon Inferno for several years, the game is now set for a release this coming November 20th. I had the special opportunity to sit with Sri Kankanahalli, the creative director and founder of Zenovia Interactive. He lends us his insights into the making of Neon Inferno and what it means for both him and the team.

Hello, Sri Kankanahalli. Thank you for taking the time for this interview. Please introduce yourself. What is your role at Zenovia Interactive, and what is your favorite game?

Hi Roberto, thanks for having me! I am the founder and creative director of Zenovia Interactive. What that means is that I define the vision and the concept of each of our games, and then I do whatever it takes to realize it, including design, recruiting, direction, and business management. I'm also responsible for almost all of the programming work, except porting, which my publisher, Retroware, handles. (Until they came into the picture, I was responsible for all of Neon Inferno's marketing as well, so you can imagine how much weight Retroware took off my shoulders.)

Usually, when someone asks me my favorite games, I say: Deus Ex, Civilization, Disco Elysium. As far as 2D action goes, my favorites are Hard Corps: Uprising (the craziest of the Contra games), Metal Slug X, and Megaman X4, which are all among my favorite games, period as well.

For those unfamiliar, what is Neon Inferno? 

Neon Inferno is a 2D action game (like Contra or Metal Slug) set in a cyberpunk-dystopian New York, where state power has disintegrated and several different factions now vie for control of the city. The five boroughs of NYC have become six: Manhattan is now split in two by the gigantic Empire Wall. Behind this Wall is "Inner Manhattan", the playground of the rich and the famous, protected with iron fists by the NYPD and their collaborator Pangaea. (Pangaea are corporate arms dealers and mercenaries, and their unofficial motto is: "Peace at any price, but ideally, the highest price possible.")

Outside the Wall, in "Outer Manhattan" and the outer boroughs, the city is in a steady state of low-level gang warfare. And the biggest gangs in town are the Family (a pan-American crime syndicate) and the Yakuza (a pan-Asian crime syndicate). You play as an assassin for the Family, either Angelo Morano or Mariana Vitti -- or if in co-op then both of them, as Player 1 and Player 2 -- conducting hits against the opponents of your organization. And since this is classic 2D action and not Hitman, that doesn't mean sneaking around, setting up sniper positions, or hiding bodies. That means gunning your way through hordes of enemies and taking down military-tech ten times your size!

I played the demo at PAX West at the Seattle MIX event. It was awesome! Please tell me about the aesthetic. It feels like a love letter to 90s scifi. 

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed the demo!

It might sound too simple, but the aesthetic of Neon Inferno is really just a synthesis of many things that I personally like. Blade Runner is my favorite film of all time, and The Godfather duology is my second favorite (just the first two films in the trilogy -- Part III isn't nearly as bad as its reputation suggests, but it's not too good either). From the first, we took the basic mood and aesthetic of cyberpunk: the lighting, the smog, the neon-noir. From the second, we took the basic themes of organized crime, religion, and urban gang warfare. All of this we melded together as well as we could, and then we filtered it through the lens of '90s pixel art and arcade action. So if Neon Inferno is a love letter, then it's a letter addressed to many different mistresses.

Why choose the game to be a side-scroller shooter?

This is a kind of game which has been close to my heart as far back as I can remember: My first ever memory is playing the original Sonic the Hedgehog on my uncle's CRT TV. I must have been three or four years old, and someone must have handed me a controller. It was the very first stage, and I started running, and almost immediately, I ran into an enemy, and I was dead. From there, I was hooked, first on gaming, and soon after also on game development. I cut my teeth on ROM hacking and fangaming in my late childhood and early teens (mostly within side-scrollers,) and I was heavily involved in online communities for these hobbies. Then, in my late teens (I think I was either finishing up 19 or starting up 20), I started the preliminary work on what would become Zenovia's first game, some years later: Steel Assault (2021). So to finally answer your question, I make these kinds of games because I love them and because they're fun for me to make.

I would still love to branch out into new genres in the future, just because variety is the spice of life. Maybe Zenovia will get the chance if Neon Inferno is successful. Of course, DLC (and perhaps a sequel) will be top priority for a while after release. (Actually, the name "Neon Inferno" is practically begging for a trilogy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, just like the Divine Comedy. We'll see.)

Why choose this unique feature of foreground and background shooting?

We started experimenting with the combined foreground-background action very shortly after the release of our first game, Steel Assault, in late 2021. I knew that for our next game, I wanted to have more interactive and more destructible environments. And when I mentioned all that to a friend, he said it reminded him of an idea he had long ago of a game which combined Contra-style and Cabal-style mechanics. Immediately, I thought it was a cool idea, and by the time I had finished Wild Guns (the best gallery-shooting game) a few weeks later, I knew it was a killer idea. Still, we floundered a lot while trying to realize the feature, and I second-guessed myself quite a few times before finally committing to it.

How does the gameplay set itself apart from others in the genre

The dual-plane action is definitely Neon Inferno's coolest and most unique feature, but in addition to this, we also have a deflect mechanic, a bullet-time mechanic, and a double jump, plus lane-switching vehicle sections, plus different equippable weapons, which you buy with the payouts from each stage. We crammed as many cool mechanics as we could into this game, and we did our best to fuse them all together seamlessly.

Tell me about the characters. They are richly designed. 

Let me copy you these short in-game bios of Angelo and Mariana. I'm a little bit proud of them.

Angelo Morano

27 years old

Angelo is a highly skilled assassin for the Family, an American crime syndicate which consolidated the last remnants of the Italian mafia, the Irish mob, and various smaller groups. His career was not chosen but destined: the Don Venatori adopted Angelo as an orphan, raising him as his own son. Years later, as the allure of glory fades, as the bodies start to come back at night, only one thing keeps Angelo in the game: his loyalty. To abandon the Family would be to abandon his own. Therefore he purges his guilt in confession, seeking in the next life a redemption unthinkable in this one.

Someday, he says, he will finally leave this city, to forget and to be forgotten. That fateful day which is always ahead of us: someday.

Mariana Vitti

25 years old

Comfort is the mother of boredom, and it was Mariana's stifling upper-middle-class existence, confined within the walls of gated neighborhoods and the fleets of armored cars between them, which gave her the craving for action: first as a shoplifter, then as a pickpocket. It was simply fate that one afternoon she would steal the young Angelo's gun, that he would chase her down, and that, after returning the weapon, she would accept his offer of a date.

She later took the oath of the Family, changing her last name to an Italian one as was required from outside inductees: to Vitti. It was a long journey from petty thief to consummate killer, but Mariana is now a local celebrity, feared by even the hardened criminals of the underworld.

It feels Neon Inferno has gone through a thorough development process. I remember seeing this a Play NYC a few years ago. What was the development like?

Yeah, I was at Play NYC in summer 2023! By that point, we had firmly committed to the gallery-shooting mechanic and the cyberpunk aesthetic, and we had a good vertical slice with one or two areas mostly finished. Things progressed pretty smoothly from there. At this point, the game is essentially done.

Before all that, though, in 2021 to mid-2022, the game went through quite a few iterations. It might surprise you to learn that the original concept, which evolved into Neon Inferno, wasn’t cyberpunk at all, or even science fiction. The original working title of the game was “American Dream,” and it took place in 1970s New York City! It was basically a cartoon riff on a Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola crime film. My idea was that you’d start as a Mafia gangster in the ’70s, and each stage would shift forward a few years, such that the game would follow its protagonist from youth to old age, with the decisions they make (or fail to make) rippling through the story. And although I never figured out how to make it plausible, I wanted the players’ actions to be able to nudge the world into alternate histories or futures (one of which would be cyberpunk), depending on who they chose to kill, or not kill. They would have the option to leave the Mafia and become a CIA agent, for example, and that would open up the door to all sorts of Cold War intrigue.

The branching paths were the first thing we dropped, since I quickly realized we didn’t have the resources for them. But I stayed attached to the ’70s theme for a bit longer. The problem was, it’s a very limiting theme for an action game, especially a 2D action game. You can’t even really have flying enemies in the ’70s. And while there are primitive robots and drones, they don’t look very cool yet.

We were floundering around with different types of retro-futuristic aesthetics, but in the end, shifting everything forward into cyberpunk was what saved the game. 1975 turned into 2055, the Mafia turned into the Family, and the moment we did that, the game became cool again.

What do you hope for players to experience when they play Neon Inferno? 

I want to dazzle players with the graphics and hook them with the action, and I want them to come out needing to see more of these characters, this story, and this setting. I want them to feel they've experienced something cool and new, something which they've never quite played before. I think that must be the dream of every game designer, but it's my dream too.

Anything you want to say to the audience? 

We hope you have as much fun playing Neon Inferno as we did creating it. Just remember to think on your feet!

Neon Inferno launches November 20th for all consoles and PC.